On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:47, Jérôme Marant wrote: > While thinking of bying a new machine, I found the IMacs quite appealing, > especially the 20 inches one. > > Does anyone have feedbacks about the hardware quality, pros and cons, > rebutals?
My wife has (a 20") one for her machine. I have been very impressed by it. The hardware is near silent, and in sleep mode it consumes so little power we don't bother turning it off. It is no speed demon, but is fast enough. I think it is about equal to the same MHz athlon. My wife got it because she wanted her own machine and was tossing up between linspire and osx, osx won. As for the 20" vs 17", I'm not convinced the extra screen real-estate is worth it. Because it is a widescreen rather than normal, you can't just expand the document window and see more or have bigger fonts. You can however have half a dozen terminals open at the same time without overlap if your eyes are good enough. I guess it depends what you want to do, since I don't intend to replace it until it dies I wanted the extra flexability of 20". I find I rarely use the sides of the screen. The apple (bluetooth) keyboard is the best I've ever used, I suspect I'll be buying one for myself next time my keyboard dies. The microsoft mouse they tend to bundle when you say you need 3 buttons is not very good, the logitech is better. Also, if you ask for a bluetooth keyboard here, they give you a refund for the wired keyboard of a free bluetooth adaptor, which is a bit of a waste since the mice come with a bluetooth adaptor. I got the bluetooth adaptor (a d-link) to detect in linux but I had to give it back before I'd finished getting it configured. As for pros/cons... well, obviously you can save a good chunk of money by getting a mac mini, so I guess it depends whether the 64 bit and 1.8GHz vs 1.4 is worth 500 or so more. The screen is very good quality, and if you price out a similar screen with another computer then it works out to good value. It is a very tidy unit, so it really comes down to if you're willing to pay for tidiness or would rather save some cash and get something more flexible but less elegant. I haven't been allowed to install linux on it, so I can't comment on compatability. Judging from posts on this list most things except airport extreme can be made to work. Running KDE, or anything else inside fink works fine, if a little sluggish due to X being unaccelerated. Apparently that almost counts as installing linux on it by my wife's definition. The only quirk I noticed is my thesis is ten pages longer when typeset by tetex under macos compared to under linux. Any other questions, drop me an email. Corrin
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