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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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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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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DasBoot is a free Macintosh utility that turns your iPod or USB flash drive into a bootable drive for your Mac. It also helps copy diagnostic and repair utilities onto the iPod or flash drive.

I checked it out… you need a bootable CDROM and an iPod or a flash drive. I believe that you can only create bootable flash drives on Intel Macintoshes, but you should be able to make bootable iPods on Intel or PPC machines.

Why do you want a bootable iPod or flash drive? Disk repair utilities generally can’t repair the volume you boot from, so if your Mac gets into trouble you’ll need to boot from a different disk than you normally do in order to try to fix it. Even if it’s not a disk problem, have a second device you can boot from is security against installing that piece of software that vomits all over your boot disk and leaves you to pick out the corn from the beans.
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One thing you get used to when using a Mac is the weird little warts in its otherwise beautiful design. Like when Quicktime uses one key sequence to go into full-screen mode and the DVD player uses another one. Or when the space key allows you to click on the default button in some dialogs but not all.

One peculiarity of the Macintosh platform is that there’s no way built-into the system to route the audio input to the audio output. Windows has been able to do this ever since the first sound cards for PCs. It’s a pretty obvious thing to want to do; hook up an audio source to your computer, mix the audio with whatever your computer is generating and send the whole thing to your stereo which can then blast your head off with it. Mac users are denied this simple pleasure.

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I’m not a big fan of screensavers… these days if I’ve been idle long enough for a screensaver to kick in, then I want my monitor off. This one’s very pretty, though, and I’m running it now. It’s from Russell Warneboldt and is free. It requires MacOS X 10.4 or later to run. Instructions follow after the cut.
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Finally, there’s an open source bootloader for Intel Macintoshes. Now you can install three versions of Windows, five different Linuxes, a BSD port and still be able to choose between them at startup. It’s an open source project called “rEFIt” (Intel Mac BIOS is called EFI, so “refit” — “rEFIt”, get it?). If you’re just interested in how an Intel Mac boots and what you’d need to use other OS’s, the rEFIt project has a very informative page on myths and facts about booting Intel Macs.

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