I was a long time supporter of all things PC and by this I mean Windows, Linux, Build it yourself desktop machine and so forth – Apple were (and still are) expensive for what you actually get considering now they use the same hardware as a desktop PC. What you may also have noticed was  wrote about and Owned a top of the range iMac – so how come this post? Let me explain all.

My Nephew has been an apple fan for many years and no amount of showing and telling me how good they were would get me to part money buying one. He spotted on the Apple refurb store a top of the line 24” iMac 2.8GHz and bought it online for one of his children but for one reason or another he changed his mind of her having this item and instead of cancelling the order – he diverted this machine to my house and then emailed me telling me what had happened.

On the said email though in very small red writing – he made mention of me maybe paying him back one day, I had no requested this machine, had no plans to buy this machine – so why should I feel I should have to pay him back? Was this not a present as he mentioned in various other conversations? Time moved on and depending on his financial situation – this machine was either a present or on loan until I paid him money. I was not happy about this and told him that it was his and if he wants it back – take it, I would rather spend the money on a top end PC.

18 Months passed, I had already chucked the boxes out by now and due to the fact it had the biggest screen, fastest CPU and so forth – it became my main machine. He finished his current contract and was broke – so much so that he had to ask for this back or I pay him – whichever. Now I had a quick think about this (ignoring the fact about him needing money fast) and should I invest £800 – £1000 on this iMac or should I let him sell it, get whatever he can get and spend my money on top end PC Hardware?

To give an example – On Dell Refurb Site they had the Core i7 2.66GHz Quad Core Machine, 6 GIG ram, 750HD for about £550 (give or take) with a half decent graphics card – far in excess of either what I have now or what is included in the Mac (ATI 2600) – add to that a 24” Monitor which comes in at £150 let us say (also from Dell) and we have £700. Operating systems aside – you can see that the Dell machine will blow the Apple away and can be upgraded later on. Yes the iMac is good as its all-in-one but that is also its main problem.

To round up them – I am now a Vista / Windows 7 Person back to playing my games, writing this in fact on Live Writer and I personally cannot see myself buying a Mac of any type – who has £4500 for a Mac Pro anyhow?

REPLACE FILES

Let us imagine that I am moving some files around from drive to drive and a make a directory called Home_Movies. I start by moving some files but later choose the much quicker method of dragging the original “Home_Movies” onto the new drive. OS X at this point explains that there is already files in there as follows:

If you click STOP – nothing happens but if you click Replace – that is 100% what it does – it replaces whatever whatever was in there with the folder you are moving and the stuff that was already in there? Well that is gone for good, it is not in the recycle bin. Windows / Linux by default MERGES the files which makes more sense to me. B very careful of this feature otherwise you will loose a lot of files in the process.

IMPORT = REPLACE?

One of the programs I use is Wallet – it stores all your Serial numbers, login details and basically allows you to manage all your stuff in one place. I had another Wallet database file and silly me IMPORTED this into mine which resulted in mine been 100% replaced. Did the programmers not see fit to merge more than one database together? I can tell you now the windows version does import and merges the two – is this a new feature of the Mac?

iWeb – No Save, open or anything

iWeb is easy for the beginner to design web sites but did they not feel to Import, Open or whatever existing sites? What happens if you loose the file – if it goes from the side bar – that is your web site gone for good. Even Frontpage has all of these features and I see that as a very low level beginners program. This is a case of “My way or bust” attitude from the Mac programmers – very sloppy and very bad.

New to my collection of Computers is the rather new style of iMac, I wish to go over this in a few details to give a sort of review if you like. The model in Question is as follows:

Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz Extreme
2 GIG Ram
500 GIG Hard Drive
24″ Display (1920 x 1200)
DVD writer (Slot loading)
ATi Radeon HD 2600 Pro

As you can See from the Picture, Its a Very Smart looking all-in-one machine and while it cannot be expanded too much, I think what it has in there would do somebody for quite some time.

Setting it up
It came pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.4.11 which surpsied me as I thought it would already have Leopard on there. There is One Power Plug for the entire system, keyboard (which is what they call Universal English – so not 100% quite UK in Layout) and a Mighty Mouse. There was a CD Inside with the 10.5 Upgrade – slotted this in and left it running for some time while it put the latest OS on there. I have a Wireless router – Set up for WPA2 and protected, the machine could not connect even though I supplied the correct password – Once installed though I connected no problems, so maybe a Install Glitch.

Getting to Grips with MAC OS/X
I have machines running XP Pro, Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu 7.10, So I already have messed with different ways of Working. Expose is similar to Compiz on Linux, showing all the open windows but there is a slight difference and an annoying one. If the application is closed (to the Dock) then Expose does not show this as a list, ALt+TAB does though and even if selected via Alt+tab, the window does not come up, you have to go to the WINDOW menu and display the window, this is quite annoying.

Spaces allow you to have Multiple Desktops and you can press a key (F4 by default) and jump around the Windows, there is also Ky combinations to quickly go to each window. I prefer the way Compiz on Linux does it though, I used the Cube on there and Scrolled the mouse wheel to quickly get to another application, much faster.

The Little things that matter
The scroll on the mouse is active in whatever window you are over, no selecting like Windows before you can scroll. There is a Built in Spell checker across ALL Applications – even though I had selected UK (English) it still had trouble with the word Colour and insisted it was spelt wrong. What about Screen Zooming – CTRL + Scroll Wheel and you can zoom into any part of the screen in real time yo make it easier to read.

Safari comes with web clip – this ties in with the Widgets so that if you had say a Stream (such as UStream) or something that changes a lot, then mark it out and its now a widget you can look at in real time on the widgets screen (F4). Applications are VERY easy to install and un-install, all you do is drag the program to Applications and its installed. Want to get rid of it? Simple, put it to Trash and that’s it gone. Mo registry to hack, no files hanging about.

With various add-ons, you can play just about any Video in Quicktime, there is also VLC to play any format you may have missed of course. The included Applications are the best I have seen such as iPhoto, Garageband to make your very own song and iMovie which beats Movie Maker in Windows any time of the day.

Stability
10.5.1 is not as stable as previous version from my own testing though now its seems fine, I am sure when 10.5.2 and so forth get out, it can only get better.