I really like these old iMacs. They are very sturdy for children. My son has an old slot-loading DVD Graphite iMac and my daughter has an old slot-loading DVD Tangerine version. They are great. The Pangea Super Pack games run real nice in Tiger and they can boot back to OS 9 to play some older games like the older Rescue Hero games and Grand Turismo and some other Play Station One games under Connectix Virtual Game Station.

My daughter uses the Tangerine iMac mostly for watching DVDs. They are very nice machines if you want to get your kids set up with Mac hardware for next to nothing.

Up until last year I was using this original iMac as my primary (and only) machine! The only thing I had trouble with was the video editing. And the fact that I had to hang cables out of the side to add another hard drive/optical drive. But hey, that's 10 years of use out of an all-in-one.

And while I'm on the topic, at my school we have just about a million eMacs (I know a bit later, but same basic design). One of them was dropped during moving and literally rolled down two flights of cement stairs. I almost had a heart attack seeing a macintosh do that. But the amazing thing: they plugged it in and it worked perfectly. The only evidence of it's little escapade is a small crack in the plastic case. Amazing.

I pre-ordered my original iMac from ClubMac 3 months before it was released (May 1998) to replace my aging IIsi. At the time I was only 18 years old. I had been on my own for a year, just barely making enough money to rent a room from someone... I didn't even have enough money to pay for the iMac.

Fortunately, ClubMac didn't require payment until the iMac shipped. So, for 3 months I earned and saved every bit of money I could to raise the $1,297 + tax I needed. By the time I paid for the iMac in August I had $13 to my name, but I had my new computer.

I also have an original iMac from Dec 98. People complained about the missing floppy drive, but even back then on dail-up anything that could fit on a floppy could be easily emailed. I never had a problem with the iMac's "missing" features.

I'm not sure the MacBook Air is quite the same. There's a lot you can't do without a CD drive (try playing Star Craft). But the main difference I see is that the iMac was a great machine at a great cost, whereas the MacBook Air is entirely too expensive and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't a rich traveling sales person.

All the MacBook Air is is cool. It shows the future, but I don't think we're there yet.

I bought a tangerine iMac in 1999 and used it daily - several hours daily - till I purchased a new IMac in 2007. During its eight years of service I did nothing to the machine except add a gig of memory and convert to OSX. It was still working perfectly the day I unplugged it. And yes, I shed a tear.