 Still THE computer for the rest of us. |
| Review Date: September 19, 2006 |
| Reviewer: Joseph Ekaitis, Southern California |
Twice in a single year, Apple has released Intel-based iMac computers, and with Intel's announcement of the Core 2 Quad chip (yep, 4 processor cores), should you wait?
If web surfing, home movie-making, photo editing and home office work are all you have in mind, the answer is no. The 20-inch iMac in its basic configuration (1 GB of system RAM, 128MB of video RAM, 250GB hard drive) is more than plenty. Only the most rabid gamers will opt for the 256 MB video RAM upgrade, and impoverished graphics designers who can't afford the Mac Pro will find the 24-inch iMac an enticing alternative. Right out of the box, this iMac carries on the Macintosh legacy of "The computer for the rest of us."
The 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor provides ample horsepower to run Microsoft Office 2004 (via Rosetta) as fast as (and some claim faster than) the iMac G5, where it runs as a native PowerPC application. The built-in iLife applications are all Universal. You'll get zippy performance that makes photo enhancement in iPhoto and home video editing in iMovie a breeze instead of a chore. And all the while, you can work to your favorite music in iTunes without skips or stutters.
The 20-inch 16x10 aspect ratio display might seem like overkill if you don't play DVDs and watch movies regularly, but once you work with it, you won't want to go back. There's so much room and the screen resolution is so fine, you can edit whole pages of text in Microsoft Word 2004 while keeping the iChat window in full view without overlapping. The optical SuperDrive completes the package, giving you the ability to burn music and data CDs as well as DVDs.
For many, the iSight camera will be icing on an already satisfying cake. Even if you rarely video chat, iSight lets you snap your own photo and throw in some visual effects with Photo Booth. It's an easy way to keep your bulletin board avatars and chat icons up to date.
Expect high-end laptop-quality sound from the built-in speakers. I saved a 3-piece set of Altec-Lansing speakers from my old Dell and turned the iMac into an honest-to-goodness entertainment center.
Running the show is Mac OS X Tiger, always a 64-bit operating system and finally able to show itself off. Acclaimed around the world as the best operating system for home users, OS X Tiger protects you and your family from the perils of a connected life by turning up its nose at Windows trojans, spyware and other nasty stuff. On the surface, OS X Tiger seems tame as a kitten but deep down inside, amazing things are going on, like Spotlight, a search tool that chews up and spits out Windows XP's cute li'l puppy. Search results appear AS YOU TYPE YOUR QUERY, and not just file names but references in nearly every file format. Open your fantasy novel manuscript, change the dragon's name from Elliott to Fafnir and by the time you've saved it, Spotlight already knows about it. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
This is my second Mac. Transferring everything from my PowerPC G4 Mac mini was a breeze with Migration Assistant and a FireWire cable. It was as if it had been my Mac all along. It didn't even matter that my default web browser and email client are Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird. There were no "You are not using Safari!" warnings or "Would you like to make Mail your default mail client?" offers. Ditto for transferring my wife's info from an even older G3 iMac (also running Tiger) to the Mac mini after I refreshed it with its restore DVDs. We had planned on the project taking a couple evenings. It was all done in about an hour and a half.
The only part of the iMac that disappoints is the optical wired Mighty Mouse, but then, we all know Steve Jobs is a quirky guy who seems to enjoy throwing a ringer into every product, so his idea of the perfect mouse is just as quirky. It's love (or hate) at first touch. I don't know anyone who has said "Yeah, it's different, but I can get used to it," though I've heard customers at The Apple Store ask "Can I get a credit if I give back the mouse?" I'm a trackball fan myself and the iMac happily said "Well, hello d'er!" when I plugged in a Logitech Marble Mouse USB trackball. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Apple to offer a BYOKM (Bring Your Own Keyboard and Mouse) version of the iMac.
Anyone old enough to read this has been alive since the days when 20-inch flat panel displays sold for the price of the 20-inch iMac. Considering that you get a machine that runs Mac OS X as well as Windows XP and Vista (which you supply), it's a steal. Enjoy the guilt.
UPDATE: On August 7, 2007, Apple replaced this model at this price with the new Apple iMac Desktop with 20" Display MA877LL/A (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, SuperDrive). Snazzy good looks inspired by the Apple Cinema Display and more bang for your buck. |
The Computer That Does Everything
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| Review Date: October 30, 2006 |
| Reviewer: M. Kreg, USA |
This is my first Mac, and I'll never go back. I moved from an HP to the 20" iMac easily using a portable hard drive. As soon as I got it home, I downloaded the trial version of Parallels and the Boot Camp Beta. I bought my own copy of Windows XP and installed it easily using both methods. I can boot up in the Mac OS, I can boot up as a Windows XP machine and run PC games that wouldn't run on my 4-year-old PC, or I can boot up in Mac OS and run Windows in a window through Parallels so I can copy and paste data or share files between the two for my work applications. I can continue to run my PC web authoring software or those sticky programs that just won't be released for Mac soon--all through Parallels.
