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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If you buy your new Intel Macintosh from Apple and you get it with additional RAM pre-installed, you’ll be paying through the nose for the memory. If you’re comfortable adding memory to your Mac (and it’s really not difficult to; it’s the most common hardware operation that end-users perform, and Apple has made it pretty easy to deal with) then you can definitely save a decent amount of money on the RAM.

Increasing the total memory in your Macintosh is likely the cheapest way to improve its performance. MacOS X really wants at least 512MB to start with, and if you’re doing anything memory intensive, say Photoshop, you’ll be very very happy to max out your RAM. Also, if you’re on an Intel Mac and you’re running older, non-Intel applications that are built for a PowerPC, you’ll be using “Rosetta” without knowing it, and you’ll definitely need some extra RAM.
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Amazon continues to have the best retail prices for Macintoshes.

They’re offering a $100 rebate on the new MacBook. They also offer a $150 rebate on the MacBook Pro, a $100 rebate on the iMac and a $25 rebate on the Mac Mini.

The rebates are also very easy to claim… good going, Amazon! You can submit the rebate online without having to mail anything to them.

When they announced the first Intel machines six months early, Apple graciously offered to allow developers to trade in their developer transition machines for a shiny new 17″ Intel iMac. Given that the offer was time limited and that we were obligated to return the machine at the end of the year, we took advantage of it. If we were buying a new machine, I probably would have opted for the 20″ 2.GHz model (it’s faster and has more video memory), but that wasn’t an option.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the 17″ model.
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