Thread: Apple imac

Apple's latest iMac separates the magpies from the normal people, eliciting more than its fair share of "oh new shinyl" shouts from the folks at the T3 office, leading us to believe there are more sparkly-obsessed avians among us than the Indian Ornithological Association could possibly keep track of. Underneath all that eye candy is a competent. robust OS filled to the brim with some great software. There's a lot more to it than what you've come to expect from your regular grey and black PC. Garage Band is great for cutting up and sewing together music and quite intuitive given that our resident Apple critic took all of five seconds to create some breakout tracks found in Lady Gaga's album. We might just be joking about this but we can dream can't we?

Speaking of dreams, if you got those of the celluloid, web or photographic variety, iMovie, iWeb and iPhoto come bundled in to make them a reality. Sure they're not as complex or as advanced as Final Cut Pro but they're more than adequate for the amateur content creator to sink his teeth into. Needless to say it's got more than enough zip for e-mails, presentations and the like. Playing games is a breeze too so as long as you're fine with turning the details down on some titles - Porta/2 and Team Fortress 2 looked great but resource-hogging pieces of digital recreation such as Assassin's Creed 2were a tad sluggish. However, we believe that users will be content with the fact that it can handle more than a few great games in between sessions of productivity.



Do chuck away the keyboard which is way too cramped and god-awful to use. We reckon Logitech's DiNovo Edge would be a better bet. In addition to this, the display is way too glossy, it could double as a mirror and the most expensive mass produced one at that. A matte option would have been nice. It's a bit tragic given that these two features lack as much attention to detail as the rest of the machine which is super silent and flawlessly engineered from all angles. The iMac caters to a class of users that either require its performance in specific tasks or just love what Apple does. Regardless which camp you fall into, it's a great piece of kit that could have been just a smidgen better.

PROCESSOR 2.5GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 DISPLAY 21.5-inch glossy TFT,1920x1080 MEMORY 4GB RAM GRAPHICS AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB STORAGE 500GB OPTICAL DRIVE Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive CONNECTIVITY Thunderbolt, Mini DisplayPort output with support for DVI, VGA and dual-link DVI , FireWir 800; 4xUSB, SDXC card slot.