Andy Chase

What these arguments remind me of is guys who hem and haw when it comes to neutering their male pets because they somehow find it threatening to their own masculinity.(Wow, another Apple-related post, and I don’t even own one yet. I’m not becoming a fanatic, I promise.)

Reaction to the new iMac has been predictably split between high praise and snide derision… but the reasons tech journalists use to pan the new design are (for the most part) really petty.

David Coursey is all bent out of shape because Apple gave Time magazine the scoop instead of him. He spends another paragraph wringing his hands over the compact form factor; his argument goes something like:

I don’t need my hardware wrapped up in a neat little package. I just put my big manly tower under my desk. Therefore, there’s no market for a computer designed like this.

Similar articles I’ve read elsewhere (sorry, none of them were memorable enough to track down; otherwise I’d provide links) take a similar tone, smugly criticizing the new form factor.

Nobody will take the new iMac seriously; what do you expect from a computer that looks like a desk lamp?! [Insert nerdly sarcastic snort here]

One article went so far as to quote somebody whose big concern was

“Think of your desk lamp and how many times you have knocked it over”

It doesn’t really look like a desklamp, you know; both lamps and the new iMac have articulated arms, yes, but that’s really about it. It’s very small for a full-featured desktop system, but we’re still talking a base that’s 10 1/2 inches in circumference and densely packed with electronic components; that’s a lot bigger than any desklamp I’ve seen. The “Think of how many times you’ve knocked your desk lamp over” analogy just doesn’t work. If you’ve got problems with repeatedly knocking stuff off your desk, maybe you should work on that before you buy any computer at all.

What these arguments remind me of is guys who hem and haw when it comes to neutering their male pets because they somehow find it threatening to their own masculinity;

“But my peers won’t think I’m 31337 if I don’t have a big huge box full of noisy fans under my desk! Therefore the new iMac sucks!”

I can appreciate and even agree with the criticisms about the lack of expandability, but that doesn’t make the iMac a bad machine. Feh.

There's something to be said for taking the guts of the computer and basically turning them into a weighted base that supports the monitor; it's an excellent union of form and function.I actually saw the new iMac on Sunday night, when it appeared in an article on Timecanada's web site in an article dated "January 14, 2002". The general assumption is that this was an error on Timecanada's part, but two days later there's no word of any legal action by Apple against them.

Anyway, my immediate reaction to the new design was ambivalent; I wasn't crazy about the look of the dome, but I'm all over the swiveling flat screen monitor.

When the computers were officially announced with specs yesterday, I got a lot more interested, and I'm definitely buying into the shift in perception the new iMac could bring to the consumer computing market. I hated the original iMac, having used them for cross-platform web page testing at both Edmunds and Stan Lee Media. I understand that in the last couple of years the line was upgraded considerably, but those originals were woefully underpowered and prone to crashing every 20 minutes. The other thing I really, really hated was the way they were marketed; not as an easy to use, all-in-one computer, but as a fashion accessory/piece of candy. One billboard in particular, which featured pictures of all five of those original fruity colors, made me especially apoplectic - the only word on the billboard was "Yum."

That being said, it's easy to forget how heavily the industrial design of the original iMac has influenced competitors' designs since 1998; nearly all of the major PC manufacturers have at least streamlined their boxes in the wake of the iMac and switched from beige metal to shiny plastic, with many adopting Apple's idea of bright colors. The original white and aqua color scheme was applied to all manner of peripherals and accessories.

My main criticism of applying so much design to something as purely functional as a computer has been that it becomes impossible to add third-party peripherals without the thing looking like crap; how good is a new, beige CD-RW drive going to look sticking out of your HP's smoky gray plastic case? And if your computer's going to be a big rectangular box, what difference does it make whether it's shiny plastic or beige metal?

With these new iMacs, expandability is much less of an issue for me; the hardware spec is much better than the first ones I used, and since ethernet, 56K modem, and firewire are all standard there's not a lot else I'd want to add except memory, which can be expanded all the way to 1 gigabyte- not bad for a consumer-level desktop machine. For what I'd be doing with it (programming, surfing, graphics work), a mid-range iMac would be entirely adequate.

As for processor speed, I wish people would get it through their thick skulls that you can't directly compare Motorola clock speeds to Intel clock speeds, as explained here. And unless you're a seriously hardcore gamer/Video Editor/multimedia artist (in which case you wouldn't be looking at an iMac anyway), you don't necessarily need the latest and greatest PowerPC/Pentium IV processor. For me personally, I'm liking the new iMac feature/cost ratio a lot when you factor in the flat panel display.

The form factor is what's really winning me over, though; aside from reducing desktop clutter, I think the new iMac design will encourage people to think of their computer not as an intimidating entity sitting on their desk, but as more of an appliance. I mean, I don't have the slightest clue about how an automatic dishwasher works on the inside, but I'm not afraid to throw some dishes in and just use the thing the way some people are afraid to use their computers. The desklamp analogy is already tired (Every other sentence about the new iMac on ZDnet uses the words desk lamp), but there's something to be said for taking the guts of the computer and basically turning them into a weighted base that supports the monitor; it's an excellent union of form and function.

At this point I'm thinking that maybe I'll set my sites on one of the new iMacs as my next computer; while still unrealistic given my current financial situation, it's a little less far-fetched than my coveted Ti PowerBook.