Beauty with brains, Mac style

It’s time to take the iMac more seriously

Well, I may sound like a bore with my newly-found love for Apple machines, but trust me, I have never actually felt this way about technology before. Problems with Windows Vista have had a lot of people look at Linux and Mac, and the Mac adoption rate in India is at a high now. Though the iMAC has been available for quite some time, i thought this is the best time to review iMac as a desktop for your home or office.
The first thing that strikes you is the clean lines and the lack of a tangle of cables — the machine just has one power cable, a cable to your keyboard, and one from the keyboard to the mouse. The other thing that hits you is that there is no CPU box, and wow, isn’t that screen big.

Setting the standards for elegance and simplicity, the all-in-one iMac packs all its components — from processor to video camera — into a thin anodized aluminum frame. Though this makes the machine heavy, its 20” / 24” display sizes make it an awesome experience to work on. The glossy widescreen delivers incredibly rich and vivid colour. The sound quality is wonderful—if you listen to music on this machine, you can make sense of what Surround Sound actually is. The screen is bright, and graphics responsive.

The built-in webcam is great, but night picture quality is not all that good. But, why would you want to do a video conference from a dark room. The performance of the machine meets all expectations. With the fast Core 2 Duo processors, and the Agile Mac OS X, the machine works beautifully. However, you will have to take the machine to the store to upgrade the RAM.

The built-in wireless is great, and very receptive to the signals. It was able to connect to all five wireless devices in my home. I have a large compound and my other laptops/desktops can find only two in any room. The bundled Apple Remote lets you remotely play music, movies, forward, rewind, almost everything you’d like to do with a home entertainment system. Like most of the other devices from Apple, it’s so sleek you can’t even see the screws.

But did I like everything? Well, not really.

I hate the material that Apple uses for its keyboards on the iMac and the Mac Book, the keys tend to get dirty too fast, and you can’t really clean them. The mouse is very nice, but getting used to its interface maybe a problem for some people. If you can, spend an additional Rs 6,000 to buy the S530 Logitech Desktop Wireless Set for the Mac—the mouse and keyboard are nicely built, it also helps clean up two more wires, leaving you with just a power cord.

My nephew, who is used to the glowing Apple logo on my Apple laptops, wanted me to light up the logo on the iMac, but sadly this one does not glow. The slimline DVD drive built into the monitor is placed high up, making inserting and taking out discs easy. Only if Apple had built in a video-in / TV-in option, I could replace my TV with this entertainment centre.

So if you need a new PC at home, or are thinking of changing your PC, it’s time you looked at iMAC. The Mac, is not about learning something new, it’s about unlearning, forgeting how you worked with PCs all these years. Give it a shot, and trust me, you will be surprised, and shocked that you did not switch over earlier.

PS: If you don’t want to change to a Mac, and are happy using Windows, watch this space for a review of HP Smart Touch PC next week.

Specifications
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 to Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8
RAM: 1 GB to 2 GB
Hard disk: 250 GB to 320 GB
Screen size: 20” to 24”
Warranty: 1 year, extendable to 3 years at extra cost
Price bracket: Rs 56,600-83,500
Ports: Mic-in / headphones out / DVI-out / Ethernet / 2 Fireware and 3 USBs (all behind the monitor)
In the package: Keyboard, mouse, Apple remote, DVDs and documentation

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The Above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday August 17th, 2008