This week Apple quietly announced plans to start selling aluminum 20-inch iMacs to qualified educational institutions for just $899. That means that qualified schools can pre-order an $899 20-inch iMac equipped with a 2.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of memory, 160 GB hard drive, 8x SuperDrive, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphic card.

The new configuration is replacing the $899 Apple 17-inch iMac sold to those same institutions since 2006. It allows institutions hit hard by tax revenue declines to continue to factor Macs into their refined budgets.