I was at the local Apple Store this past weekend and ran across a great deal on an older iMac. I have been in other stores before and seen stuff available for clearance, but I had no idea that Apple did such a thing. I was in the store getting my Macbook repaired at the Genius bar and my brother just happened to spot the box under a table with some other marked down batteries and such.

We walked over and took a look at it as I experienced sticker shock, but because it was so cheap. This computer was originally the 1299 model and here it was several hundred dollars less, almost 50% off. I’ve never seen discounts like that on products. So, after sitting at the bar a little longer, I decided that it might be a good replacement for the aging eMac or the Dell tower that my mom has and add another Mac to the family.

For that amazing price I ended up taking home a 17″ 1.83Ghz Core Duo iMac with the ATI X1600 graphics card, 160Gb hard drive and 1G of ram. It’s in beautiful shape without any scratches or anything you would expect from the unit being a demo model at the store. Plus I still have a one year warranty on it.

All that said we did have one or two small issues with the computer when we first set it up. It was my first time using the Transfer Assistant and we just used that to setup the iMac. I’m assuming that some of the issues we had were because of this. The one or two that were pretty major, the iSight not working and the wireless dying every 5 minutes and not working until after a restart, were solved by applying a boot rom update back from April. Someone had updated the SMC firmware to the latest, but hadn’t done the boot rom and that seems to have fixed the unit and all is well. Looks like a great deal and I hope that we have a good experience with it.