I recently purchased a new iMac from Apple computers with a 24″ screen. I hoped it would be good and it is; it’s really good.
Rated as /5 on May 16 2007 by Jonathan Brazil
Some weeks ago I finally splashed out on a new iMac from Apple. After plenty of deliberation I managed to persuade myself to go for the 24″ model rather than its smaller 20″ and 17″ cousins. I went for the real estate on the screen instead of upgrading items such as a graphics card, hard drive, as I thought it was a better investment of my cash. The base system comes with a 250GB drive anyhow so anything outside of that should really be heading for third party NAS or USB connected device. Unless that is of course that you do a serious amount of video editing. I also went for the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse option for no other reason than I thought it looked cool to have no cables other than a power lead. 🙂
I also went for the 2.16 Core 2 Duo processor rather than spending several hundred extra on the 2.33 for the sake of a couple of clock ticks. To be honest I don’t think I would even notice the difference. I have 2GB of RAM in the machine and it runs very smoothly indeed. Applications like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD all run much smoother than they did on the old G4 hardware as much as I still pine for the glory days. Even Aperture with all of its resource hogging runs quite smoothly for processing RAW images from my Canon EOS. It did take Aperture quite some time to create all the thumbnails and finish processing the 10s of GB of photos that I have on my NAS drive. Looks wise, the iMac is truly an archetype of beauty in terms of computers. The screen simply blows me away – it’s a little too bright on the default setting but you can adjust this in the system properties. The built-in Bluetooth and WiFi options come as standard and are very welcome as I’m sure that the iMac will at some stage in its life be carted about the house as an entertainment unit. The built-in speakers and more powerful amp that only comes with the 24″ model are decent enough but you’ll never beat the quality of external speakers for a computer. Overall I have no regrets with my purchase, a slight curiousity as to what 3GB of RAM would do for me but no real desire to change anything. Do yourself a favour and buy one! 🙂