The iMac has landed!

Welcome to planet Apple, the iMac has landed!

A spanking 20″ iMac, 2.4 GHz, 320MB HDD machine was delivered by a very nice man in a brown UPS uniform yesterday lunchtime. Just the activity of unpacking and setting up was an indulgent experience, the way in which these machines are packaged sets them apart from the vast majority of other computer manufacturers. Everything, even down to the cardboard and plastic packaging has been considered from a design perspective to look good whilst still fulfilling the required function.

This was only ordered on Tuesday lunchtime and was delivered less than 24 hours later. That’s impressive. I am sure this wouldn’t have been the case had any modifications from standard specification been required. In the short-term, the only upgraded required are memory and an external hard-disk (for backup purposes). However as Apple themselves charge an exhorbitant amount for memory, this has been purchased from Crucial.

Whilst I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, I have been extremely impressed so far. The screen makes everything look good, even the mediocre content! Prior to ordering I was very tempted to purchase some external speakers, however I’m glad I decided not to order immediately as the internal speakers are suprisingly good and more than adequate for my purposes.

This was delivered pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) which I was somewhat suprised about. It did however ship with a Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) DVD in the box which I immediately upgraded to after completing the initial setup for Tiger. I also checked for and and installed all software updates prior to doing anything else significant.

As this is a desktop machine, I opted for the standard wired keyboard and mouse which I am impressed with so far. The new ultra-thin keyboard is suprisingly nice to type on, the only thing which took me by suprise was the position of the ‘@’ sign which occupies the same key as the ‘2′. I’m not sure whether this belies the american focus of Apple or whether this is a Mac specific trait.

Had a quick play with the Front Row software and first impressions are it is very good. How much it will be used on this machine, only time will tell. From what I saw I can imagine how this would be used via the Apple iTV device on a big-screen TV.

Impending iMac – come in planet Apple, do you read me?

I have been lusting agonising for a while over an Apple iMac as a replacement desktop computer for home. The last time a new computer was purchased in our household was 1998 (Pentium-II, 266Mhz) and we have managed on that and subsequently a second-hand (Pentium-III, 800MHz) Dell Optiplex which was purchased for £10, for the last 9 years. The Dell which is used as the main desktop is dual-booting between Windows XP and Debian GNU/Linux and is still used on a daily basis for all manner of tasks.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t cut it any more for anything which requires a serious amount of horsepower and as I now want to dabble with video editing etc. the time has come to take the plunge. In actual fact the time came about a year ago but as I had been tracking the developments in the iMac camp, and was aware of the ‘impending’ new hardware in the pipline and the new version of Mac OS X (Leopard), I was happy to delay until both of these had been released.

My rationale behind the decision to move to Apple was based primarily on a couple of factors, the first being that they are designed to work together as a cohesive whole, as opposed to a collection of discrete parts. Secondly as mentioned above I generally favour Linux due to the open-source nature and the ability to use a decent command line environment. I also like the separation between kernel space and user space processes which is something which just doesn’t happen under Windows. However I also have others within my family to consider and they tend to use Windows XP. I am therefore hoping that the introduction of Mac OS X will bring something that will satisfy both camps, the simplicity of something which just works and gives an enjoyable and useful windowing environment with the power and elegance of a Unix-based core under the covers.

Based on all this I am therefore on the cusp of ordering a new aluminium iMac Core 2 Duo. Whilst I initially favoured the 24″ when the new prices were announced, I have accepted that this is just too big for the environment into which it is to reside and am happy to compromise for the 20″ model, I will however go for the better of the two 20″ models which comes with 2.4GHz processor, 320GB HDD and 256 MB ATI Radeon 2600 Pro graphics card. At this stage the only upgrade I am planning to do is to bump the memory up to 2GB.