The philosophy of iMac

I have always used Mac towers (starting back from the G4 days). It was time for me to upgrade this year and I went to my local Mac store as soon as the new Mac Pros came out.

I have to say I was a little disappointed at the price and what you got for the price. I started looking at the iMac 2.8 extremes and honestly that seemed to be more than enough power for what I do (Graphic design, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). I upgraded to 4GB of Ram and I have to say it is blazing fast.

I also have to say I am 100% in love with the glossy screen. I was a bit worried about it but the colors are so crisp I was shocked.

Bottom line... If you do a lot of video editing, etc. you will most likely be better off with a tower. But for app's like Photoshop, Illustrator, C4D it runs like a dream.

Just put an ExpressCard slot with 16 lanes into the Mac mini. that's allllll we need. Consumers will use it for camera card readers and the rest of us can use breakout boxes to upgrade our graphics. Win-win-win.

If the shoe fits... I loved towers and tweaking. But I live in a shoebox size apartment with a wife and small child. It's tight enough that we can't fit the 'p' in cramped. While a tower setup in the long run makes financial sense (I love my Mac Pro tower, which I recently boosted with three additional 500GB internal hard drives). When you are packed into 400sq. ft., that iMac looks awful space efficient. If Apple could make a tweakable iMac, it would be the holy grail (ok, at least for me).

I've had three iMacs. A version B Bondi Blue, an iMac "lamp" and my 24" white iMac I bought in Nov 2006 (has it been that long already?)

I've also got a G4 800mhz PowerBook.

I started with "PCs" in 1981 with an Atari 400 at tech school.

My first DOS PC that I used was a Compaq Luggable and my first desktop DOS machine was a 286 Olivetti. Actually those were both work computers.

Later in the 80s and in the 90s I custom built over 300 computers for myself and friends. I think about 15 of those were for myself from BIG towers (12 adapter bays!!!) to several regular custom built desktop computers. I had LAN Manager, Novell, IBM OS/2, Linux for server OSs and DOS, Windows 3.1 through '95, OS/2, early Linux as examples but not a complete list of desktop OSs. OS/2 was EASILY, EASILY, EASILY my favorite OS for both server and desktop. I did some very cool things with both that Windows still can't do. But this isn't about that.

I played with every desktop and network OS I could during that time setting them up at home and connecting them all together.

Around 2000 I asked myself what I was getting for all this. Actually quite a bit during most of that time. But eventually I stopped gaming, I got burned out on what I described above with all the OSs and IBM stopped updating OS/2 (it still exists and is updated as eComStation).

iMacs and Mac OS X came along. The first came with OS 9 ... I think. That was good but when OS X 10.2 arrived that was it. That was when I started doing something that shocked my wife to no end.

I stopped playing with my PCs and almost exclusively used my iMac Lamp, for everything at home. And I found that I didn't care if it wasn't easy to upgrade. Everything I needed like more disk space was easy to fix. Just connect a external FireWire drive to it and a USB hub. What else do you need? Nothing.

Note that my wife and I still use our 2000 800mhz G4 iMac every day. It's our main computer in the breakfast area where we check e-mails and do web searches.

In November 2006 I bought my 24" 2.16ghz Core2Duo Intel iMac. I've seriously thought about upgrading the internal HDD just because I take it back and forth to work every day in an iLugger bag. I ended up just taking one of my external FireWire drives with me instead. It still only takes me 2 minutes to set everything up at work with my bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Soon I'm going to get a Mac Mini for work so I don't have to lug my 24" iMac back and forth. I'll just bring an external FireWire or USB 2 drive with me instead (no USB memory card for me).

My job is as a Computer Systems Analyst at work putting band-aids on Windows computers all day. You don't every really "fix" a Windows computer because you know it is going to break down eventually.

I've never had to reformat my 2000 iMac's hard drive or defrag it or do anything to is except use it.

I don't need towers or custom built PCs anymore. The games I would like to play are 3D first person games but most of them aren't very fun. Besides, I can buy a PS3 (no lamebox 360s here) for that.

The original Macintosh concept was an appliance computer, an all-in-one. At that time, there was an Apple Computer, too. The Apple Computer was originally designed for computer enthusiasts; the Macintosh was for people that just wanted to get work done.

Problem is, Apple no longer produces an Apple Computer. I often wonder why that is. Here are some of my speculations.

1) An Apple computer running the Mac OS is going to be called a Mac in the media, no matter what Apple calls it.

2) The Macintosh metaphor is external peripherals. This works for everything but graphics.

3) The successor to the Apple Computer might have been the Newton eMate, but it wasn't a big hit. It might have been the Mac CI, which was a hit but but not a smash hit.

4) The Mac future is in portables. The original Macintosh had a handle (even the current Mac Pro has handles :lol:).

5) Maybe the iPhone will evolve into the new Apple Computer. I think Apple pointed the way with the Nike+ iPod interface. The iPod Touch is another candidate. All it would take is one "killer app". I can see the Touch as being the enthusiast testbed for the iPhone, as I imagine that telcos don't like the the ideas of people experimenting on their networks. A Touch with wireless USB or high bandwidth Bluetooth could ... (google "wearable computers" if you want to know more).

I like my iMac. I enjoy playing with computer equipment. However, I have reached the point where doing so 'just because', i.e for my own personal amusement, is just not fun any more. If I was paid to play with it, that would be a different story.

When I come home to my iMac, I just want to use my computer to waste time or work on projects, not constantly fiddle around and customize it.

I have never been the tinkering type, at least in a physical way with my computer so I guess when I switched to the iMac it was really a non issue for me. I did upgrade the ram from 1GB to 4 GB (I have the iMac 24" aluminum body, I got it in November so not the most recent update). and really i couldn't be happier and I do love the screen. The colors are great and I enjoy using it every day. Why tinker when you can get stuff done? If I wanted to tinker I'd get a tower but I love doing what I intend to do with no fuss!

I have never been the tinkering type, at least in a physical way with my computer so I guess when I switched to the iMac it was really a non issue for me. I did upgrade the ram from 1GB to 4 GB (I have the iMac 24" aluminum body, I got it in November so not the most recent update). and really i couldn't be happier and I do love the screen. The colors are great and I enjoy using it every day. Why tinker when you can get stuff done? If I wanted to tinker I'd get a tower but I love doing what I intend to do with no fuss!

I don't need a "tower".. Upgrade the Mini all f'ing ready!!! Give me the guts of the IMac head-less for $1K.. I don't need the monitor, & I don't need 8 cores (I'll take a Quad Core though)

We have 3 working iMacs in our house, along with a G3 iMac that's in pieces. Personally, I think they are great. Easy to setup, move around, and I haven't had much issue with lack of expandability. Memory upgrades are easy, hard drive upgrades doable, and the 20" and 24" models have big enough screens that I don't really care to upgrade the screens. Plus you can always do dual monitors -- though, I do have to say that I wouldn't mind a monitor that matched the iMac better at a cheaper price than the current lineup of Apple monitors...

I also own a PowerMac G5, but to be honest, the only thing that I had in it that I couldn't do with a current iMac is that I had two internal drives. I could certainly deal with an external drive at this point instead of two internals...

Considering the price of the iMacs vs the price of the Mac Pros, I'll be upgrading my PMG5 to a iMac at somepoint in the future. The low end Mac Pro is $600 more than the high end iMac, and the iMac is plenty powerful for even my needs :)