Apple has come out with a sweet 50-lb eMac exclusively for education. It's an iMac with a 17" flat panel CRT and all the standard goodies.
<cranky_old_man>
Some students are complaining about the pricing. $1249 for a high end model? $1500 for the custom built model? What's to complain about?
In 1988, I bought a MacSE with two floppy drives for $2500. Yes, a whole megabyte of RAM, a 9" black-and-white monitor and no HD (instead of spending the extra $500 for Apple's overloud 20MB disk, I spent $300 for a 45MB disk and somehow had space to spare when everyone else's disk started filling up...) There was an option to buy a MacII for $4000, with a small color monitor and 80MB HD included.
And now students are crying out because they're shelling out $250-$500 more than the $999 list price of the base model? Not only do these boxes still play Crystal Quest, Tetris and Escape Velocity, but these boxes come with compilers, X-Windows and export restrictions!
Back then, the computer I wanted was a $10,000 68030 NeXT cube (acutally, the '040, but that wasn't in production yet). That box was a steal at $6,500. (But you still really needed the 330MB HD; the system was unusably slow with the flopticals alone. I can't think of a better machine than something like the eMac. Very little on the market is close to an order of magnitude better than that $1000 configuration. (Multiple CPUs get kinda interesting, but not that much more interesting until you start talking multiples of 16 CPUs...)
Kids today....
</cranky_old_man>
