My lovely flat shiny iMac (Apple iMac MA456B/A)

Member Name: mchitty

Product:	Apple iMac MA456B/A
Date:	02/11/08 (210 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great features out of the box, runs smoothly, looks great

Disadvantages: Not great for gaming

I've had my 24" iMac for over a year now, and it's served me well. In the past 13 months I've used it every day to do a whole range of things, from Word Processing to editing home movies to gaming. It's great.

Out of the box, my iMac came installed with Tiger, however it also came packaged with a disk for Leopard, the latest verson of OSX (the Mac operating system - they're all named after big cats). Leopard comes complete with the latest iLife suite. iLife includes a range of great software that basically means that out of the box, the Mac is 100% ready to act as a movie editing studio with the excellent and intuitive iMovie software, or as a recording studio with Garage Band. What I love about these packages is that not only are they incredibly easy to use, but they're also surprisingly powerful.

One of the great things about the Mac is how smoothly and quickly everything seems to work. Click on Safari, the internet browser, and it pops up in an instant. No hourglass, no wait, no sluggishness. After a year of heavy use and downloading, it still works great, without any sort of defragmenting / clearing up.

The Mac very rarely crashes, and when it does, it's usually just one programme, and it always manages to get itself back on its feet again very quickly. I never feel like I have to worry that my Mac is just going to stop working one day (like the three PCs I have owned did!)

The 24" screen is really good, both for watching movies and for gaming. It's also handy for image editing / other creative jobs, as you can quite easily place different toolbars in different areas of the screen to keep things tidy. The 'Spaces' feature of Leopard means that you effectively have four different sections of desktop. These can be scrolled through with a quick keypress, and this feature is absolutely invaluable when working with multiple programs at once.

The iMac has an iSight webcam built in to it. This is a nice touch, whether you want to take photos, video chat using iChat or import your videos into iMovie to make a quick home movie.

The big draw of the iMac for me when I first got it was the aesthetic appeal. It really is a beautiful machine, and takes up minimal desk space. On my glass desk at home, it really does look the business. The mouse and keyboard are similarly compact. The keyboard especially, is less than a centimetre thin, and the keys are flat and have a great feel and response. Similarly, the Mac operating system also looks great, full of nice touches like 'Coverflow', which allows you to scroll through a directory of documents whilst being able to see each individual document represented on the screen.

One downside of the Mac is the gaming capabilities of the system. For the past year I have regularly played World of Warcraft on my Mac, and it runs and looks great. However it is quite an old game, and newer games - few of which are compatible with the Mac - do not fare so well. So if you intend to use your Mac for gaming, although for certain games it is totally fine, you'd probably be better off with a powerhouse PC.

For creative tasks however, or even just general work based tasks, the Mac absolutely shines. It's a beautiful machine with great functionality - I love my Mac and I would recommend it wholeheartedly!

Summary: This machine is a piece of art!

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Features: