New iMacs Announced
Apple announced an upgrade to the iMac line of computers today, without much fanfare. That's typical when the upgrade is generally just a bump up in processor speeds. That's true with this upgrade as well, with no major redesign of the computer.
There have been iMac upgrades in the past that have not caught my attention, but our current iMac is showing its age. It's not too early for us to think about getting a new one. The difficulty, as always, is price. We have a major bathroom remodeling project that is about to sap about $13K from our assets, so any other large purchases will be difficult to fit in.
When I went to the Apple site to check out the prices, one with all my ideal upgrades is $2200. That's the 24" version with the standard processor (2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo) and hard drive (320GB) but with an upgraded graphics card (2.2x increase in graphics performance) and increased memory (doubled to 4GB).
Since I don't do any gaming at home on the iMac, I waffled a little on an upgraded graphics card, but the trend in computers seems to be offloading more and more calculation tasks to the graphics processor. So my thinking is an upgrade to the graphics chip might make a bigger difference in performance in the future than upgrading the CPU.
Even if we decide to get a new iMac, it won't be until after the finances for our bathroom remodeling job are setteld and underway. After that, though, if it looks like we can fit it into our budget, an iMac upgrade is probably in our future.