G len Fleishman is adding to some positive words he wrote for the Seattle Times when Apple introduced its new iMac G5. Mr. Fleishman has gotten some face time with the iMac, thanks to a loaner unit from Apple, and he says that using it is better than seeing it, and that the best thing is how simple has made the design. From the review:
To me, however, the best part of the iMacis design is not the stand, the rear location of all of the ports or even the double-shot layers of white and crystal plastic that encase the unit. No, the best part is cracking open the shell. If youive ever had to dig around the innards of a computer, you know some components are hard to reach, use different size screws and often have sharp edges.
By contrast, to open the iMac G5, you loosen three screws on the bottom edge and lift the back panel off using the stand. The screws are designed to just loosen and stay in place, so you wonit inadvertently drop and lose them.
With the guts revealed, you can replace (or upgrade, depending on the part) nearly every component inside, from memory to hard drive to logic board. This is a huge design effort and will no doubt reduce the time and money required for Apple to repair iMacs and reduce the time youire without a computer.
In the full review, Mr. Fleishman also discusses how fast the iMac G5 is, how nice it was to use Appleis wireless keyboard, the bundled software, the display, and more. He also recommends that people bump up the RAM past the default amount included by Apple, but does not criticize the company for that default.