Apple renews education push with new iMac

Apple has renewed its efforts to widen its education sector presence with a new, low-cost dual-core iMac.

The 17-inch LCD, $1,299 ex GST education priced iMac features a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and will be bundled with Apple’s iLife ’06 suite of education software.

It additionally features 512MB DDR2 SDRAM, a 24x combo drive, 80GB SATA 7200 rpm hard drive, Intel GMA 950 graphics and a built-in video camera.

The model, intended to replace the vendor’s eMac range on which production has ceased, will only be available to accredited Apple education resellers.

Rather than building to a given price-point, the new iMac was the product education customers feedback, Apple product marketing manager Geoff Winder, claimed.

Through the use of Apple’s Boot Camp beta and complementary virtualisation software from ISV partner Parallels, tertiary institutions could now consolidate to an iMac environment, Winder said.

“Parallels allows you to hot-swap between operating systems so there is no longer a need to have dedicated Linux, Windows and Mac labs,” he said. “Boot Camp is still in beta, but you could use it to run Windows for your work applications then [OS X] for home applications.”

Tim Kleemann, director at national Apple reseller chain Next Byte, said education resellers could now present a “no-brainer” pitch to cost-sensitive schools.

“The new iMac is a cut-down machine, but it’s the cheapest [Apple] Intel machine to date,” he said. “You can access more applications than any other machine plus you can [make use of] all your old legacy Mac and PC applications.”