sorry to plauge this board with another stupid topic but...

1) is it safe to but an imac. im pretty sure i have a buyer for this alienware. being a college student im going to need another pc ASAP.
2)say i buy the imac or even a macbook pro, what is the return policy if i want to upgrade to the new macbook/imac?

 

Restocking fee of 15% I believe. I say just wait it out till the end of the year if at all possible... new iMacs are rumored.

 

I doubt there will be "new" iMacs. Perhaps a refresh with a faster cpu or gpu, but a new design is not likely. Thus you could buy an imac now without to much regret.
But if your after a mb or mbp then waiting till the end of september might not be such a bad idea.
a

 

A. This is not a "stupid" topic. The decision of when to part with your money is not trivial or stupid.

B. If you're using Windows now and it's not working well, why wait? If the upgrade is worth it, simply pay the restocking. I opted to pay restocking because the RAM doubled, the hard disk space increased, and the cpu got 10% faster. In my mind this was worth it. I had already received a discount through my employer so the restocking didn't sting as much as it would if I had paid list.

C. If whatever you're using now is working well, why rush? You can save the restocking by waiting until exactly what you want is in stock and available.

Patience is not always rewarded when it comes to tech toys. Sometimes you wind up suffering with a less than optimal solution needlessly waiting for a tiny incremental update. The update I paid for this past spring was incremental but worth it to me. The update we will likely get this fall should be more than merely incremental. It really boils down to how well your current solution is working for you. In hindsight, I should have gotten all the M$ software out from under my roof 5 years ago. I wasted about 200 hours of restoring randomly disappearing settings, restoring network connectivity, restoring printing connectivity, virus removal, adware removal, driver troubleshooting, antivirus software renewal, OS reinstallation, and so on during those 5 years. My Admin workload would have not been identically zero if we were running Macs all that time but I bet it could have been cut by 90%. So the "opportunity cost" of waiting until this year meant a lot of missed time I could have spent doing something genuinely useful.

 

I don't see an iMac refresh until sometime after January, they just refreshed them. If Apple refreshed computers that soon then the Macbook Air would have been done long ago as it's been 8 months since it's release and still no update.

 

You can check out the Macrumors buying guide if you want to reduce your risk of buying just before an upgrade. It looks like the Macbook and Macbook pro are "due", but the iMac is not "due" for a while.

 

I've heard a little bit of rumoured iMac updates, but it probably isn't as imminent as the Mac notebook updates, which will come first. I wouldn't expect an iMac update until after the holiday season, I expect they'll probably wait until Nehalem. Which is nearly a school year away, in the sense that by March you're almost done the school year already. So I'd jump at it now!

 

Yeah, that is what I meant, my bad.

 

@r0k - "If you're using Windows now and it's not working well, why wait?"

I believe he is talking about the issues that the M15x has had in terms of the case cracking and the poor build quality of the system which has made a few users have to send back their system for a few weeks. Basically I think he means he wants another computer incase his AW kicks the bucket. Nothing to do with windows.

@Op - I love the Imac. In fact I was just at a friends house using his 11x8(?) Wacom tablet and it was amazing. The Imac really does look great and the screen is also very nice.

 

m8,find a cheap laptop,use it till refresh,and then buy apple

 

Why bother?
Have you seen the re-sell price of Mac's, its normally >70% !
Thus you can quite safely buy a iMac now and if in 6 months you want the upgrade, sell it off and take a small hit ... probably about the same as a cheap PC.
a

 

both the ideas of Underpantman and Xirurg are good but i think Underpantman wins coz in 6 months, bugs woould have been found in the macbook pro and new revisions would be done... if you buy in 6 months, you have a better chance of getting an error free machine. my sister is buying me the new macbook pro for christmas!!!!

 

yes,that sounds good

 

Well, in about six months' time, its around the time for the next generation of MBPs with Nehalem .

 

nehalem for notebooks that soon???

 

​