I was thinking I'd stay out of this, but it's a slow afternoon. I'm a switcher (2 years in the Mac world, if you don't count an SE30 my child used back in the 90s). I'm not going back...I'm quite happy, but some of this fanboi stuff is too much. Here's my experience:
G4 mini Dec 05. Pretty wimpy machine in many ways, but got the job done (if slowly).
Mac Pro Oct 06. No big problems, but unreliable sleep, fan noise on awakening when it deigns to awake, 2nd DVD drive that opens randomly or when I ask for the first one to open. I like it just fine anyway.
Macbook Pro 15" August 06. Fan noise, requiring trip to Apple store. Display backlighting just uneven and dim now. Hard drive died; I replaced it without difficulty. Its surfaces have not worn well at all. Trackpad unreliable. This one has been a troublesome machine and is now relegated to being the XP machine for when I need one.
Macbook Pro 15" March 08. Happy as can be, with no problems at all.
Macbook Pro 17" March 08, the same. Very nice machine. Great display (optional hi-res but not glossy).
20" Cinema Display, Dec 06. Nice, but not that nice. The awkward power brick (and those silly ports) is what lets you have that thin display. My 2004 23" Sony P234 is a better display, I think, but whenever we get new ACDs I'm sure they will be much, much better than the Sony. When the 17" is side by side with the Sony, the difference is striking.
But note that the two new MBPs aren't even 6 months old yet. We'll see how well they age.
My son had a dual proc G5, which is now mine. Lots of headaches at first (actually had a bad CPU, the first time I've ever heard of that, and I've been computing since 1981) but stabilized eventually.
Yeah, the designs are nice. As far as taste goes, though, I don't like the Mac Pro case much, visually. Functionally, it's excellent. Inside, the layout is superb. And it's the quietest tower I've ever had, which means a lot to me.
Fast startup is a huge plus for me.
Not having to have anti-this and that, another plus, but not so much for the expense as for the bother of keeping them updated.
I don't like the way Finder works, and although basic networking is good, using my NAS is not always smooth.
Time Machine is nice mostly because it's convenient (and 10.5.4 seems to have fixed the failed backup problem). It's a nice implementation of what, differential backup? I don't like that Apple wants us to believe that they invented this kind of backup, when all they did was wrap a nice UI around it (and it is nice...I do like it).
Mostly what I don't like about Apple is the lack of choice. It's their way or go somewhere else. I've stayed and don't intend to leave the Mac camp, but it's annoying.
Now what was the OP's question? Oh, iMac. If you want that form factor, it can't be beat. If you like the 24" glossy...great. If not...oops! No 24" iMac for you! My son has a 24" glossy and it's a very nice screen. He's a professional video editor in NYC and does some work at home on the iMac from time to time. He says it handles it nicely (Avid / FCP).
I built probably two dozen PCs when I was using them -- everything from simple ones to dual Xeons. They all did their jobs well and most of them are still out there working for other people who just want a machine that works for them. I do keep trying to get them to switch, because as time goes on I remember fewer and fewer of the XP tricks and sometimes I have to think for a while when I open a case, so I'd like to get them on Macs, to make my life easier. My friends call me the Mac Pimp, but it's self-preservation more than anything else.
I had a bunch of Dell laptops over the years and they were all OK, but none of them were more than OK. They did their jobs without any fuss, but I never bonded with them the way I've bonded with the 17" MBP.
Finally, you want examples of amazing design and durability? Look at the older DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) machines. I cut my computing teeth on PDP-11s and then moved on to VAXes and AlphaServers. I had a microVAX that I used for 5 years and moved more than 300 times, in cars and vans; I used it outside, in tents, in the open, inside, hot, cold, you name it, and it was up 24/7 except when being transported. I had zero hardware failures. I had zero system crashes (VMS). In fact, after the VAX, the only hardware failures I ever had over the next 11 years, in the various AlphaServers, were a memory stick, a CD drive, a bad SCSI drive, and I had to replace one power supply. These, again, were 24/7 move-them-around machines. I had 64 bits on the desktop long before the G5s came out. I never, no not ever, had a VMS crash except for the time that the memory stick went out. Not once! Got that MicroVAX in 1990, so that's 16 years, onsite and 24/7 without a crash (I shut down the business in 2006). VMS didn't have much of a GUI, though, I'll grant that. But it did have X, and X-terminals and X-terminal emulators could do some nice stuff. (Oh, you thought X was an Apple product?) But for getting my real-time job done the DEC/Compaq machines were absolutely unbeatable.
). If you have a real reason to need the power, whether it is gaming, video encoding, mass amounts of storage or whatever else you do, the iMac is really a pretty stupid choice.
question!