I figured I'd save the giddy "OMG I JUST GOT MEH IMAC!" and "unboxing" pictures for only myself, rather, post what I thought of my new mac, coming from using a pc since i could look high enough to see the CRT (there was a brief stint in elementary school (720 days) where I used gen I iMacs). I gained interest in Macs again about the time the 1ghz ibook was released. We got my grandmother a mac mini, but never had I (or and of my family) owned a mac. I took the plunge, and after the amount of time I spent here and on apple.com and a quick run a while back on a hackintosh, I didn't really have any problems.
1) Only three usb ports. I know this is a space thing, and mac users have wireless everything, but I was used to my 12 powered ports on my self built tower. Nothing getting a hub can't fix.
2) If you are in a less than bright room, the screen does get a little obnoxious on full brightness, that is a good thing I guess, but if I'm watching a movie in the dark, brightness is at half
Usability
-Being a geek, coming from windows, this wasn't too hard to figure out. For instance, I already knew I didn't love Safari, as I didn't like the interface in windows. One thing that blew me away was the fact that unlike in windows, where you would have to have another moused hooked up first, the mac asked me to insert the batteries into my mighty mouse and turn it on before the initial boot. It also sent the audio from the intro video through my digital output without any fuss. Coming from windows, this is a pretty substantial step. The main reason I stayed away from bluetooth interface devices before. I plugged in my ethernet cable upon first boot and I did a system update, however, did not prompt for the 1.1 update, and hasn't yet, so one has to assume it has already been updated. That having been said, I have only crashed it once, and it was primarily my fault. One should not open VMware fusion (which, due to the fact that I was in bootcamp just minutes ago, opened the window at 1680x1050), and have iPhoto importing 3k RAW shots from an external drive on only 1 gig of ram. I even tried opening two calculators in dashboard, it didn't crash, and from what I can tell, there is no bottom third yellowing. On the note of only 1 gig of ram, while I am going to be upgrading, the system is not at all impossible to use with that amount of ram. In fact, I can have 5 widgets in dashboard, have mail, firefox, iChat, address book, iTunes (importing), iPhoto (importing), iMovie (importing), iCal, VLC (running in background), Pages, Numbers, and Last.fm running all at once, and the only time it slowed down to a crawl (if only for 3-5 seconds) was when I opened system prefrences.Defects
- In this region, I could only find two, which coming from a pc are understandable. 1) Only three usb ports. I know this is a space thing, and mac users have wireless everything, but I was used to my 12 powered ports on my self built tower. Nothing getting a hub can't fix.
2) If you are in a less than bright room, the screen does get a little obnoxious on full brightness, that is a good thing I guess, but if I'm watching a movie in the dark, brightness is at half
Gaming
-This aspect was important to me, as the tower I came from was built solely for this purpose. Installing boot camp was fairly simple, however did bring up the bluetooth issue I mentioned with the mouse. Also, it didn't install the audio driver properly (I just went to the ! device in device manager, and pointed it to the bootcamp disc), but it is still a beta and it can be fixed. Also, performance (even with only a gig of ram and the bootcamp video drivers) HL2: Ep2 runs perfectly at 1680x1050, all settings maxed, hdr and antialiasing. GTlegends also at the same settings runs perfectly unless there is A) alot of smoke or B) more than 5 cars visible at once. There is only one issue with that game, which is, the cockpit view button is "INSERT", which is where the "FN" key is on the new keyboard, but a push doesn't get you there. I can't find anyway to make cockpit view toggle a seperate button. conlcusion
-I bought now due to the fact that I needed a machine for school, and couldn't wait for leopard. I will be buying it when it finally comes though. All in all, it is a fantastic machine that makes zero noise, doesn't heat up my room, and has all the performance to play any game (atm). The screen looks so much better than my 4 year old samsung 19inch panel, and while it might not be aas good as the S-IPS panel in the 24 inch, this thing does make the DSLR shots look a helluva lot better (even if it does boost colors artificially due to glossiness). I will be keeping this machine a long time...It's the begining of a new era of black apples......
