I was browsing around the other day on the web when I came across a picture of the Dell Studio Hybrid. It basically looks like a little Mini Tower not much larger than a hard drive and comes in seven different colors. Anyway, I immediately went to their website and configured one really quickly to see what I could get for say under $1400. Here is what I got for the price of $1299 which included a $170 discount and the standard one year warranty.

• SYSTEM COLOR Bamboo

• PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5850 (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)

• OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1

• MONITOR Dell SP2208WFP 22 inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor with Webcam

• MEMORY 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz (2 DIMM)

• HARD DRIVE 20GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)

• OPTICAL DRIVE Slot Load CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-RW Drive)

• VIDEO CARD Intel® Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100

• SOUND Integrated Stereo Audio with 5.1ch digital output (S/P DIF)

• KEYBOARD & MOUSE Dell Wireless Desktop Keyboard & Mouse
• WIRELESS NETWORKING Built-in Dell 1505 Wireless-N Networking

Not bad for all of that… The only gripe that I have is that the video card is integrated and its running the wrong operating system. A similarly configured iMac would cost you a little over $1700 but with that iMac is a 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1066 Mhz FBS/6MB cache, it also has 800 MHz RAM instead of 667 MHz as well as a dedicated 128 MB ATI Radeon graphics card. I could go on and on about the specs but essentially the iMac is worth the $400 bump in price. PLUS you get OS X Leopard and a bunch of Software you can use out of the box. I do like the Mini Tower design of the Studio hybrid though and like the color choices as well. I hope that Apple adds some type of Mini Tower in their Fall line-up as well as some more colors. I’m getting tired of aluminum, black and white its stylish but its getting boring. My Mac Mini could use an upgrade big time and a Mini Tower like the Studio hybrid sans Win OS would do me just fine except I’m hoping that they put dedicated graphics in there somewhere.