New Education iMac, Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

Apple had two interesting announcements this week. The first was the addition of a low-end iMac strictly for the education market. In the past Apple has kept around older iMac models and continued to sell them to students and educators. But this time around they have produced a new version of the 21.5-inch iMac for that purpose. The model comes with an i3 processor, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive for $999. You can buy this low-end iMac from Apple, but only if you qualify for educational pricing. Note that for only $200 more you get the standard low-end iMac which comes with an i5 processor, twice the memory and twice the disk space.
The discontinued white MacBook is also available for educational purposed, but cannot be purchased by individuals from Apple. Reportedly it can only be ordered by educational institutions.
Apple released an add-on to Lion this week in the free Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. It allows a Lion user to use an external hard drive, such as a USB flash drive, as a recovery disk. A hard drive with Lion installed will include such a disk as a separate hidden partition on that same drive. But this method will work even if that internal drive is damaged. It will allow you to boot from the external drive and use tools to repair your disk, restore from Time Machine or even log on to the Mac App Store and re-download and install Lion.
The financial turmoil this week has produced an interesting bit of data. While Apple’s stock price went down with the rest of the market, it didn’t suffer as much as others. Several times on Tuesday, and by the end of the day on Wednesday, by the numbers it was the world’s most valuable company. At the end of Wednesday it was valued at $337.2 billion, ahead of Exxon Mobil which was in the lead previously.