Shopping for the Apple Macintosh Business Desktop Computer

As of Jan. 20, 2006. Totals based on vendor configurator.

There's not much to add--except for Office, the iMac is pretty much ready to go onto your business desktop. (And dazzle your friends with its design studliness.) There is no other processor to upgrade to. The basic RAM is adequate — Apple doesn't play that "256MB starter RAM" game. Ditto with the hard drive — no lame-o 40GB drives here. It even comes with a camera built into the bezel, and WiFi wireless and also Bluetooth, which lets you hook up some peripherals without wiring. We can't tell if there's standard Ethernet, though.

The processor is only 1.83GHz, a lower frequency than the PC chips we've been looking at, but that couldn't be more deceptive — the Mac's Intel chip is dual core, which makes it much faster in some operations than a single-core chip in the same operating range. Dual-core Windows PCs are out of our price range. Apple's dual-core iMac starts at $1,299 — not bad!

Which brings us to Microsoft Office. A 30-day test-drive comes with the iMac. The only versions available to buy are Standard Edition and Professional Edition. Standard Edition is fine — it includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a Mac-only Outlook variant called Entourage.

Apple charges full price for Standard Edition — $400 — while the PC vendors offer discounted Office Small Business Edition at $200 to $250.

At $1,299, the iMac is attractively priced for business users. (Apple still sells the Power chip version, but it's the same price, and it will be going away at some point.) But when you add Office to make the system comparable to the other desktop computers we've been analyzing here, the Macintosh iMac jumps to a dramatic $1,700 — at the high end of our Power User configuration!

If you can figure a way to duck that Microsoft tariff on your Mac and get a better price on Office, the iMac is worth looking at. At the time we were shopping, for example — in January 2006 — Microsoft was offering a $250 rebate on any version of Office. That would bring the iMac configuration price down to $1,400 — still a premium, but one many who admire Apple's design and software and interface innovations would be willing to pay.

By the way, if price is no object, you might want to look at the Professional version of Office —it also includes Virtual PC with Windows XP Professional — so you can access Windows-only programs and files smoothly.

If, on the other hand, price is very much an object, but you'd really, really like to play with a Mac on company time, you could experiment with a Mac Mini, which is a tiny (six inches square) Mac box that starts at $500 with a slow (1.25GHz PowerPC G4) processor, 512MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a DVD/CD-RW. Or $700 will get you an 80GB hard drive and a DVD burner. Then you have to add a monitor and keyboard, as it doesn't come with them. Buy your monitor from somebody who isn't Apple, because Apple only sells expensive LCD monitors that cost more than the Mini itself.