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.