The iMac comes with a trial version of Microsoft Office for Mac, which you can purchase for somewhere around $350. Or you can purchase the trial version of Mac's iWork for about $79. Hmmm. My wallet says I'll learn iWork. For those of us raised on Microsoft, the only tricky part is remembering those new keyboard shortcuts to make text bold, italics, centered, etc. Mac's Pages, the word processor, is a real wizard when it comes to formatting text around objects. I keep finding myself asking, Why didn't Microsoft ever think of this?
For instance, set a hot zone for your mouse, and when you move your mouse there, all the hidden windows you'd be Alt+Tab-bing through to find what you need scatter across your desk so you can see all of them right in front of you. Click the one your looking for, and that becomes the front window, all the other windows zooming back to their original position behind it. And I love the voice that says, "Excuse me, Safari (the web browser) needs your attention." If I'm away from my iMac, the voice lets me know when I have messages, when a file has finished downloading, etc. I have it set to remind me the time so I don't stay too long playing with the new iMac.
I plugged in my old printer, waiting for the "Found new hardware... Found Printer... Installing new hardware... Drivers missing..."--nothing. Like I never plugged it in. I thought it must not have worked, so I opened the word processor to see if I could print, and there it was. It just works. There's a USB port on the keyboard for the mouse. Why didn't anyone ever think of that before? I imported my 1,500 photos, and they're not catagorized by file name--they scroll by with the month and year taken. Pull out the remote and from across the room you've got a slide show of your photos complete with music in the background. And not one single sales icon on the desktop trying to sell me Internet access or security software. If you want to know how to use a PC, ask a 10-year-old. If you want to know how to work a Mac, ask anybody who's never used a computer before how they think it should work.
Honestly, and I hate to sound like a convert but, the only problems I had were with the Microsoft applications. I had to call Microsoft and get them to release the code on my copy of Windows since I was installing it twice (on the same machine).
For those afraid to take the plunge from PC to Mac, this is the ideal. It can easily be both, but the Mac appears to be made with more common sense behind it. I can enjoy the spiffy hardware and software of the Mac, but use Windows to do the other stuff I have to do. Mac even includes tools in its Boot Camp software to make Windows do some of the things Mac does by nature. |
There's no better time to make the switch from PC.
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| Review Date: January 30, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Michael Hacker, Poteau, OK USA |
I've been an avid supporter or PCs for many years now. I'm a technician, and I've built many machines for myself and my friends and family. Needless to say, I was always a bit skeptical of buying a Mac. Windows can run many more applications and games, and that fact would always sway me from buying Macs. Recently, however, my wife (a film student) said she needed Final Cut Pro, and so we decided to splurge and try out this iMac. (Note: I got the same iMac, except with 2 GB of RAM, a 256 MB video card, and a wireless Mighty Mouse and keyboard, bought directly from apple.com)
First of all, let me say this - the quality of everything is amazing! The design is, in my opinion, very refreshing. It looks clean, neat, and very well done. The screen is very crisp and bright, with an impressive resolution (widescreen 1600 x 1050).
I play World of Warcraft, and the game runs virtually without flaws, even on the highest graphics settings. When I first saw it, I was stunned - was this the same game? I'm sure you can get the same effect running a really tricked out PC, but I have a laptop with completely equivalent hardware, and it does not run near as well as it does on my iMac.
No crashes, no hang ups, and no problems so far. DVDs play with absolutely no hiccups (even on high end Windows machines, I would get the occasional skip). Everything just works, no strings attached. I've had it for a little over a week so far, and I'm still falling in love with it. I will say a few things negative - to be fair. We left GarageBand running for several hours on end(5 tracks opened), and the program claimed to be out of memory (2 GB of memory just doesn't disappear). The problem did correct itself, though, and it didn't crash. Also, the new Intel Macs have dropped Classic support, for older applications. Again, this isn't a big deal, since you probably don't have that many old Mac programs that would be of any use to you.
