Don't Worry About The Flowers!
Written: Apr 24 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ease of use, OS X Ready, simply a nice computing experience.
Cons: Upgrade limitations, awful speakers, screen size
The Bottom Line: It's a real contender in today's market, priced reasonably and performs well.
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| adicarter's Full Review: Apple iMac Blue Dalmatian 15 in. (M8347LL/A) Mac D... |
The iMac has become something of a revolutionary in terms of personal computing. There's no doubt that it has done a lot to reverse Apple's flagging fortunes and has brought the once ailing company back to relative health in a time when many companies are struggling.
I personally like Mac's, I try not to evangelise them too much. Like PC's they have their pro's and con's but this machine really is the result of the boys and girls at Apple "thinking different" and in a relatively short space of time the iMac has become quite a common site.
So what's the deal with the new iMac?
Well for starters you have a choice of new flavours, sure there has been lots of flak thrown because of the new hippy trippy colour schemes but if you don't like them there's always the more subdued graphite choice.
It's the Graphite choice which we settled on in my workplace when we were upgrading our old and venerable PC which has finally been put out to grass.
We needed a machine with a relatively small footprint, some pretty decent computing power the capacity to burn CD's (back up solution). Also because we were migrating from the PC platform the ability to run PC emulation was also going to be necessary for some of our dedicated apps.
So what did I think?
Out of the box the new iMac looks as sleek and sexy as it ever did. My only previous experience with iMacs was pre slot loading models. The new way to slide the CD's into the machine without an ugly CD drawer sliding out to greet you is a marked improvement.
Our machine was preloaded with OS 9.1, possibly the last step on the Mac OS road before the OS X which we intend to hold off moving up to until the end of the summer.
There was also the usual suspects on the machine Apple's own brand mini office suite Apple Works 6 and a few other little start-up programs as well.
I wasn't too interested in those to be honest, I wanted to see how this machine handled some "real" work.
As a result I loaded the machine up with a real test of it's powers and installed Virtual PC 4. Remember I needed to be able to some of my old PC apps until migration was complete and VPC is as good a test as any.
Before I go any further I must add that before I booted up I had hiked the RAM up to 384 Mb, memory is cheap at the moment and it was within our budget constraints.
Well with all my apps loaded I began working the machine and found it to be pretty stable. The iMac supported an open PC environment with a lot of Office stuff going on while supporting a connection to the Internet via Microsoft IE 5 and a lot of pages open.
I can honestly say the performance was blistering, this kind of work would bring my older Mac at home to it's knees yet the iMac didn't seem to break a sweat. In fact so far even by Mac standards it's being impressively stable.
Using the CD rewriter is a cinch although it has to be said the process isn't the quickest in the world. Burning audio does take time via the iTunes software although it is a small price to pay, let's face it Apple have given the package away for free.
In terms of the hardware that comes with iMac I was again for the most part pretty impressed. The new keyboard is not an immediate winner with me. I'm used to the more "clunky" feel of the old beige Mac keyboard, so the new revised Pro Keyboard that ships with all new Mac's felt a touch "spongy" to me.
However if you persevere you find the level of mistakes you make with it decreases and let's face it, it has to be an improvement on the abysmal keyboard it replaces on the earlier iMacs with their "blink and you'll miss 'em" arrow keys.
Connected to the keyboard is the new Apple Pro Mouse. No more dirty trackball to worry about as this baby is one of the new optical breeds that are appearing on the market. I have to say it's also a vast improvement although it is not perfect.
I had to notice that every now and again the cursor would "leap" if you weren't applying just the right amount of pressure to the mouse itself, the "invisible" button on the top (the top of the mouse itself is pretty much a hinged button so you can click it with more or less any part of your hand) is a masterstroke and after a couple of weeks use this is a mouse I wish I had at home.
So just when you think I am gushing without end about the virtue of this device I get to the point where I find things about it that are not so nice...
...and one of the worst aspects of the machine has to be the speakers. A lot of hype has come from Apple about how wonderful these new Karmann speakers built into the iMac are, what can I say but...
...they are awful.
I know, I know they are only small little things but the sound reproduction is only good for piping out the various system sounds the iMac makes, you try pushing audio out through them at any level and the sound is terrible. No warmth, no depth and absolutely no bass at all. Maybe I'm expecting to much, but at this point I'm just going by what my ears tell me!
Also another point is for the established user, while the iMac is fabulous for beginners and light users, if like me you are used to using a 17' or 19' monitor then screen real estate of the iMac is going to become a little frustrating.
Yep, you can up the screen resolution to give you more room on-screen to play with but I just didn't find the 15' space comfortable after what I am used to.
Still that's a personal gripe I've been working with big screens at home for years. Everyone else in the office seems happy with what the iMac offers in the screen department.
Upgrade options on this machine were always going to be limited. The sheer small size of the machine means no plugging in any extra PCI cards to boost performance. You're stuck with what came in the box, although remember that some of the iMacs now have motherboard replacement options to enable speed boosts, there is no reason why upgrade manufacturers won't pull this trick again in the future.
One of my acid tests of any G3 Macintosh is running SETI@home data on it. It's basically an exercise in crunching data and makes a machine work pretty hard.
This new iMac really does cut the mustard in this department, a block of information is "crunched" in half the time my previous Macs manage meaning this machine makes efficient use of its processor and although we aren't talking the big numbers that Intel are quoting on the new Pentium machines, the iMac is no slouch.
Couple this with the ease of use of the general Macintosh experience and the easy configuration of things like Internet access (something which the iMac is famed for) and you have a nice little machine for the home and small business.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1499
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
Processor speed: 601-700
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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Epinions.com ID:
adicarter
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Member: Adrian Carter
Location: Sheffield, UK
Reviews written: 101
Trusted by: 15 members
About Me:
A lifelong fan of anything electronic. If it goes beep, let me see it first!
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