Outstanding bang for the buck

I took delivery of five identical 20" iMac G5s, 1.8GHZ and Superdrive. The only change from spec was to add 1GB to each machine. Since the intended user for the 5th machine left the company right before delivery, I had no choice but to take it as my work machine. Ahem.

Let me tell you how much I like this machine: my three previous Macs have been laptops, one iBook, one Titanium Powerbook and the last one was an Aluminum Powerbook. Less than a month after I issued myself the 20" iMac G5, I purchased one for my home.

It's been a few months and all five work machines and my home machine (which is the exact same model, and the 1GB stick of ram is the exact model I installed on the work machines) work insanely great.

As a matter of fact, the only two things I see wrong with this design:


1. The power button is placed in a really stupid place. During the first week I used them I kept hitting it by mistake while trying to reposition it.

2. The earphone port is in the rear, which sucks because the cable gets in the way, and the keyboard doesn't have legs so if you run the cable underneath the keyboard it will make the keyboard tilt.

The case design is brilliant. The damn thing is HEAVY, but it is balanced perfectly and it is very easy to reposition. All of the ports (except the damn earphone) are in a great spot. Opening the case to add ram means turning three captive screws and pulling the whole back off.

The keyboard is just stupid. I have hated Apple keyboards for years, and the current generation of the pro keyboard is no better. The only real improvement is that its two USB ports are on the rear instead of on the sides. I don't understand why the hell Microsoft figured out keyboards five years ago but Apple still hasn't.

I got four of the machines running on Panther, and both of my machines on Tiger. It runs great regardless. I cannot upgrade the other four machines yet because they are used by business analysts that rely on SPSS, which had not been patched for Tiger as of 6/10/2005.

The only user complaint so far? One moron was whining because she wanted to write to a floppy. Never-mind that her iMac G5 has a DVD burner, but she wanted a stupid floppy. Her supervisor laughed at her and hopefully handed her one of our nearly forgotten USB floppy drives.

That is the only real complaint I have heard so far. My wife uses ours at home and she doesn't say zilch about it.

Back to DVD and CD burning. So far it feels as less of a hassle than when I burned CDs on my Aluminum Powerbook, and the heat dissipation is a hell of a lot better. I am yet to burn a coaster.

Video playback performance is fine except for playing WMV with the Microsoft player. If you use a proper CODEC from Quicktime it looks fine. VLC and RealPlayer both look great as expected. Command & Conquer: Generals runs super smooth. 10.4.0 had OpenGL issues, but these were fixed in 10.4.1.

The built-in speakers are acceptable, but I almost never get to use them. At the office I have to wear earphones, and at home I have a 6-yr. old so I have to keep the volume low enough that I can hear mischief.

Processing power ROCKS! I am a web developer, and for a long time I ran my Apache, PHP5 and MySQL development servers off my two machines. The only reason I stopped doing it was because I hired an extra programmer and there were CVS issues involved.

Java performance so far is very good. I use a big Java-based application as part of my job so it runs 8-12 hours a day nonstop with no real issues. The only problems I have with the app are faults in the app itself, not hardware performance.

I also do a lot of data mining, and it is really sweet to see how the machine grinds thru huge data-sets like nothing. The same goes for rendering models in Poser 6 and POV-Ray.