A friend bought a new iMac on Saturday because his old iMac G4 died (well the screen). He was all happy for 2 days, then today he found Apple Updated the iMac line. Ok, so what have we learned?
1. Apple never preannounces releases. The Mac Buyer's Guide was right. It said "don't buy now, updates soon" and they were 3 days away. Though it's hard to know what "soon" means at the time; we thought about 5 weeks to coincide with WWDC.
2. If you wait for your mac to actually die before replacing it, you have less flexibility in waiting for an upgrade. The prospect of waiting 5 weeks was untenable, but waiting 3 days would have been fine.
3. If you buy from Apple you get a 2 week window to return for free upgrade in case a new model comes out. If you buy from a reseller the policy is probably different. The reseller probably has only a slightly better price, so if you fail at #2 above and you have to buy, the 2 week window might be worth it. *
4. Most bumps in hardware are small so missing it isn't a big a deal. If the bump is big it means they have a new model or line and you probably don't want the 1st generation of an Apple product.
*I'm not sure about Apple's upgrade policy if you customize it much. If you buy in a retail store the only customization they can do is add more RAM, so that probably isn't an issue for a free upgrade. If you get a RAM upgrade at a retail store be sure to ask for the stock RAM. You pay for it anyway (yes it's a little more expensive than ordering from the online Apple store) and you can keep it for possible later use or resell on eBay. If you order online with a bigger hard drive or upgraded graphics card I don't know if they exchange for free (you can return and buy a new one but that adds a restocking fee that probably eats all the gains). Mail returns take longer, you might not be happy about that. The model upgrade might make up for the options you got, so maybe you can return in a retail store and get a new stock model.
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