[megasad]

1GHz eMac, 17" CRT, 1GB RAM, 60GB Hard Drive, ATI Radeon 7500 32MB, DVD/CD-RW, Tilt & Swivel Stand
£ 894.37 (£779.24 + £115.13)

1GHz eMac, 17" CRT, 1GB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, ATI Radeon 7500 32MB, SuperDrive, Tilt & Swivel Stand
£1078.18 (£963.05 + £115.13)

1GHz iMac, 15" LCD, 768MB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 32MB, DVD/CD-RW
£1092.55 (£983.29 + £109.26)

1.25GHz iMac, 17" LCD, 768MB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 64MB, SuperDrive
£1504.34 (£1395.08 + £109.26)



One of the above is what I will buy soon. The prices are based on educational discount and RAM bought from Crucial. My mind will not let me decide. Help me.


What I like about the eMac:
Ports on the side, low cost, 17" flat CRT (16" viewable) that displays resolutions up to 1280x960, the look of the machine, easy to max out RAM at 1GB.

What I don't like about the eMac:
The fans mean it is not completely silent. Resolutions above 1024x768 apparently cannot be used with a higher refresh rate then 75MHz, which means I would be unable to use it at anything higher than 1024x768, which negates the advantage that the eMac has over the 15" iMac in this regard. The hard drive in the DVD/CD-RW model is only 60GB, and so to get the 80GB I have to pay over £180 more and get a superfluous (to me) SuperDrive.


What I like about the iMac:
The LCD display (no refresh rate issues), the look of the machine, the faster system bus and RAM, the 1.25GHz G4 in the 17", that it is completely silent, USB 2.0, that it is available with a 160GB hard drive.

What I don't like about the iMac:
The LCD display; as I've experienced with my iBook, after a year or so, the brightness of said display drops quite a lot. Apple charge a rediculous amount to put a single 512MB chip in there (£147.13), meaning that 768MB is the maximum (reasonable) amount of RAM. The 15" model's top resolution is 1024x768, and the 17" (1440x900) costs over £400 more. The ports are on the back.



So, my biggest conflict with the systems above is between the top end eMac and the low end iMac. The 17" iMac is too expensive, and if I go with the high end eMac, why not save nearly £200 and lose the unwanted SuperDrive? Is the graphics card in the 15" iMac noticeably different to that in the eMac? Will the refresh rate of the eMac's display, when at the higher resolutions, really fry my brain? Will 256MB extra RAM make the eMac noticeably faster than the iMac?

Please, answers.


[Edited to increase price of iMac systems, by £11.75 each, after realising that they need PC2700 RAM now, not PC2100. Can't change poll questions though, dagnammit. Oh well.]

[Grrr]

Ugh.. Silly polls!

Anyway, I just got an eMac from (Wait for it) PCworld! Of all places eh? They had a special offer on that I could not refuse. 1ghz eMac 60gb DVD/CDR drive for £800 (Retail price) BUT! Came with a free Fuji A403 digital Camera. Worth £200 apparently. I sold this to a mate for £100. So I essentially got myself a brand spanking new 1ghz G4 eMac for £700. Spent another £112 on a gig of ram from crucial though. Runs like a champ.
This offer only applied to this model of eMac though, and not the superdrive models. Offer did apply to 1 of the iMacs also however, but I dont recall which.

Also, dont worry too much about the refresh rates on the screen when running at full rez. I too was a little concerned about this, but in actual fact, i just dont notice the low'ish refresh rates at all. It's a good screen.
Whats more, Do the spanning hack, and you can bolt on another screen. Yep, dual screens (not mirrored) on an eMac. It's very cool. You could drive a 23" cinema display if you wanted. No refresh worries with one of those. I just use an old Apple 15" crt though. works very nicely.

[Luca Rescigno]

You can't use a 23" Cinema display on the eMac at all. The eMac only has the ability to use external VGA monitors, and the $300 Gefen VGA-to-ADC adapter only works with PowerMac and PowerBook G4s.

However, there are plenty of CHEAP 15" and 17" LCDs with VGA connections that you can use with the eMac. The quality won't be as great as a digital LCD, but it'll still be pretty good and you will get that much more screen area.

I'd say get the cheap eMac because you can always add an external Firewire hard drive later if you want (only about $50 more than adding a second internal drive on a PowerMac), and it's fast and cheap. I just bought a 1 GHz Combo eMac today myself.

My second choice would be the 17" iMac because it's such an awesome machine, but it's way overpriced so I didn't even really consider it when making my purchase. For the cost of the 17" iMac, you could buy a single processor PowerMac G4 in addition to a 17" LCD monitor. Faster, more expandable, better graphics, and so on.

[Grrr]

Oops, yes, my mistake.. I forgot about the lack of digi screen connections. I only mentioned the 23" thing cos after the spanning hack has been done, you can view all the available resolutions that it can drive. And the 23" cinema rez is listed.
Still, it's damn nice to be able to drive a separate screen from an eMac though..

[megasad]

Hokey doke, for those of you just sitting on the edge of your seat, desperate to know my decision... I'm going with the first (and cheapest) option, the Combo Drive eMac.

My reasoning? That my iBook is just two years old, and though the battery has died completely and the screen has dimmed considerably, I can't really justify the expense until at least another six months have gone by. My last two PCs have each lasted three years before I got fed up with the slowness and whilst I want more from my iBook, I don't actually need more.

Um... so, yes, in about six months, Panther will be shipping with all new Macs and the eMacs will probably have been bumped to 1.25GHz processors, 166MHz System Bus, larger hard drives, and so on. So, pretty much like the new iMacs. And they'll still be under £800 (before RAM) which will be the least amount I've spent on a new computer, ever.

Until then, I'm moving house, getting a new desk on Thursday, so shall hook up my iBook to an external 17" monitor, my Apple Pro Keyboard and my Logitech scrollwheel mouse, maybe even run the system off of my Lacie 60GB 7200rpm FireWire harddrive (though I don't know if I'll be able to stand the noise...) for the extra storage and faster response time.

Now all I have to think about is whether or not to sell my iBook once I've got the eMac... I'd probably only be able to get about £500 for it on eBay, and it cost me £1300. But, as the battery is dead, I don't even use it as a laptop anymore, since it has to be plugged in all of the time.

I shall see.

[Link]

*NO!* don't get the old emac.

The old emacs do NOT have video spanning capability. Without this they're a total waste of money.. (the gf4mx will work.. radeon will work.. GF2mx will NOT work).

[Luca Rescigno]

All the eMac models given as options in the poll are capable of video spanning if you apply the proper spanning hack. Only the 700 MHz ones and the 800/Superdrive model have the GeForce 2MX which can't span at all.

Besides, I don't think it's useless if it can't span. It's still quite a good computer for the price.

[Scooterboy]

The eMac weighs 50 lbs (22.6796 kilos)* so if you want to move your Mac around you may want to consider the iMac. For those on a tight budget, it's hard to beat the eMac.

I'm on a budget and needed a Mac desktop so I ordered an eMac 800 (reburbished) from the Apple Store web site. $649 USD (£401.78292 Sterling)* and the eMac will be perfect for my needs. Does the Apple Store UK sell refurbished?

* I love the OS X Calculator with it's built in Currency and Measures Convert function!