The iMac is here!

It's 'downright cute,'
and packs lots of power

By Charles Downs
Special to Arizona Central
June 22, 1998

They just don't get it - the pundits who decry Apple's iMac as a "stripped down, cost-cutting, entry-level" computer.

Click the image to read a related article.

iMac specs: OS 8.1 operating system 233 MHz PowerPC G3 processor 512K of backside level 2 cache 15-inch (14.8-inch viewable) high quality display with 1024X768 resolution 32MB SDRAM (expandable to 128MB) 2MB SGRAM (expandable to 4MB) 4GB IDE hard disk drive 24X CD-ROM drive 10/100Base-Tx Ethernet Built-in modem Two 12Mbps Universal Serial Port (USB) ports 4Mbps infrared technology (IrDA) port Built-in stereo speakers with SRS surround sound 66MHz system bus

Click the image to see how the iMac compares with various Pentium systems.

Entry level? Yes, because at $1,299 (computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse and modem), it's the lowest cost Mac in the lineup.

Cost-cutting? Yes, Apple reined in cost by opting for a 233-MHz G3 processor rather than a 292-MHz chip and a 36.6K modem instead of a 56K. Big deal. The iMac still smokes a 400-MHz Pentium II, as you'll see.

Stripped down? That's a mind set. The apparently "Spartan" iMac is showing us the future of personal computing.

The iMac's sort of strange. It doesn't look like a Mac. It's downright cute. It even looks as if it was designed to appeal to kids rather than adults.

You can almost see its innards through the translucent "Bondi blue" (pronounced "bondeye," after a beach in Australia) case. The keyboard is translucent, the line cord is translucent. The mouse is translucent. I'm waiting for some wag to introduce an aftermarket "illumination kit" that will install small lights in the computer, keyboard and mouse. That would be a kick.

Don't let the pretty face fool you. When you get past the radical design, you begin to see some really user-friendly engineering - and some muscle.

Let's say you want to bump the 32-megs of factory-installed RAM up to the limit of 128MB. Open a rear door, loosen a couple of latches, and you can slide the whole chassis out of the case. The storage devices (hard drive and 24X CD-ROM) are on the chassis, too.

Interconnection ports - there are only two, the USB port and a telephone jack - are hidden behind a cover on the right side. There are two stereo head phone jacks on the front panel, along with the surround-sound stereo speakers. The drop-in CD-ROM tray emerges from the center of the front panel at the touch of a button. A lighted button on the panel indicates that the iMac is sleeping. Touch any key and it wakes up. A 4-megabyte/second IrDA-compliant infrared port on the panel beams data to other IrDA devices such as PowerBooks and printers.

But it's that little G3 chip inside that makes the Apple "entry level" a bit exciting. An illustration shows the results of an independent benchmark test comparing the iMac's computing power to computers with "Intel inside."

Could the chart be right? The $1,299 iMac is 41 percent faster than the $2,599 400-MHz Compaq Presario 4800? And 246 percent faster than a 233 MHz Compaq 4550? Yes, it is. And that $1,299 includes monitor, keyboard, mouse, modem, CD-ROM and Ethernet!

Options? Only one, the "Windows 95 Option," which costs $149.95 at MacWarehouse. Actually, it's Virtual PC 2.0 with Windows software from Connectix. With Virtual PC installed, you can run Windows 95 and Apple's OS 8.1 simultaneously.

You can drag a file from the Mac window to the Windows window and back again. The iMac's factory-installed 32MB of RAM is enough to run Virtual PC comfortably, but you'd be happier with another 32MB. Oh, and by the way, the iMac uses the cheap SDRAM you can buy at Fry's electronics. A 32MB chip costs $42.95 - $1.34 a megabyte!

Let's see now, $1,299 for the computer, $149.95 for Windows and $42.95 for another 32MB of RAM. That brings the price of this little box that will beat the pants off of a $2,599 Pentium PC up to $1,491.90.

The iMac was shown off to an appreciative crowd of 300 people at a recent Arizona Macintosh Users Group meeting in Phoenix.

When the iMac was announced in May, the question was, "Will anyone buy it?"

The question posed by some very knowledgeable Mac users at the AMUG meeting was, "Can Apple make these fast enough to meet the demand?"

iMac Product Manager Mike Shebanek assured the audience it will. "The iMac is eminently manufacturable," he said.

