Two weeks ago I took delivery of an iMac 27.5′ that I bought on finance from the Apple Store, and I have to say that I’m glad I made the investment. I moved away from PC’s a few years ago when I decided to jump ship to the Macbook Pro 15′, and I am now completely Windows-less.
I still have the trusty MBP bagged up, however I’m keen to refurbish and sell it with a view to possibly getting an iPad, or contributing towards the expense of buying a new camera.
The specification I went for is Dual Core Intel i5 3.06GHz, 4GB memory, 1TB hard disk and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card with 256MB on board memory. The processor and memory specifications are quite similar to the MBP, although the iMac is definitely faster which is probably down to the i5 processor.
The screen, which is a true 16:9 widescreen display at 2560 x 1440 resolution is quite simply, stunning. I’m only just getting used (again) to having all of the extra workspace, and being able to have multiple windows up at once with plenty of room to spare. The size of the iMac makes everything else in the office spare room look pathetic; although at least the colour scheme matches my printer.
Applications such as Aperture, Final Cut Studio, Photoshop and After Effects really benefit from all the extra space, and running games like Football Manager and even golden oldies such as Deus Ex at full resolution is quite something.
The Apple Magic Mouse with its button-less design works really well, and I’m surprised at how quickly using it has become second nature as I was really expecting it to be a nuisance. I went for the full, wired numpad keyboard instead of the standard wireless one, and that was a wise call as I do a lot of work in Excel and other applications where I’m regularly entering figures.
I have to say that the migration (which I did over Ethernet) from the MBP to the iMac was utterly painless. The only thing I had to install once the migration was completed was, ironically, something need to support MS Office Mac Edition! The only issue I have now is that I need to get a 1TB firewire or USB drive to use as my Time Machine backup!
