Fantastic Desktop Computer

I purchased this iMac on the eve of Steve Job's MacWorld Expo keynote speech and received it promptly about 10 days later.

This is my first Apple desktop computer I have owned and I am utterly amazed by it. It starts with unpacking the beautifully packed box and the simple installation. There are really only 3 cables to connect and you are up and running. Power, Keyboard and Mouse. When turning it on for the first time, the computer walks you through a quick setup process where you enter your personal information as well as take a quick picture of yourself (or whatever you want) for your user account. This is particularly neat, since it counts down from 3 seconds and then uses a bright flash of the 20" screen to properly light your face. I must have played with that for 15min alone.

Once it is up and running you have all your great Apple applications to choose from. They are all running natively on the Intel processor and are incredibly quick. I immediately went ahead and loaded up iTunes with about 3GBs of music, and iPhoto with about 2000 photos. Both these task where performed from an external USB 2.0 drive and got done in no time. Now that this data is on the internal harddrive both applications work incredibly fast. Full screen editing and flipping through pictures is a breeze.

Another great aspect of this machine is how quiet it is. I still have my old PC sitting next to it and I catch myself turning that old thing off just to enjoy the peace and quiet of the Mac.

The remote you get with the iMac is a tad small. I have large hands and had to get used to it. The response of FrontRow is very good for the most part. Occasionally, you will have a moment where FrontRow doesn't respond. One has to keep in mind though that what it really does in the background is launch the appropriate application. In fact, when you close FrontRow, and you just listened to an audio file, you will see that iTunes is still running. The same goes for pictures and iPhoto.

The screen is gorgeous. I'm glad I got the 20" version. It will allow me to get some of my design work done without having to move all those windows around.

The computer starts up in roughly 25seconds, which is unheard of. It almost eliminates wanting to put it to sleep since you can start it up so quickly. One thing I did notice however, was a very faint high pitch noise when the computer is shut down. I assume it is the internal power supply, however this might just be an isolated case. Since I keep this computer in my bedroom, I tend to just put it to sleep which eliminates the noise.

As far as software is concerned. As an example, I am running the Adobe Creative Suite 2. It is quick enough to get the job done although I can't wait for the day CS3 as a universal binary is released. If you are a creative professional and this is your main design workstation, I would not recommend the iMac at this time. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and can wait for the tasks to finish and are able to put up with sluggish Photoshop performance, this is not the computer for you.

Fortunately, it is only a matter of time before the most favorite third party mac applications will be available as a universal binary, making this computer even sweeter in the long run since you will see its performance increase over time.

This is a fantastic machine I can recommend without hesitation.