Apple iMac M8535LL/A

Apple is renowned for two things: excellent design and ease of use. The latest iMac demonstrates both admirably. The first feature you notice is the high-quality 15in TFT monitor. Although users will instantly observe the sharpness, they'll also see that the screen is attached to a dome-shaped base by a cantilevered arm, which allows easy adjustment to a wide range of viewing angles and heights. This is a smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makers to shame.

But a computer is more than just looks. The iMac comes with all the modern standards: two FireWire and three USB ports, 10/100BaseTX Ethernet, V.90 modem and a VGA-out. Inside, there's an 800MHz PowerPC 7410 processor, usually referred to by Apple as a G4 (for the fourth generation of PowerPCs).

While 800MHz sounds slow, the megahertz conceal some serious performance. AltiVec, a vector-processing unit on the die, gives the chip the ability to act simultaneously on many pieces of data with a single instruction.

By modern PC standards, some of the iMac's technology is Palaeolithic. The system bus runs at a pedestrian 100MHz, and the SDRAM memory falls behind DDR or RDRAM. The graphics chipset is the Nvidia GeForce2 MX, instead of GeForce3. However, because the OS - Mac OS X - has been rewritten to make heavy use of AltiVec, in general use the iMac feels as snappy and responsive as the AJP Neo-PC 4 (reviewed opposite).

All that can refute this are the times in intensive benchmarks - running an identical benchmark in Photoshop 7 took 108 seconds on the AJP Neo-PC 4 and 190 seconds on the iMac - both with 512Mb of RAM. The Neo-PC 4 is faster, but it costs substantially more and has 1,400 more megahertz at its disposal - it's faster but not by a huge amount.

The Pioneer DVD-R drive that comes as standard on the M8535LL/A really stands out. As well as reading and writing CDs and DVD-formatted discs, the bundled iDVD software allows easy creation of DVD videos, complete with menus. This demonstrates what Apple is good at: taking a task that requires significant expertise and making it simple enough for a consumer. And performance of DVD encoding is a strong point, as Apple has massaged the code of iDVD to make the most out of AltiVec.

Mac OS X is now the default OS on Apple's machines. Underneath the good-looking interface, OS X, is BSD Unix running on a Mach kernel, with the Unix and Mach layers being open source. Its reliability, even at this early stage, is impressive: I've had OS X running on two machines for over six months and haven't experienced a single crash.

Unless you rely on a piece of software that doesn't run under Mac OS, it's worth taking a serious look at the iMac. If you're working with digital video at home, the ability to edit footage and burn it onto a DVD that can be played in virtually any home DVD player will be a big attraction, and the overall ease of use makes it suitable for the least technical users.

Author: Ian Betteridge