gunsroland's Full Review: Apple iMac 17 in. (M8812LL/A) Mac Desktop
It was just about a month ago that I bought my iBook and 17" iMac. I thought I would take a few minutes to give my thoughts on switching now that I have had a chance to explore many more of the things mac has to offer.
Design - A I still get great comments from everyone who sees my iBook...and when I show them the pictures of my iMac they immediately want to know more. I think the innovative designs is one of the top things Apple has going for it right now. People are fed up with computers taking up all of their desk space. They want something sleek, compact, stylish, and something that WORKS! To me the very best part is the little things they built in, like having 2 USB connections right in the keyboard.
Reliability - A I have never had to flip off the power because the machine locked up. I have never had to do an alt-cntl-del...in fact I don't know what the Apple equivalent to that would be because I have never had to look it up. I have some applications like AOL that do crash out once in a while, but the program closes and everything keeps purring right along. This is the way computers are supposed to work.
iPod - A WOW! I have 4335 songs on my 20 GB iPod now and that took me up to 15.3 GB. I never thought I had that many songs. I am enjoying my music collection much more since making playlists to put all my favorite songs together. I do wish the battery lasted longer...but it gets me through my 8 hour day just fine. The earbuds have got to go...but I find it hard to get the same quality of sound out of regular headphones without turning them way up.
iPhoto - C This application is pretty good for the novice picture taker who doesn't need to edit anything. But for someone like me who wants the flexibility to crop, lighten, darken, add text, and rename my picture files, this program is just a waste. I do use it to import my pictures from my camera and to publish my web page but for other applications I prefer Graphics Converter, which I downloaded for free and might end up paying for.
iTunes - A I LOVE LOVE LOVE this application. Most of it relates to the iPod...but I burned my first mix CD last night and was absolutely blown away when I listened to it. The quality was better than the originals. I do wish it was easier to update the titles when some dummy puts the information in the wrong column...and it might be easy to do this and I just haven't figured it out yet.
iMovie - A I watched a DVD on it and it was exactly what I expected. No real frills...but I don't really want frills either.
iDVD - N/A One complaint I have with this is that without a digital camcorder I cannot really do much with this program. So I really haven't used it.
.mac - B I signed up for the free trial and set up my web page. They need some instruction on this in a very bad way. I fumbled around with iDisk until someone on the users group told me I could publish pages directly from iPhoto. I really enjoyed this feature and use it a lot. But again...where is the documentation???? I will probably end up paying for at least 1 year of this because my family is enjoying watching my house building progress on my webpage. After the house is done, I will probably drop the service.
Free downloads - A This is something that is missing in the Windoze world. If you want me to buy your product, let me try it out and see if it works for me first. If it does, I will pay you for it. If not...into the trash it goes. I have downloaded around 10 applications so far and installed them flawlessly and never had to reboot once.
iCal - A This is a nice program. Basically it is MS Schedule with pretty colors. But it WORKS. What surprised me is that even when I had the program turned off, it still popped up my reminder window to set the trash out Wednesday night. I LOVE IT! But the best part...free download! Thank you Apple for not trying to juice me for more add-ons that should have been included in the original OS. This showed a tremendous amount of class and I truly appreciate it.
Hotkeys - B- I was thrilled to see that they did have hotkeys for the Apple...and I am happy to see that they are intuitive and follow a lot of the standards that Windoze uses. But there is some coding system for some of the keys and I still don't know what they mean. Like the one that looks like a square root sign. Where is that key? there are a couple others I can't remember...but again, no documentation to explain things.
Speed - B At first I thought this machine was pretty slow. I was actually about to complain about it. But then I realized what I was doing. I was running AOL, 3 Explorer Windows, iCal, Itunes (where i was ripping CDs), iPhoto, and Yahoo messenger all at the same time. NO WONDER IT WAS SLOW!!!! My Windoze would have crashed long before I got all this opened up...but not the Mac. I distinctly remember my Windoze machine telling me to close all other programs before burning a CD. What a joke. Thankfully that is behind me now.
Productivity - A WOW! I have no down time. Like I said above, I am able to play on the net, rip or burn CDs, update my calendar, publish webpages, and edit photos all at the same time. And...I NEVER have to reboot! I almost miss the reboots because it used to give me enough downtime for a pee break. Now when nature calls, I view it as lost productivity.
Overall grade - A Switching was the best thing I ever did relating to computers.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1799 Operating System: Macintosh Processor speed: 801-900 RAM: More than 256 Internal Storage: SuperDisk Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.