Macintoshes are the BMWs of the computer world. Everyone wants one (okay, not everyone), but not everyone can afford one. They look great and generally work very well. When you look at things like “total cost of ownership”, a Mac may actually save you money in the long term, but not everyone can pony up the upfront money so that they can save in the long term. Even if you can, it’s nice to save a few bucks if you can.

Apple exercises tight control over Macintosh hardware prices, so you won’t usually find a new Mac discounted by more than a few dollars. But you may well find decent rebates and bundles and special pricing from Apple itself. Here are a few of the things I’ve seen that may be helpful to you.

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Apple’s MacOS X 10.5 “Leopard” has been out a while now, and I hear about more and more people hitting an installation snag that causes them a lot of grief.

You boot up the Leopard DVD-ROM, start walking through the install process and when it gets to the dialog asking where to install it, there’s nothing. No disk partitions show up at all.

I’ve encountered this on several computers so far. I can’t tell you exactly what causes it. I’ve seen it on both Intel and PowerPC machines.

We tried all the obvious things: reset the PRAM, repair the target disk, repair permissions on the target disk… no luck.

The solution is simple:
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Macworld is coming up in a couple of days, and although I will be on a plane during the breathlessly awaited keynote, I still have some thoughts on what may be coming up… about 95% of people writing online have thoughts on it, too.

After last year’s fantasy-fulfilling iPhone announcement, expectations are high for this Macworld. It seems very unlikely that Apple will top that, but here’s what I think you may see.

We’ll see hardware refreshes. Now that Apple is using Intel chips, we know a lot more about the release schedule of the processors they’re using, since Intel publishes a processor roadmap and is very vocal about new chips. Intel is in the process of pushing out new CPUs, the “Penryn” line, mobile, desktop and server, and I think we’ll see some new Apple machines using them - specifically new MacBook Pros and likely MacBooks as well, and an iMac speed bump.

The iMacs just had a significant refresh last summer and I can’t see Apple doing any major changes to them beyond giving them new CPUs. The MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, however, haven’t had any significant changes in a while. In fact, Apple followed a very clever strategy when they switched to Intel chips - they didn’t make major changes to the appearance of the machines. An end-generation PowerPC iMac or PowerBook doesn’t look much different from a first generation Intel iMac or MacBook Pro. This was a great way to subtly tell people that they were still the same machines.

The MacBook Pro/Power Book has looked the same for a long time now, and while it’s still a great looking machine, I expect that Apple will update it to bring it more in line with the appearance of the new iMac.

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One complaint some users have about the new release of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is that the cool R2D2-like hologram effect for iChat and Photobooth that was present in beta copies is missing in the final releae.

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This is pretty cool. If you check out Amazon’s top selling software list, “MacOS X Version 10.5 Leopard” is the top seller, and “MacOS X Version 10.5 Leopard Family Pack” is the number two top seller.

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Apple has finally announced the release date for their new OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. You can pre-order Leopard at the Apple Store with free shipping and they promise it will arrive on Friday October 26th. You can also pre-order it at Amazon. Amazon is offering a $20 rebate when you order Leopard and Parallels at the same time, and is also currently charging $20 less for Leopard than Apple is. Amazon says they’ll ship Leopard on Friday October 26th.

Check it out at the Apple Store (click here) or at Amazon (click here).

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Amazon is offering a nice discount on iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 for Macintosh. This is the best price I’ve seen on them, and Amazon ships them for free.

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I’ve run into this in a few places and use it myself. It doesn’t do anything useful, but it is pretty.

There’s a hidden option on the Dock which will display the icons for hidden applications as translucent images instead of the normal opaque icons. It’s a very pretty effect and is slightly useful to let you quickly know why you don’t see your Safari window.

In order to set the dock to do this, you’ll need to open a terminal window (from Applications | Utilities) and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
killall Dock

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The uber-gadget will be released at 6PM local time on Friday July 29th. You can barely read a Mac, computer or gadget blog without being overwhelmed by articles about it.

This article outlines what you need to know if you want to get one. And - stuck with a cellular contract for another year? Wired has a helpful article listing some slightly shady ways to get out of that contract - but let’s face it, if you can’t stick it to your cellular company, who can you stick it to?

Also - think it’s too expensive for you? If you have a Crackberry, you might actually find the iPhone cheaper.

Here are things you should know about buying the iPhone:

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Apple has a couple of ways you can save on a new Mac this summer. First, if you buy a qualifying printer with a Mac you’ll get a rebate of up to $100 on the printer. That’s enough to cover the cost of many of the printers available through the Apple Store. This works with any Mac, new, refurbished or on an educational or developer discount. Click through the banner to the left for more info.

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