visual cortex flirting with your imagination

apple imac i7 27inch review

click on image for imac at apple.com

the impressions i had for mac is always "i could not afford one because its pricey and most of the applications i use will not be available on mac". i think about a year ago (or more), the pricing for mac's product range became much more affordable. i finally took the plunge and bought one when one of my hard disk's died and my lcd monitor had random flickering issues on my PC. i ordered an imac 27inch with an upgrade of the processor to an i7 (the upgrade path price for was too good to be missed). click on the image above for technical specs of the imac. however, i was worried about the current issues apple was having with its imacs - documented here. the wait for delivery took about a month+

when the day came for me to collect my imac, i anticipated its gonna take a while for me to setup and check on stuffs. its lasted 20mins - 5 mins for the guy to help me set the imac (with just a couple of clicks) and the remaining 15mins was to check for the problems they had for the imac - cracked lcd screen and yellow banding (i was lucky my imac was ok) - you can do the test here. therefore, by right the total time one will spend when you take delivery (minus any checks for imacs plus time to pay for it) should be less than 10mins. when i got home, with the help of a mac guru friend, i was up and running within 45 mins, boot time is less than 20seconds. my imac have 2 wires - one for the power and the other for my wacom tablet. the last time i check, my PC have at least 5 wires. FML.

from a usability point of view, to me, the experience of using a mac is second to none although the first few days may be a bit weird for you if you are a long time PC user. current mac osx, snow leopard, supports gamma 2.2 by default (less trouble for me in colour issues across the board). all native applications are 64bits. a timely transition from a PC to Mac for me.

my mac guru friend was giving me "i told you so!" look, i was cursing while mumbling "i should have bought this ages ago!". naturally, nothing is perfect - the imac do have some quirky behaviour to it (to me). wireless keyboard - how i wish it is a full size ISO compliant keyboard, its keypad repeat rate - even though its bumped up, its slow to catch up on how i type. magic mouse - nice features, but short battery life. apps crashes randomly especialy  adobe photoshop CS4 but lesser now after its 10.6.3 mac OSX update.

overall, in my opinion, the new apple imac range, if its within your reach, you might want to consider to purchase one.