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iMac all over again |
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 FTLComm - Tisdale - August 31, 2004 I began selling Apple Macintosh computers in 1995. Though they were cripples compared to what computers are today they were substantially superior in every way to non-Apple computers. But, in 1998 we had a look at the first Internet Macintosh, the iMac. We sold many of those neat little beasts and all are still running nicely today most are upgraded with memory and hard drives but they run the newest UNIX based OS X released this year so that their owners will not part with them and they keep right on doing their job as they have throughout their long life. The first series actually when through a number of subtle changes dropping |
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 its CD tray for a simpler slot design and a series of performance upgrades
that topped out at around 500Mhz with a G3 processor.The second version of the iMac was more expensive because of its beautiful thin flat LCD sreen that floated on a post atop the ten inch round base. Owners of these machines truly love them but when they moved from the older designed iMac most hung onto them anyway. Early this year Apple moved from the Motorola/IBM G4 processor to the IBM G5 which is really a powerful processor without the heat that is so much a part of computing in other computer systems. This morning Apple released the new iMac that has its curcuit board, hard drive, CD/DVD drive all tucked into the flat screen monitor. The speaker system, microphone, modem and connections are all included and built in. |
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 Like iMacs before it there is no software to buy as the basic machine comes with iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garageband, AppleWorks, Quicken 2004, World Book 2004, some games and demo software. The UNIX based Mac OS X, version 10.3 Panther includes the 9.2 system, system based mail, chat, browser, search, address book, QuickTime, iSync and iCal software. |
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 The peripherial connections are in the back of the monitor. Headphone,
audio in, optical digital audio output, audio in, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet, telephone
plug, two FireWire 400 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, two USB 1.1 ports (on keyboard),
VGA output, S-video and composite video outputs.The base 17 inch model is $1749 Canadian and includes the 1.6Ghz G5 processor with its 533MHz bus, with 256MB of RAM but supports 2GB, an 80GB 7200 rpm hard drive, a slot loaded DVD-ROM/CD-RW with its active-matrix LCD 1440 x 900 pixel screen with millions of colours. You can add memory to the machine and the most common accessory would be a wireless network card (Airport) and a Bluetooth adapter. Like all iMacs when you take it out of the box and plug it in it will |
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 immediately connect to the network and upgrade its operating system. If you have other computers there is no need for routers and that sort of wire based equipment. The Airport Express does the job with the addition of Airport or compatible cards to produce a wireless network with computers or with your iPod. Though substantially more money than a Windows based computer system the iMac has proved to be extremely durable. People who bought their 1996 iMacs from us are still using them with this year's software and their friends who bought Windows machine have already gone through three computers since then so the iMac turns out to be by far the most economical despite its higher initial cost. One other factor that is important to note and that is that the Macintosh operating system is revised about four times a year. My machine checks for upgrades once a week and keeps itself ever current. We have noticed that Windows computers are rarely upgraded from one generation of software to another simply because it is costly and very time consuming where as almost all Macintosh users upgrade within a half year of the release of newer systems. |
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