Apple?s $1,099 education-only iMac is cheaper, and for good reason

The $1,099 education-only iMac will look like the other 2012 models on the outside, but not the inside.

Andrew Cunningham

Going all the way back to the venerable eMac, Apple has produced a low-price version of its iMac for educational institutions. This year is no different. Apple is now offering a new education-only version of the all-in-one featuring many of the improvements from 2012's model, but at $1,099 it costs $200 less than the entry-level model available to the general public.?You will give up quite a bit of hardware to save that money, though. Compared to the $1,299 model, the list of downgrades runs thusly:

• You get a dual-core 3.3GHz Core i3 CPU, instead of a quad-core 2.5GHz Core i5 CPU
• You get 4GB of RAM spread across two 2GB sticks, instead of 8GB of RAM in two 4GB sticks.
• You get an integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics processor, instead of the dedicated Nvidia GeForce 640M.
• You get a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive, instead of a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive.

Many of these components can be upgraded at purchase, including the RAM (which still maxes out at 16GB) and the hard drive (which can still be traded for one of Apple's Fusion Drives). The former will be especially important, since as we noted in our review the RAM in the 21.5" version of the iMac is no longer easily replaceable.

This new iMac mirrors many of the cuts made to 2011's $999 version, which also saved schools?$200 compared to the then-$1,199 entry-level model. That iMac likewise lost its quad-core CPU, some RAM, and some hard drive capacity (among other things), but was allowed to keep its dedicated GPU.?Different schools have different needs, and if you simply need the cheapest iMacs you can get in bulk we suspect there's some money to be saved here?otherwise, you're giving up a lot of hardware to save $200 now.

Source: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/gadgets/~3/yMAkRkewVFw/

lindzi cox bachelor finale courtney robertson ben flajnik hunger games premiere red meat bachelor ben