So, I was converted from a PC guy to a Mac man in the span of a couple hours. If you're looking for a chance to switch from PC to Mac, here's your chance. The price tag isn't too bad, for what you're getting (Excellent monitor + Mac + built in webcam and microphone + good keyboard and mouse). |
Superb
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| Review Date: December 7, 2006 |
| Reviewer: GR, Massachusetts, United States |
In a word, superb. I was waffling between the 20" and the 24" iMac, and decided on the 20 because of the price differential, and for less than that difference, I could buy another 20" LCD to connect to this to get all the screen real estate I would ever need.
The screen colors are extremely accurate (I do some amateur photography, so this is important to me), and it is very bright. The C2D processor speeds through anything I throw at it, even with just the 1GB memory it shipped with (I may upgrade it in the future, but see no reason to do it now). Even MS Office for Mac (2004), running under the Rosetta emulation, does not seem sluggish in the least... it feels as snappy as any of the Universal programs (iLife, Safari, etc.) the computer ships with.
The OS and the included iLife programs are a pleasure to use... with about 1 hour worth of work, I created a 385 photo DVD slideshow with transitions and music of a recent vacation... it really could not have been easier. The end product has surprised a few friends of mine that own Windows PC's--they can't believe what I can do with this.
I do have the need to run a few Windows programs not available for the Mac, so I did partition 25GB off the hard drive with Apple's Boot Camp utility (available at Apple's website) and can start up into Windows XP whenever I want, and it runs much, much faster than the fastest P4 (I think it's a 3GHz with 1GB RAM) that I have at my office. Truly the best of both worlds.
I can't recommend this enough. |
One year after my iMac purchase
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| Review Date: May 3, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Toby Foote, Brunswick, OH United States |
I bought my very first Macintosh (the 20" iMac Intel Core Duo) back in 01/2006. It's more than one year ago, and I still love my iMac purchase. Everything is in one unit, and everything I need comes pre-installed and WORKS (how about that)!
I'm a UNIX system admin by day, and computer junkie the rest of the time. I got sick of Windows having to be re-installed every couple months because of the cookies, spyware, and other junk that finds its way to your Windows computer. Not with a Mac. Although this could change tomorrow, you won't find viruses (to date, only 1 Mac virus has ever made it to mainstream).
Being a Windows user for about 15 years, and a DOS user for about 10 years before that, I wasn't sure how I would adjust to the Macintosh. After all, with all that GUI, is it really good for a "power user"? I'm here to tell you emphatically YES!!! You will still occasionally have an application crash, and the system can still hang every now and then, but it's about 10% of what I experience on Windows boxes.
If you are a power user, I do recommend a Mac, but I DO NOT recommend buying the extra .Mac subscription. You will be able to Google every Mac question you have on the Internet. Instead, buy as big a monitor and hard drive as you can afford. You will fall in love with how everything works together. iTunes collects photos for your iPod from iPhoto. iMovie will read photos from iPhoto and music from iTunes. There's even a Google Picasa plug-in for iPhoto. This iLife software also comes FREE with the computer, although I mainly use iTunes, iPhoto, and recently iMovie. There are other iLife programs that are very good too; I just don't use them. Quicken also came for free on my computer.
And if you loved the days of DOS when a software program was a single .exe file, you'll also love that Mac software programs are a single .app file. No Windows Registry either. There is only one software program that I know that has violated this philosophy on the Mac, and I bet you'll guess who -- that's right, it's Microsoft Office. God love them for breaking a program up into a billion different pieces.
Also, Macintosh hardware is top-notch. You won't find cheap plastic parts, flimsy latches, or monitors that bleed colors together. Macs cost about 20% more than other commodity computer hardware -- but that's because you are buying the best hardware on the microcomputer market.
What makes Macs even more appealing is that you can run MacOS AND Windows. Apple created another free product called Boot Camp. It's like Partition Magic, but it allows you to run Windows and MacOS in completely separate partitions. You don't have to worry about your Windows partition bleeding viruses into your MacOS partition either, if you choose not to let the partitions see each other. You can run other virtualization products that allow you to run Windows programs in your MacOS (like Parallels), but I don't recommend this, as it will allow Windows viruses to infect your precious MacOS -- this is the precise reason I defected from Windows at home.
I could write pages and pages of why I love my Mac, but I'll try to wrap this up with just a few final comments. If you are deep enough into researching Macs, such that you are reading all these Mac comments on Amazon, you are ready for your first Mac. Take the plung. Free yourself. You don't have to work so hard on your home machine. Macs are made for your home and small business.
And one last note: To this date (knock on wood), I have never had the need to, nor ever thought about, re-installing my Mac operating system. It just keeps working. (And I don't have to defrag!) |
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