Commentary--Our Take on Apple's New iMac G5

In three words, we love it. In fact, we ordered a 20" model from the Apple Store yesterday right after they were announced. It will ship on "Sep. 29 or before." The new iMac G5 embraces Apple's principal design theme of thinner/smaller and its macro design theme of elegant simplicity. It's colors also follow Apple's recent design convention of white and brushed aluminum.

The iMac G5 is as elegant a desktop computer as any ever made expressly for consumers. It's feature set continues to be perfect for a general consumer desktop right down to the graphics that will play most shipping 3D games well. Apple even included one of the key features that we declared a must, the G5 CPU. The new iMac will sport a CPU that is among the fastest CPUs in a low-end consumer desktop.

But...having heaped all that praise on the new iMac G5, could Apple have done even better, especially in the areas of price and innovation?

The high end iMac is a bargain with a gorgeous 20" flat panel monitor. At $1899, the 20" iMac G5 is $300 less expensive than the 20" iMac G4. Our only quibble with it is that Apple should have provided a better performing 3D graphics card for the budding household gamer, even for a few more bucks.

At $1299, the low end iMac is today among the most expensive low end consumer desktops if not the most expensive. But it's packed with features and when the cheaper Wintel or Winamd desktops are similarly configured, the differences are not all that significant. And the 17" CRT eMac desktop starts at a mere $799 for the extremely budget conscious.

There are three necessary components to an all-in-one desktop computer: mouse, keyboard and monitor. The mouse is questionable as a necessity and stuffing computer "guts" into one is not yet feasible anyway so that leaves the monitor or the keyboard. Apple chose to include the computer "guts" with the monitor in the iMac G5 just like all the iMacs before it and several Wintel incarnations. Clearly, Apple's design is the best ever but it's incremental even if in many aspects.

We ask, what about the keyboard? What about size? The guts of a 133MHz 12" PowerBook G4, including a SuperDrive and a 60GB hard drive, could easily fit into a full size keyboard. The cooling needs of a 1.8GHz G5 might require a slightly larger enclosure but that also affords the opportunity for designers to make a keyboard look really cool. What about the all-in-one concept? That concept is not compromised since every all-in-one box contains both a keyboard and a monitor.

An advantage of associating the guts with a keyboard may be price. It could be packaged alone, dropping the flat panel screen, the most expensive component. The configuration would be for those who already have a monitor or who want to buy a cheap CRT, i.e. for those who buy rock bottom Wintels like public schools, companies, governments and scads of consumers world wide. It would also be for those who want a consumer desktop running Mac OS X that uses one of Apple's fabulous new flat panel displays--a fatter keyboard but a thinner monitor than those of the new iMac G5.

But what do we know? Apple's successful education strategy is built around an inexpensive iBook. And, some will point out that a computer in a keyboard has already been done. They would be right, of course. Our first actual computer, a TI-94, was scarcely more than a computer in a keyboard, albeit a pretty weak one.

In summary, we think Apple's new iMac G5 is a compelling design when compared with the iMac G4 or any other consumer desktop on the market for that matter. The more we look at it the more we like it. The iMac G5 should pump up sales of the iMac line significantly. We can hardly wait to get our hands on ours. Oh, did I say we love it?