yeah a monitor would have been nice, except people said they didnt want one... (iMac)
What you get is the main box, no keyboard, no mouse, no monitor. Keyboard and mouse cost 58 buck extra if you want apple hardware... market price if you dont. Monitors are cheap right now, so you can pick and choose, apple 20-30 inch displays for buku bucks, a middle of the road or third party lcd or plasma or a Cheap CRT.
Im not conviced that they are really trying to compete with Dell or Gateway, just aiming for the under 1000 bucks market. People didnt like the imac because of the locked in LCD, (what if I want a better monitor later!) this gives users a lot of options.
One thing I dont like is the reemergence of the power brick, absent on most macs for a while. But what can you do, I have paperbacks bigger than this thing. It crams a lot of stuff into a tiny space. On their main page they have six or seven stacked on top of each other taking up as much space as a small tower (with pretty much the same specs)
I think theyre banking on singles, college students, and families that want a computer.
I wouldnt buy it untill Mac OS X tiger comes out though, (for any forum people who are intrigued) It'd be like buying a dell a few weeks before longhorn came out. Your going to want the new OS, with a lot of new functionality and features and paying extra for it isnt prudent. The good news is that OSX tiger will be out in the first quarter of this year.
So a few more months.
They have a whole slew of new features and anyone with quicktime can see what they are at the apple site.
The most interesting one for me is the improvement to ichat av which allows multiple teleconferences (audio or visual) which seems like the perfect way to go for online rpgs... although I'd stick to audio so I dont have to see your ugly mugs.....
So yeah no monitor semi crappy, but like I said I have one sitting around gathering dust and I suspect a lot of other people do to. If someones avoided buying mac because of the price and has a 2-3 year old pc that they arent happy with its attractive, just save your keyboard, mouse and monitor.