iMac Review

Just for reference, my wife and I purchased our first Apple PC last week. And we've been in bliss ever since. So I can give a little background on the machine that I purchased:
20" screen
Intel Core Duo 2.4 GHz processor
1 GB Ram
320 GB hard drive
Office for Mac 2004 (with a $7 upgrade to 2008 on the way)
Leopard OS (10.5.1)

Since that startup, the machine has been downstairs in what will be its new home. I've yet to purchase the Apple router, but that is on the way. It's connected to my base Linksys SRX200 Wireless G router. I've also hooked up a Western Digital 500GB USB drive to make use of Time Machine which may well be the single greatest home backup software I've ever seen.

The speed is tremendous. Boots up in about 15 seconds overall. Safari as a browser is pretty solid. Heading to pimpmysafari.com offers a slew of different tweaks to it, much like firefox. Only problem is the good ones have to be purchased. I highly recommend the tweaks. As I said, backups happen automatically: Every hour, every day, and every week. And when it's going on, you don't even know it.

My wife, who has never ever gotten into anything techie ever lost herself for 4 hours playing with it. She loved iPhoto, iMovie, the Photo Booth application, etc. She finally realized once what it was like to lose time when you're playing with something cool and fun. I've never seen that before, and it was great.

For a laugh, you know how Microsoft is touting Office 07? Especially from it's Outlook standpoint? Yeah, it's looked that way and been that functional for a Mac since 04. And since it's more running in emulation, it is the slowest app on the machine. Adium is a great replacement for trillian. Growl is an outstanding notification tool. I could go on.

Let's say this is part one. This is a great machine that's so very solid. I couldn't be happier.