Heh. Working from home it's all one and the same.
@Been Told: I totally hear you on the cost of Apple hardware. We bought my wife's Mac Pro on Ebay, spent a long time looking for a good deal and finally got one with 14 GB of RAM, 2 dual core processors ATI Radeon HD 4870 and full copies of Aperture 3 and Final Cut Express (software that we actually needed for some of the content creation we do). It's still under Apple Care warranty support too
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Once we had it and I got a chance to open the case up I was even more impressed... The engineering inside the case is absolutely top notch. Would we have bought the Mac Pro and iMac as personal machines? Prob not, as they were pretty expensive, but as business expenses it made sense, and we've been able to do things with them that we couldn't before.
One thing that is under appreciated in the newer iMacs is the power consumption. My old dell tower used about 500 watts including monitors etc. That works out to be about:
500 (watts) * 14 hours a day (conservative estimate of how much I use it between work, netflix and playing games etc) * 340 (days used) * .19 (cost per KWH) = $452.20 cost
Keep in mind that it would often be left on overnight to handle large processing tasks like video processing etc.
By comparison my iMac uses about 130 Watts all told which gives a yearly cost (all the above remaining constant) of 117.57 for a yearly savings of about $334.62. The iMac actually uses a lot less than that estimate as it hibernates VERY reliably, so I have no problem keeping it setup so it powers things down then hibernates after fairly short periods of inactivity. So the total savings is probably a bit higher, always depending on the cost of electricity ATM.
Anyway, that helps make the cost of the machine a bit easier to bear
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) and it DOES look as good as the illustration makes it look. Gotta love that, even if I can never afford it.
I wouldn't be able to hold a straight face to her.
