Lucid Nonsense


New iMacs, Mac minis and Mac Pros

Tuesday, 3 March 2009

So, Apple have finally released new desktop Macs today. The Mac mini has received some overdue attention, and the iMacs have been… largely unchanged. Certainly nothing spectacular. The Mac Pros have also received a bit of love, being upgraded to the new Intel Nehalem architecture (Core i7 to give it it’s seemingly-arbitrary marketing name) which, with it’s integrated memory controller in particular, should give a bit of a speed boost.

For UK Mac users though, the main difference is in price. While the US Mac press is announcing the updates along the lines of “nothing spectacular, but a bit cheaper”, the UK prices have actually increased. Unfortunately for the last 6 months we have become used to relatively cheap Mac prices over here. Prices for the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pros were last fixed when £1 was trading at around $2. Sadly with today’s release Apple have reset prices to the current exchange rate, and with a pound buying you just over $1.40 at the moment, that has almost instantly hiked prices of the new Macs by around 30%.

It’s going to make it a bit trickier for resellers with the higher prices but it’s the kind of situation it’s hard for any company to avoid when selling across exchange rates. I’m afraid it’s a situation we may have to come to terms with when buying imported goods over the next few months. While the pound may bounce shortly, the graph doesn’t look too good at the moment.


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