Kevin Holler

As some of you may have read on the front page of the site, I recently purchased an iMac 24″, 2GB RAM, Intel Core Duo 2.16Ghz etc.. So I’m going to try and sum up my first few days with it. My likes and my dislikes and what windows habits I had to ween myself away from.

My first impression was just simply wow… I sat there and just looked at the design of everything for at least a half hour.. even the packaging was so efficient , but that wasn’t anything to be getting excited about. I booted up the iMac and was impressed by its loading time compared to Windows. I still had my doubts and figured it was due to the hardware so i continued along and began to try figure out those little bits that would take getting used to. I decided to test Boot Camp and i installed a copy of Windows XP Professional.. After installing it and booting it, i had realized that it wasn’t just my old pc that caused the slow booting time..

The first thing was the mouse, i hated not having right click on that mouse so i switched back to my Dell mouse straight away.. which got rid of one annoyance. Secondly the keyboard design is quite unique. It no longer sounds like I’m using a hammer to hit the keys.. its quite smooth now and I can type a lot faster… which is a big plus for me alone.. although that isn’t unique to the iMac alone. Sure I could of gone and bought a new keyboard any day, but it never bothered me enough to fork our the few bucks to buy a new one.

The GUI of Mac OS is great if you ask me.. its designed down to perfection. And the Dock is very handy.. I’ve always loved having a centered navbar since i started using Linux with various window managers. The application GUI is also pretty clean but the fact that the close button is on the left took me a while to get used to also. The way applications are installed took me a few minutes to figure out.. popping the application into the applications folder and then copying it into the dock. But now that I’m used to it I prefer it to installation methods that Windows used. It seems a lot cleaner as to how data is stored, configurations are kept and how the application is managed in general.

I have only used the machine a few days so i will report back as soon as i gather more information and experience with it all. I’ve been busy with other work at the moment so this machine feels a little neglected

Tags: 24", iMac, Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS