With the news that there may be a budget Mac on the horizon what is actually left for Apple’s current budget machine, the eMac?

Well, the eMac has been Apple’s “budget” machine for a while now though starting at $799 isn’t exactly budget machine price. The next leap up is the iMac G5 which starts at $1299. While this is cheaper than the previous iMac it is still out of the reach of many customers. But the iMac G5 has only just arrived and it is not likely to leave us. The eMac however hasn’t been updated in a long, long time.

So will Apple dump it if they do bring out this new budget Mac, or will this new Mac be the new eMac effectively changing the meaning of the ‘e’ from education to economy? Or maybe the eMac will go back to being an education only computer. The main reason it was finally released to the general public was because people wanted a budget Mac.

Maybe one thing we’re forgetting and one that may be the eMac’s saving grace is price difference. Apple would be releasing this budget Mac at $499 to try and get people onto the Mac ladder. It is cheap yet it is a Mac and it runs OSX. It gives people a low cost option to get started with Mac’s. But if you go from a Budget Mac to an iMac that is a $800 jump, hardly a small step up the ladder.

So that’s where the eMac will come in. It will server as the high end G4 and, possibly later on, a low end G5 machine. And at around $799 it allows a stepping stone between the budget Mac and the iMac.

Though Apple could become a victim of it’s own design. People would want to buy the budget Mac as it allows them to choose what monitor they want or even keep the one they already have. But eMac and iMac remove that as they are all in one, and the next Mac that allows you to chose your screen is the low end Power Mac that comes in at $1499, a full $1000 above the new budget Mac.

Maybe for Apple’s plan to work it needs to dump the all in one design of the eMac and create a mid range tower, like an iMac G5 would be in a tower. This will allow people to move from headless mac to headless mac, gradually heading up to the mighty Power Mac, and if they so choose they can buy an iMac on the way. This may sideline the iMac but when you consider that once people are on the Mac ladder, they can see just how good it would be to have a computer that only requires you to plug the power in to work