I really, really want one of these puppies.

The new 24-inch iMacs are out. I went and played with one at the Apple Store today. Now, when I first saw the 20-inch iMac, I thought, this thing is huge. But the 24-incher puts its 20-inch sibling to shame. For a minute there, I almost thought I was looking at Apple’s 30-inch super-luxury monitor; even knowing the size difference, I still walked over to the 30-inch display to compare. You can tell the difference, of course, but it doesn’t feel like much. Maybe the iMac’s large white facade makes the screen look bigger, but really, I don’t think it needs any help. In MS Word, a 2-full-page display of a document left the pages displayed more than large enough to read comfortably and had lots of screen space left over. Unfortunately, there was no full-screen, high-quality video on the machine to test, though in hindsight I now realize that I could have downloaded an HD trailer from the Apple movie trailer site.

The specs for the $2000 (base price) desktop are pretty impressive. The new Core 2 Duo chip (2.16 GHz, option for 2.33 GHz for an extra $250) has a 4MB L2 cache (that’s good, take my word for it if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and a fast NVIDIA graphics card. 250 GB HDD, Superdrive with DVD+R DL/DVD±RW, Built-in Bluetooth 2.0 & WiFi-g, built-in iSight camera, and the ability to use S-Video out to the TV (Apple does a good job of high-quality video out) in case the 24-inch monitor just ain’t humongous enough.

I decided some months back that I would get an iMac as my next computer purchase, but not until next year, after OS X v. 10.5, Leopard, is released. My last computer, this PowerBook I’m using now, I bought just a few months before Tiger was released, and I had overlooked the extra money it’d cost me to buy separately–one downside of Apple’s no-upgrade-option policy on software purchases. But when I decided to wait, I thought Leopard was coming in January (now March or even later seems more probable), and the 24-inch model hadn’t been released. And with the iMac line being refreshed now, it’s likely that I’d just see another iMac speed bump occur just a few months after getting one in Spring–which would make me want to wait a bit more, and I’d get caught up in the eternal wait-for-the-next-better-model game. Now it’s beginning to seem a bit silly to wait six months or more to buy a computer just because I don’t want to pay $130 for a new OS–especially when, as an educator, I have the academic discount that puts Leopard at $70.

There is one nit I have, though: Apple sells the iMac with 1GB of RAM, which is nice, but I of course want to upgrade to 2GB at least. The problem: the on-board 1GB is really two 512MB RAM chips which occupy both of the iMac’s only slots–no empty slots to add RAM. Which means that if I wanted to upgrade, I’d either have to pay Apple $175 for what should be a $120 upgrade, or I throw away perfectly good RAM chips, which in the end would be even more expensive. Bad form, Apple. The 1GB of RAM should absolutely have been a single GB chip–but maybe that was their idea, to make you buy from them up front. (One other nit for Apple: running Windows natively on a Mac is a huge plus point; why not demo it in Apple stores? You may well have lost a sale today when my Japanese friend couldn’t see it at work when we visited the Shibuya store.)

Japan pricing, usually higher than American, would add $140 to the total; however, I luckily am eligible for the 7% educational discount from Apple Japan, which would set it back down to $2000. But I’d have to shell out the full $200 for Windows XP–due to their system of educational sales, I would not be able to buy it without going through massive headaches with my school’s home campus, thousands of miles away (unless anyone out there knows differently?). The whole shebang, including XP, the 2GB Apple RAM, and the option for wireless keyboard and mouse, would set me back about $2400. Oh, wait, I forgot that I’d want to buy Windows virtualization software–almost certainly Parallels. Add another $80, call the whole deal $2500. Add another $170 (total of $2650) if I want to opt for the extra 2 years’ AppleCare warranty.

Partly I’m writing this to work out for myself whether to buy it now or wait. I have this personal rule where I don’t buy anything expensive until I’ve considered it for at least two weeks. However, that’s more for impulse buying something that I wouldn’t really use and don’t truly want (like the five hundred bucks I shot on a Sony Clie PDA years ago, virtually unused all this time). I know I would use the iMac, though.

Any thoughts?