Product Reviews

The latest version of Apple's all-in-one iMac retains the same overall shape and size of previous models but has a sleek black plastic and aluminium design. It's classy and resembles an LCD TV more than a computer. It's slimmer than many standalone 19in LCD displays we've seen and is easy to tilt and swivel single-handed. It is almost totally silent, even during intensive tasks such as video encoding; the aluminium case becomes very warm, though.

We installed Windows Vista using Apple's Boot Camp utility and ran our usual set of benchmarks. We were surprised to find only 1GB of RAM; we'd expect a computer at this price to have at least 2GB, especially since an extra gigabyte only costs £30. It still performed well, especially in our video-encoding test with a score of 255, but if you regularly run multiple applications simultaneously or perform memory-intensive tasks such as manipulating photos, you'll need to add more memory.

The iMac has one of ATI's latest graphics chips, the Radeon

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HD 2600, which is capable - in theory - of playing upcoming DirectX 10 games. As the results of our 3D tests show, though, you'll have to settle for lower graphics detail or switch to a lower resolution to play the latest titles. This is disappointing, but not unexpected since the iMac's compact case would have trouble accommodating a more powerful graphics card.

The glossy 20in display has a resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, which gives plenty of room to work on. It's very bright, with plenty of contrast and rich-looking colours, so it's ideal for watching films as well. Unfortunately, it's imperfect for demanding, colour-sensitive image editing. The glass front creates a lot of reflections, so you need to be careful in positioning the iMac, while even small changes in our viewing angles resulted in noticeable shifts in colour accuracy.

Apple bundles the latest version of its iLife website, photo, music, movie and music editing software with the iMac. This can produce impressive results, but if you plan on storing a lot of video and music you may want a hard disk larger than the standard 320GB model. The iMac's compact case isn't easily upgradable though; only the RAM slots are accessible.

The keyboard is another major change from the previous iMac. The keys are much more responsive and comfortable to type on. A few keys are small and hard to press, though.

Apple's latest iMac is a quiet and well-designed all-in-one computer that's ideal if you don't have much room. But its poor screen, meagre RAM and small hard disk are all very disappointing at this price.