What?

Yes, the title does cause raised eyebrows. When did you last use the words ‘bargain’ and ‘Apple’ in the same sentence?

But there’s not other way to describe the Mac Box Set which gets you Leopard, iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 for a very small sum.

If you are still using Tiger (10.4) an upgrade to Leopard (10.5) is recommended. My upgrade was accidental as when Apple finally replaced my first (Tiger) MacBook (bad wi-fi) the replacement came with Leopard. Leopard is no slower on our old G4 iMac than Tiger and offers superior networking between Intel machines, not least the little advertised feature known as Screen Sharing. This allows you to control other like-equipped Intel Macs over the internet with an interactive picture of the remote machine’s screen ported to yours. Ideal for problem fixing on a relative’s machine without the need for panic midnight visits. Further, you must have Leopard with the latest iLife ’09 as iPhoto ’09 will not work with Tiger.

As for the applications, I can testify that Numbers, the spreadsheet app, is finally almost as fast as my ancient copy of Excel from Office X and, at last, spreadsheets can be saved password protected, although you have to de-protect Excel spreadsheets before import. Import is fast and issues clear warning messages for areas where it struggled. In practice, a large, twenty tab, Excel spreadsheets with many complex formulas and some graphs converted fine with only minor formatting issues. It’s now a fully useable product and will see the last Microsoft application on my Mac finally confined to the the trash can where it belongs. No more weekly Excel lock-ups.

iPhoto ’09 adds little to its predecessor. Poorly implemented face recognition technology and the ability to show the location of a photo using GPS if, that is, your camera stores GPS information in the first place. A solution looking for a problem.

As for the other apps, Pages continues solid and easy to use – though there is a learning curve for Word escapees – and I will not be using iMovie, iWeb, Garage Band or Keynote. The latter is Apple’s version of Powerpoint and runs right into Dr. P’s Business Rule #1. No marketers or slide presentations are to be permitted in business meetings addressing strategy. It worked for me for over a decade – once I had the power to enforce this simple rule – and paid back massive dividends. Margins do not come from a spreadsheet and business plans do not originate in Powerpoint or Keynote presentations.

For an even greater bargain, spend $229 for the 5 user family pack. Better still, buy either from Amazon and you will get 8% off and will avoid that legalized form of theft known as sales tax. Starve the Beast!