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The iMac as seen through the eyes of a power user
by Ator

As pretty much everyone knows, the Macintosh is not for the power user.  Certainly, many a respectable geek loves his Mac and will fight to the death to defend its honor, but the Macintosh puts many barriers in the way of the power user: proprietary hardware, weak or nonexistent upgrade paths, and an OS that can't run the latest games.  That having been said, Apple has deliberately attempted to position themselves in direct competition with Pentium II class machines with their "snail" ad, touting the power of their G3 processor.  They clearly want to be seen as powerful.

The latest and most prominent machine to feature this processor is the iMac.  But still, there are much more powerful G3 Macs out there. The iMac is being pushed as a user machine, not a power box.  So why review the iMac from a power user's perspective?  Well, first of all, it sounds like fun.  :-)  But more importantly, Apple has decided to position the iMac as a paradigm-busting machine, "The wave of the future" if you will.  And, yes, there have been some radical decisions made by the iMac design team.  The question is, are they good design decisions.  Will the iMac live up to the hype?  Let the games begin!

The basics

The first thing you need to understand about the iMac is that it is basically a laptop with a really big screen.  The actual pieces that do the work take up a very small portion of the whole body of the iMac.  This means that the Apple engineers had to make laptop-style design decisions: lots of things had to go.  What they chose to keep and what they chose to eliminate is going to make up a good deal of the review.

What they did right:

  • The processor: Okay, the G3 is a sweet piece of machinery.  Even the MacOS was silky smooth running on this puppy.   It's got a great engine under the hood, despite its goofy appearance.

  • Color: Really, it's a small addition, and despite their ad campaigns, I don't think that its color should be a reason to buy a computer, but hey!  The people who made this case were clearly having fun.   Even the power cord is colored!

  • Price: Hey, it's no sub-$1000 compuer, but you do get a better processor than you would in most sub-$1000 computers.   Of course, in order to keep the price low, Apple made some questionable design sacrifices, but we'll get to those later...

  • Full-on USB support: The USB is definitely the wave of the future, and its throughput and daisy-chaining abilities are an important addition when you can't add internal components.

  • Included modem and ethernet:  Kudos to Apple for not forcing people to choose one or the other.  As those of us contemplating home networks know, even apartment living can still benefit from ethernetted computers.

  • Dumping the floppy: Now, Apple has gotten a lot of heat for dumping the floppy, but I don't have any problem with the action in principle.  It's high time we move ourselves away from this pathetically small kind of storage.  Just the other day, I had trouble fitting enough files on a floppy for a networkable DOS boot disk.  I definitely am not sorry to see the floppy go...however...

What they did wrong...