New iMacs

Well, as expected from the store being down last night, Apple refreshed the iMac lineup. So what's new? A lot of people in forums are scrutinizing the specs, and almost everybody is quite amazed. Why? The specs of the new iMac leads to Intel's upcoming montevina chipset/platform. So what's the big deal? Well, Intel has not released it yet. Montevina is supposed to come out officially around June. I guess Apple is intel's special partner deeply in bed. :)

Not only that, almost all the Penryn processors that the new iMac use are not out yet either. The only one that is officially out is the 3.06GHz, which is Core 2 Extreme X9100. The 2.4GHz is supposedly Core 2 Duo SP9400, and the 2.8GHz is Core 2 Duo T9600, both are not supposed to be out till May 08. I couldn't find any reference for the 2.66GHz chip in wikipedia, so Intel has not even announced that one.

So here we go again, Apple getting chips early from Intel. Awesome! Other than that, 2GB RAM becomes standard except for the cheapest model (C'mon Apple, what's wrong with making 2GB standard on everything?). The highest end 24" model gets nVidia Geforce 8800GS. Not too shabby, but the other models are still stuck with ATI's 2xxx GPUs, not even upgraded to ATI's 3xxx lineup.

Other disappointment, no quad core. I know that iMacs use mobile CPUs, but still I want my quad-core, considering many windows desktops are now quad-core and they're cheap. Intel's mobile quad-core chip is supposed to come out in September 08.

I guess the Mac mini is the step child now, still holding a combo drive. No refresh for the mini. I'm tempted for the 3.06GHz iMac, but I don't think I have the desktop space for a 24". :(