Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I was ready to place my Mac Mini order and all that jazz but I thought I would just look around a bit more before I pulled the trigger. After scoping the Mac Mini with more memory and thinking about a separate display and so on, the cost is near a thousand bucks. Dont get me wrong still very cool machines but I am, lets say, very economical.

So I went to check out eBay . . . again.

Instead of the Mac Mini I ended up buying another older iMac.
The prices are great and they just work great. Its an all in one unit that just works.

I was shopping for another Mac for my wife because she has started using iTunes and iPhoto quite a bit and needed sort of a mac of her own. We started with two iMacs via eBay last year just for the kids to have their own machines for games. Then my wife started using the kids machines for surfing and really liked them (the iMac DV's are convection cooled and thus silent in "sleep" mode and so we leave one of them on all the time for quick net access). One day she decided to plug in her camera and viola after just plugging it in iPhoto loaded up and she was rolling (with no instruction whatsoever). Then over the holidays an iPod made it onto her list and so iTunes is now a big hit. At this point the iMacs are the main household machines and that was never the intention, it simply came about because they work so well and can do anything that the "family" needs.

You can get the DV all in one iMac models on eBay for 200-500 bucks. The faster the processor and more features and so on the more cash. The only ones I would recommend are the "slot" loading DV models. (The earlier tray loaders are not convection cooled and take a more proprietary type of memory, the DV's utilize the regular ole 168p DIMMS sitting in the closet.) The DV models not only have digital video via AGP and integrated nVidia (some models have ATI) but also firewire (great for iPods), USB, integrated 10/100 NIC, integrated modem, integrated Harmon Kardon sound and of course the all in one chassis with 15" display. (They arent the latest greatest of course, thats kind of the point, some might scoff at a 15" display and so on, but for all around "normal" use they are just fine.)

The recent one I just bought (in lieu of a Mac Mini) is a 2001 (last of the integrated iMacs) 700Mhz with 60GB drive, 512MB ram and CD-RW for $399 with shipping. The 700's are actually pretty rare but you can find the 600's fairly regularly, you can find older 350s, 400s and 500s for even less. For best results again make sure to get a "slot loading" DV model, they start in the 450MHz flavor but are most often 500s.

These things run all the apps my family uses fantastically with VERY low maintenance. In addition to the standard family stuff because they are OS-X I have a few shell scripts for connecting to the family "server" and mapping drives and so on, and I use them once in a while for access to work machines (straight up terminal and SSH, the BSD core makes them actually very good development type machines, of course you have to throw some memory at them for the more intensive tasks but the 500-600-700 models run Apache, Tomcat, Eclipse and so on just fine).

All in all for my money a better deal than the Mac Mini at the moment. Again, dont get me wrong, the Mac Minis are mega cool, but the right tool for the job in my case simply meant integrated unit, very capable, cheap cheap cheap and ultra low maintenance, hence the older iMacs on eBay.

For more on what models do and have what check out apple-history.

NICE OLDER MODELS TO LOOK FOR (in order of desirability):
1. 2001 iMac (Summer 2001) 700MHz - CDRW - Firewire (Last of the non flat screen iMacs.)
2. 2001 iMac SE (early 2001) - 600MHz - CDRW - Firewire
3. 2001 iMac (early 2001) 400/500 MHz - Firewire
4. 2000 iMac DV SE (Summer 2000) - 500MHz - DVD - Firewire
5. 2000 iMac DV+ - 450MHz - DVD - Firewire
6. 2000 iMac DV (Summer 2000) 400MHz - Firewire
7. 1999 iMac DV/SE 400MHz - DVD - Firewire
8. 2000 iMac (Summer 2000) 350MHz

(My kids have the 1999 model iMac 400DVs, I bought one of them for $200 and one for $302, both on eBay, other parts did vary a bit, such as hard drive size, but the disparity in price was mainly just that the $200 one was a good deal, the $300 mark is more "normal" for the DV's. $399 for the Summer 2001 700MHz is a great deal, at least I think so.)