Review my order, please

I've decided to invest in a new iMac. I've offloaded most of my PC stuff and have saved enough to buy a really nice one. Is the Apple Store the best place to buy stuff? Here's my cart, including the student discount from my college:

$1,981.00 - 20" iMac, 2gb ram, 256mb vram, USB modem, 250gb hdd
$119 - AppleCare
$49 - iWork 2006
$150 - Office 2004 for Mac - Student and Teacher Edition
$70 - .Mac - Retail Box Promotion ($30 off with new Mac purchase)

Total with tax: $2,511.04

That's a lot to swallow, but I'm ready to take a serious plunge. My hope is by the time I sell off my remaining PC software, Universal versions of Lightwave, Adobe CS, etc., will be available and I will be proficient enough with OS X to start some serious work. This iMac seems like the best option because (1) my new place is short on desk space and (2) my wife likes the minimalist design. The WAF is playing a large role here, especially since this will be her birthday present and she doesn't know it yet I'm a little nervous about purchasing a "Rev A." machine, but aside from the sporadic Front Row glitches I've read about, they seem to be excellent machines. If you have any comments, please post them, and if you know of a better/less expensive place to buy this system, then by all means let me know!

Getting both iWork and Office is a waste. Don't do that. Pick one. Also, buying RAM from Apple is expensive as ****.

Meyvn said:

Getting both iWork and Office is a waste. Don't do that. Pick one. Also, buying RAM from Apple is expensive as ****.

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I agree with both points. Get the RAM from Crucial or Newegg.
And its either iWork OR Office. Having both would be redundant. I would personally go with Office as it is more or less the standard.

There are also several alternatives to .Mac that are less expensive or even free.

Meyvn said:

Getting both iWork and Office is a waste. Don't do that. Pick one. Also, buying RAM from Apple is expensive as ****.

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With my college's discount, the 2gb of ram is $270. Crucial sells it for $187.99 per gig stick, so it would run $375.98 from them. I'd prefer to save the $100 by going through Apple As far as iWork goes, I'm getting it because (1) Keynote exports to PowerPoint and (2) it's $49 with my student discount . I still use a PC as my primary work tool, including PowerPoint, but Keynote looks like it offers some killer features as a presentation app (such as 3D graphs). I require Word because the material I use in my InDesign projects come in as Word documents.

D3v1L80Y said:

I agree with both points. Get the RAM from Crucial or Newegg.
And its either iWork OR Office. Having both would be redundant. I would personally go with Office as it is more or less the standard.

There are also several alternatives to .Mac that are less expensive or even free.

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Yeah, as far as hosting goes, I'm actually a web developer, so I have plenty of space and tools to play with. However, this is more for my wife's benefit (password-protected photo blogs for sharing with the family), plus the backup utility looks pretty good.

I think some people here should visit the Apple Store once again and see what the pricing on RAM is right now. It's changed a lot you know?

When it comes to Pages (part of iWork), it can import/export DOC documents—it's been good enough for me, and I'm getting plenty of Doc's every day. It has some limitations, but, well, if it's good enough why waste money—so you might want to find out about that. Considering Office is not even native on the Intel iMacs I wouldn't really buy it, unless you were absolutely sure that Pages isn't good enough or if you needed a spreadsheet app.

Regarding .Mac: I'm a webdeveloper myself and I've got plenty of domains and hosting accounts, but I still use .Mac. Mainly becuase it integrates so well with OS X and because of the e-mail. I just prefer to keep my e-mail separate. Somehow I feel better e-mailing my friends/family from @mac.com than from one of my domains.

Tiranis said:

I think some people here should visit the Apple Store once again and see what the pricing on RAM is right now. It's changed a lot you know?

When it comes to Pages (part of iWork), it can import/export DOC documents—it's been good enough for me, and I'm getting plenty of Doc's every day. It has some limitations, but, well, if it's good enough why waste money—so you might want to find out about that. Considering Office is not even native on the Intel iMacs I wouldn't really buy it, unless you were absolutely sure that Pages isn't good enough or if you needed a spreadsheet app.

Regarding .Mac: I'm a webdeveloper myself and I've got plenty of domains and hosting accounts, but I still use .Mac. Mainly becuase it integrates so well with OS X and because of the e-mail. I just prefer to keep my e-mail separate. Somehow I feel better e-mailing my friends/family from @mac.com than from one of my domains.

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Yeah, that's my one reservation with Office, that it's not native. However, the reports I've read says it runs just fine with Rosetta. It's not like I'll need 30fps in Word anyway iWork and iLife 2006 are both native, which I'm sure will be great. Well, I placed my order yesterday. I'm pretty excited! When MacBook Pro rev. B comes out, I think I'm going to kiss my Windows laptop goodbye

before you buy office from apple's website, check to see if your college sells it, i was able to buy it for $13.00