Should I buy an iMac now, or wait for the 970?

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Dlatu1983

Prime Minister
I recently found an LCD iMac, G4 800, Superdrive, 256/60 for $1250. I'm selling my current combo iMac for the same price. Is it worth buying now, or should I suck it up, hold onto the $ (if I don't sell it now, I won't get CLOSE to this much $ for it, the individual wants to buy ASAP), and wait for the 970? if it's just a month or 2 away, I can see myself waiting for it. Do you foresee it ending up in an iMac right away (I can't afford a powermac)? I'm big into video, and I'm getting into gaming. I know a powermac would be the best choice, but I can't swing the price of entry. Should Panther performance (I plan to buy it as soon as it's released) be acceptable on the G4 800? Thanks.
 
I had owned a used iBook 700 for about four months. It broke. That same night I went to the Apple Store to get me a PB12". It was closed. I had arrived 15 minutes late. The Apple employees were still in there. I tried getting them to hook me up. No dice. I was dissapointed.

The next day I decided I'd wait for the new iBook. In the meantime, I used an iMac DV 400. A month or two later, the iBook 900mhz came out. No regrets on the wait. Well, I was dissapointed every other Tuesday morning when visiting maccentral.com and not seeing a headline that read... "Apple Updates iBook Line." You'll go through that if you decide to wait, but it'll be worth it... :)
 
If you need a computer now, and if you can't afford a Power Mac, definitely get a new iMac now. I guarantee you won't see 970's in the iMac line (if Apple does indeed decide to use them) for many moons. Look how long it took them to add G4's to the iMac after they released the first G4's. If you want to wait that long, then by all means, go for it, you have an excellent computer. However, if you want a new computer now, and you've mentioned in other posts that you want a computer with more VRAM, then you'd be best off buying the new iMac now.
 
well, we have another mac and 2 pc's in our home, but they're in other bedrooms. And I use my iMac for EVERYTHING. Music. DVD's. Watching TV. Listening to the radio. I IM for EVERYTHING (phone? huh? what's that?). I don't think i could go a solid week without my own comuter.
 
Or computer. :D

In that case, you'd get the best deal now, because your iMac will only depreciate. Everything indicates that Panther will be much faster in general than Jaguar, so you should be fine upgrading on a 900 Mhz iMac as soon as it comes out.
 
If you can buy the new iMac for the same price as you sell your old one, then you're basically trading an old iMac for a new iMac. Thats a sweet deal, and you can always sell the new iMac later on for more than you would get for the old iMac.

I'd say go for it:cool:
 
That's exactly what I was thinking. Is there any way I can clone my HD? I have more music and video here than I can fit onto my iPod. Can I use firewire disc mode to copy the "used" (ALL my folders, basically copying the "Macintosh HD" folder to my sister's iMac) folders? Her HD is the same size as mine, @ 40gigs. She has about 35 gigs free, and I have about 20-25 used.
 
You could use Stuffit and just compress your data and then transfer it to your sister's iMac. Just make sure to back up everything you want to keep.

You don't neccessarily have to keep everything on the drive, and you probably shouldn't keep the system because it's probably customized to your old iMac by the OSX installer.
 
all I really need is my eyeTV movies and preferences (I'm guessing all I need is the folder the movie files are in, and the folder from my Library directory) , my music the preferences (equalizer, playlists, etc) and my iPhoto library.
 
Make a compressed disk image of your entire hard drive, then compress it with Stuffit or Zipit and store it on your sister's iMac (to save as much space as possible). Then you can unstuff/decompress it later and restore everything you need to from your sister's computer. I'll help you do that later if you need it.
 
The chances of the 970 debuting right away in an iMac are pretty slim. Apple will be lucky if it can get sufficient amounts of these chips for the pro line, which should really start to sell once they arrive...

Sooooo....

If you can't afford a Power Mac, I'd go ahead and get the iMac.

Apple will probably stick with the G4 in the iMac for at least another year. The current iMac enclosure was designed with the G4 in mind, and a newer chip (970) might give off too much heat to be used without modification.
 
Another point to consider:
Assuming the 970s come out this year, it will probably be at least another 2 to 3 years minimum before we have software that can really take advantage of 64 bit chips. By then, you should be ready to get another new machine.
 
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