imac

We’re within sight of upgrading the main machine at home from a Mac Mini, purchased in December 2006, to a new 24″ iMac. Unlike some of the other Apple products we’ve purchased – products that were upgraded within weeks after the purchase – it seems that our timing may be right on this one.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen several articles indicating a new iMac line in March. The features vary, but most of the speculation includes quad-core processors and higher-quality Nvidia graphics. From my limited Apple experience, that seems consistent with previous Apple hardware upgrades.

In any event, this purchase may happen sometime in late March or early April – after any new iMacs have started shipping. Our Mac Mini purchase came toward the end of the Core Duo line, processors that were replaced with the Core 2 Duo. My first Shuffle was, within weeks, replaced by a new design. The purchase of my 30 GB iPod (my fourth iPod, at that time) was quickly overshadowed by upgrades to the iPod line and, a bit later, by the initial iPhone release. For a bleeding-edge guy like myself, that was pretty frustrating. I did wait for the 3G iPhone and will likely get a good year of use before the inevitable Apple upgrade.

So, maybe just a few years into our Apple use, we’re finally syncing with the Apple release schedule. If so, it’ll be nice to have a machine that I know is the current state of the art for that model for longer than just a few months.

Update I’ve activated the WP-Polls plugin. Vote now in the sidebar for the features you most expect to see in the new iMacs.