And watch for the price to drop, as it usually does when the production line starts cookin'. I'll bet you that before the end of the year you'll find the iMac it at the larger mail-order sources for as little as $999, or it will go for list price with Virtual PC tossed in at no additional cost.

WHAT'S MISSING?

In my description of the iMac you may have noticed I didn't say where the floppy slot is. It isn't. Face it, the sun is setting on floppy disks as a storage medium. It costs developers more money to supply software on floppies than on a CD. And then there's the flop's capacity: "Do you really want to back up your 4GB disk on 1.4MB floppies," asked Shebanek. "Do you know how many floppies that would take?" (Answer: About 3,075.)

But if you really want to use a floppy drive with your iMac, Imation and Panasonic have announced they will have an USB-compatible external floppy drive available for the computer in August, when iMacs begin to ship. The drive will read and write 800K, 1.4MB and 120MB disks in either IBM or Macintosh format. The price hasn't been announced, but I'd guess it will be in the $200 to $300 range.

You can't hook up your ZIP drive or your SCSI scanner or an external to the iMac, either. Gone is the SCSI interface. Instead, Apple has moved to the next data-transfer technology, the USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. It moves data at about 1.5 megabytes/second. You can connect up to 127 USB devices such as digital cameras, scanners, printers, joy sticks, and graphic tablets at one time. "If someone does that, give me a call," said Mike Shebanek. "I want to come to your house and take a picture of it."

Both the PC and the Mac worlds are embracing USB technology. If you want to see what you can plug into the iMac's USB bus, take a look at four web sites:

USB Implementers Forum

USB Stuff

USB FAQs

Why USB on the Mac OS?

USB devices are "hot-swapable." Pull a SCSI cable with power on, and you take a very real risk of frying your motherboard. You can connect and disconnect USB devices with power on. Plug a device in, and the iMac senses that it's been added to the bus, loads the appropriate driver, and the device icon appears on the desktop. No SCSI addresses; no address conflicts.

I CAN'T USE MY ZIP DRIVE?

That's right. And here's where we're going to discuss the future of personal computing. The iMac is touted by Apple as "The Internet-age computer for the rest of us." The assumption is that you have Web access, and that if you have Web access, you have email, and if you have email you can move files - even really big files - from point A to point B electronically.

You're at your office and you need to take a file home to work on it this evening. Instead of dumping it to a ZIP cartridge or floppy, you simply email it to yourself. When you get home, you download it from your email server. When you're done working on it, e-mail it back to yourself.

Or you want to move that Quark XPress brochure to your service agency. Instead of sending a SyQuest cartridge by messenger, you compress it with StuffIt and email it.

BUT IT'S ONLY GOT A 36.6 MODEM. WHY NOT 56K?

Do you have a 56K modem? Can you achieve 56K performance on your phone line? Betcha you can't. A 36.6 modem - if your phone line will even support that transfer rate, is pretty fast. Most phone lines won't handle much more than 28.8.

But the modem is rapidly becoming an obsolete way to connect to the world. Phone companies, cable companies and satellite services are offering far faster connections that you can get with a modem - as fast as 10 MB/second.

These faster services use Ethernet rather than a modem to get data into and out of the computer. That's where the little RJ45 jack on the back of the iMac comes into play. The iMac supports 10/100Base-Tx Ethernet. That means it will transfer data at 10 or 100 MB/second depending on the capacity of a network. This lets the iMac shine in the Ethernet environment of an office or a college campus.

And you'll be able to use a LocalTalk Bridge to connect your iMac, via Ethernet, to your AppleTalk printer.

WOULD I WANT AN iMac?

You're darn right I would. I do some rather heavy-duty desktop publishing and web-page maintenance. I'd rather have the 266 G3 MT I'm writing this with simply because its expansion capabilities suit my purposes better. But if someone told me I'd have to give up the big G3 for an iMac, I wouldn't be all that unhappy. The iMac would do everything the minitower G3 can do, just a tad more slowly.

The iMac is powerful, fast and takes up very little space in your workspace. It leaves the Pentiums in the dust. It will log on to the Internet right out of the box. You should be so lucky as to have this "entry level" Mac.

Charlie Downs is the public information officer and webmaster for the Arizona Department of Real Estate. Downs, an expert on all things Macintosh, helped manage the Macintosh forums on CompuServe for several years. He is a member of the Arizona Macintosh Users Group, and a team member of the new Mac Web site, MacAlliance. He welcomes your Mac questions and any suggestions you have for topics for "The Well-Healed Mac."

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