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Apple’s iMac is a pre-assembled, pre-configured, ready-to-use machine known for its ease of installation. In fact, Apple had claimed that anybody, even with no computer knowledge, could set up an iMac in under seven minutes and be on the Internet in fifteen—and that included the time to unpack.
 The iMac has been designed to be legac- free to the extent that it doesn’t even have a floppy drive. Practically nothing is
upgradeable, except for the RAM and hard disk. A casing integrates all components in the monitor cabinet itself, and those who like to open up their machines will find the iMac difficult as there are no visible screws.
New models of the iMac have been released many times, with the most striking thing about them being their colors and patterns—ruby red, indigo blue, graphite gray. The latest releases are the Flower Power (with a floral pattern) and the Blue Dalmatian (with white patches on blue background) models. We’ve looked at the Flower Power model.
Design
| Apple iMac 600 Flower Power |
Price: Rs 101,100
Features: Integrated 10/100 LAN, 56 k modem, USB keyboard, optical mouse,
CD-RW drive
Pros: Great looks, good performance and software bundle
Cons: Expensive
Contact: Apple Computer international.
5th Floor, Du Parc Trinity 17, M.G. Road, Bangalore 560001.
Tel: 080-5550575.
E-mail:
parminder@asia.apple.com
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The Flower Power’s USB optical mouse connects into the hub of its USB keyboard, which is in a transparent casing. The headphone socket is located at the front for easy access. The volume from the speakers, which are built-in Harman Kordon stereo, is not very loud.
All the ports—network, modem, two USB (one of which is taken up by the keyboard), two FireWire, and one each for external mic and line out—are on the lower side of the cabinet. Here you’ll also find tiny buttons for hard booting and reset. The machine powers up on pressing a translucent button on the front panel.
Performance
The Flower power has a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 128 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard disk. It comes with Mac OS 9.1 pre-installed. The network card is 10/100 Mbps and also has a 56K internal modem, an extended USB keyboard, and an optical USB mouse. It also comes with a Matsushita CD-RW drive, a built-in Rage128 Ultra AGP card with
16 MB VRAM which makes working with graphics a breeze.
As for the software, apart from the standard restore CD and Apple Hardware Test CD, there is a System Software installer, an iMac Applications CD and iMovie 2. The Software Installer CD has useful utilities like Acrobat Reader 4.0, AppleWorks 6 and drivers, while the Applications CD has games like Bugdom, Gro-Mag and
Nanosaur.
We checked out the iMac’s performance using the MacBench 5.0. The benchmark takes a score of 1000 points for a G3/300 as the base. Of all the results, the notable was the processor power. While the CPU score was a mere 1046, the FPU score was an impressive 2007, almost twice. Such a high FPU score clearly shows the aptness of the iMac as a computing intensive device, say for intensive gaming.
But all these attractive looks, features, and good performance come for a high price tag of Rs 101,100.
Ashish Sharma
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