Brent Kearney

The sweet new machines from Apple, the Intel “Core-Duo” iMacs, are more than just blazing fast. They are also the easiest to use, best designed personal computers on the market.

That statement sounds like its coming from a raging Mac zealot, but its not. Having made a career in information technology, I have installed and configured thousands of computers of all types over the last 10 years. None have compared to the iMac in terms of ease of use, functionality and well thought-out design. I have so far seen 3 complete novices who were able to take them out of the box, and get online within a few minutes. For people who have little or no computing experience, I couldn’t recommend anything else.

The first thing that people ask when they look at the iMac is, “where is the computer”? The Intel iMac has a profile of only about 5cm wide, making it the thinnest “fat client” I’ve seen. Here is a profile shot comparing the new iMac with a Sun thin-client terminal:

The thin client has no CPU or hard drive in it, but the iMac is a full featured PC packed into a similarly sized casing. Sort of like a laptop, but the iMac offers desktop performance with an SATA hard drive and a ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with 128MB of fast video memory.

The iMac has sufficient ports for most users to attach pretty much any kind of device. On the back you’ll find 3 USB 2.0 ports, (there are 2 USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard), 2 Firewire 400 ports, a gigabit network port, digital audio out and in, and Apple’s freaky video-out port. You can use an adaptor for the video-out port to connect to pretty much any kind of video device: SGVA, RCA, S-Video, DVI, etc..

Other notable features of the hardware include the built-in iSight camera, the new Apple Mighty Mouse, and a tiny remote control for Front Row.

The real treat with these machines though, is the software that they run. I will post a subsequent article on Mac OSX and the little surprises that came with the new Intel Core-Duo iMacs.