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| Saturday, September 18, 2004 |
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Apple’s GenNext iMac here to stay
NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 17: Welcome to ‘‘Name That Apple!’’ For 100 points — It’s a compact rectangular slab that plays great-sounding music from a built-in hard drive. The front is shiny white acrylic with a screen at the top. The corners and edges of the back panel are gently rounded. Name that Apple!
Bzzzzzt! No, I’m sorry, ‘‘iPod’’ is not the answer we were looking for. The correct answer is: ‘‘the new iMac G5’’.
Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, has made the new iMac look a lot like his iPod design. The new desktop computer was clearly designed to send a message to the world’s four million iPod fans: ‘‘If you think our music player is great, you should check out our computers’’.
The most striking aspect of the new iMac, which is trickling into stores this week, is that its guts are completely concealed inside the tilting 17- or 20-inch flat screen. Only a thin anodized aluminium foot touches your desk. The overall effect is very attractive.
Nonetheless, the new design isn’t nearly as radical a breakthrough as the first iMac (that translucent, colorful, all-in-one egg) or the second one (floating screen, white dome-shaped base).
Apple’s chief, Steve Jobs, has gone on record as loathing the noise made by computer fans. Considering the heat generated by its 1.6- or 1.8-gigahertz G5 processor, the iMac’s silence is quite an achievement.
Truth is, Apple really muffed only one detail: even the top-of-the-line model comes with only 256 megabytes of memory. That’s typical for consumer computers these days, but on a creative powerhouse like the Macintosh, it’s not enough.
Programmes like Apple’s creative suite (iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, GarageBand and so on, all included) and Adobe Photoshop can run in 256 megs, but only barely; programmes like Microsoft’s new Virtual PC 7, which lets most Windows programs run on the Mac, don’t open at all. In all cases, you’re missing out on the speed potential of the iMac’s G5 chip.
If you intend to buy this computer, therefore, consider an upgrade to at least 512 megabytes a nonnegotiable extra ($75 installed by Apple, $50 to do it yourself).
If Apple succeeds in luring iPod fans into the cult of Mac, the feature that will ultimately make them happiest has nothing to do with quiet fans or thin power cords. In the long run, they’ll benefit most from the iMac’s stealth feature: Mac OS X. Not only is this operating system rock-solid and, for a first-timer, much easier to understand than Windows, so far it’s also 100 per cent free from viruses, spyware and all the grief that comes with them.
Apple’s slogan for the new iMac is ‘‘From the creators of the iPod’’. From a certain perspective, it’s a little depressing that this is how Apple chooses to bill itself, but on the other hand, the marketers have a valid point — anyone who’s captivated by the iPod should try a Macintosh.
The iMac models’ prices range from $1,300 (17-inch screen, 80-gigabyte hard drive) to $1,900 (20-inch screen, DVD burner, faster chip, 160-gig drive). That’s less expensive than comparably equipped guts-behind-screen PC’s like the Gateway Profile 5 (which costs $125 more). Sony’s V310P costs $50 less than the G5, but has only a 15-inch screen.
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| posted by Perimbean @ 7:00 AM |
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