Apple has knocked $200 off the price of its iMac G5 in the US, while reducing the UK price by £150. The machine now costs $1499 and £1049 in the two territories. The price of the 17in model remains unchanged at $1299 and £899, respectively.

The 20in iMac G5 contains a 2.1GHz G5 CPU, 512MB of 533MHz DDR 2 SDRAM, a 250GB hard drive and an 8x slot-loading dual-layer DVD writer. It's got an ATI Radeon X600 graphics chip with 128MB of DDR video memory. Bluetooth and 802.11g Wi-Fi are built-in too.

The spec closely matches that of the recently released Intel-based iMac - known simply as the iMac as opposed to the iMac G5. It has a 2GHz Intel Core Duo backed by 512MB of 667MHz DDR 2 and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics engine with 128MB of GDDR 3 video memory.

The Intel-based model costs £1229/$1699, so the price cut puts more clear blue water between the two top-end iMacs. Clearly that favours the older model, suggesting Apple's keener to reduce its existing stocks of the PowerPC-based machine than win early converts to the Intel version. Mac users will, after all, migrate to the Intel machines eventually.

However, there's no argument as to the PR benefit that a big consumer vote of confidence in the Intel platform would bring Apple in the near term. ®