How do you make Earth’s best computer even more appealing? Apple knows: jack up the spec with Intel’s latest, blisteringly fast dual core processors, give it an anodized aluminium frame, and reduce the price! Well, that’s what it’s done with the iMac anyway.
Admittedly we’d have liked to have seen a Blu-ray drive at this price, and we resent having to shell out an extra £60 to get a 640GB hard drive (don’t even get us started on the 1TB’s £140 outlay). However, the 1680×1050-pixel display, which comes in 24 inches, looks absolutely stunning.
And while we’re on the looks, the whole shebang is one sexy package. The brushed aluminium, glass and black chassis is complemented by the impossibly thin new keyboard, which is a slither of slimline sexiness.
Spec-wise the 20-inch iMac comes with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 mobile processor, with 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM (which can also be doubled, but that’ll cost an extra £80). The rest of the spec hasn’t really changed that much from previous models. The biggest improvement being the iMac’s new 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor. 802.11n gives you roughly twice the range and between two and three times as much practical data bandwidth as the older 802.11a, b or g standards.
In use the Leopard operating system wipes the floor with Vista and iLife ’09 Suite makes it an absolute joy to manage your tunes, pics, movies and more. Meanwhile that Intel processor works overtime to make sure the iMac is on a level playing field with its PC counterparts. That said you can forget about using this for games. The ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics chip is good, but still not for hardcore gamers, struggling with 3D graphics.
Other than those minor gripes we can safely say that this is Apple’s greatest ever desktop. You might even say it’s the iMac daddy.
