WVSU Yellow Jacket — Buying a new PC can be as easy as picking a flavor
By Sean Rose
Are you considering a new computer? We all do at some point or another, maybe it’s advertising’s voice in our head, maybe it’s just a desire for some new fun toys. I would like to invite you to consider an old friend, Forrest Gump’s mint-making Apple Computer.
Just a few years ago, in my computer retail days, I steered many people away from buying into a company that I thought wouldn’t exist in five years. I had every right to think that, too. Apple sales were poor, they fired the co-creator of the company — Steve Jobs, and they lagged FAR behind the PC world in terms of hardware price and performance.
Today is a different story. I am sure you have seen the "little colored computer" ads on TV. That’s great. Now you need to realize that little plastic box is also a name taking, PC crushing machine. I am a long time PC user, with my first PC sporting an 8086 processor and 640KB of RAM, jam packed with a whopping 20MB hard drive. I recently purchased one of those "plastic computers" to publish some of my software on the Macintosh platform. I didn’t expect to like the machine; it’s a resume builder and a tool, nothing more. Wrong. That’s what I get for thinking I guess. Better not try to do that too much.
Upon arrival of my high-gloss white and orange box, I couldn’t help but get a little excited. No PC I have seen came in such a decorative fashion, not even those "cow boxes." I started to open it. No wait. This thing is really pretty and I haven’t even opened the box yet. Well, reservation fails and I dug into my new "tool of programming destruction." I can only say I was very impressed with everything. The package was of excellent quality, with fit and finish that is unknown in the PC world.
Fancy cardboard and manuals aside, the iMac is heavy. Nothing cheap or lightweight in there, it feels like a lead weight, considering it’s size and that’s good. Trust me on that one. The plastic feels and looks more like a surrealistic glass, some alien egg euro-fiber. Cool. It looks great. Plus, the television commercials aren’t lying; I really did set up the computer and hit the Internet in less than ten minutes.
Inside, the iMac is powered by IBM and Motorola’s PowerPC chip, the G3. Most non-believers are thinking is that "Intel Inside" at this point, but no AMD and no Pentium III here. On paper the iMac doesn’t look like it can compare to a comparably priced PC, but that just isn’t true. Sometimes numbers aren’t everything. Don’t worry about the smaller hard drive and the slower processor speed. Mac applications are typically smaller than their PC versions; Photoshop is 50MB on the Mac, 100+ on my PC. Certainly the most overrated spec in any computer purchase is the clock speed. That’s the number with Mhz beside it. Most people think higher is better, and it is, but not when you are comparing apples and oranges. The G3 chip is radically different from an x86 PC processor and therefore moves data around in a different way. Think of it like a highway, you can move more cars down a four-lane highway at 55 M.P.H. than you can a two lane at 55 M.P.H. So it is with processor clock speed.
The G3 is frighteningly fast running Photoshop and other integer math based applications; however, its floating-point arithmetic isn’t as spiffy as a Pentium III. In laymen’s terms, ordinary business and Internet applications run faster on an Apple, while the PC is faster at 3D oriented applications like games. So if you are a diehard gamer, read no further, go buy a new PC. If you are not, you honestly can’t buy as nice of a computer on the PC platform as you can an iMac or Apple Tower. I looked too. I spent a solid afternoon cruising some of our fine shops and looking at the iMac clone from e-machines and regular towers. The e-machine seemed very, very poorly constructed and the monitor was nothing in comparison to the excellent screen in the iMac.
Not to say the iMac was perfect. There wasn’t enough memory installed from the factory. Having become used to a PC with lots of RAM, the standard iMac memory wasn’t enough. Expect to pay about $100 more for a strip of additional memory, but on the flip side, it was super easy to install and makes the machine much faster running several applications at the same time. The only other drawback is lack of books and software locally. There isn’t much of an Apple market in Charleston, so don’t go into Star-Mart and ask for Mac stuff. The salesperson will probably tell you they only have software for computers. If only they really knew. You can obtain virtually any application you want, and the iMac comes with a great software package, just get the plastic out, cause you are going to have to order it.
Apple put together a five-star package and it is no wonder they are selling like crazy. I can’t emphasize enough how well the machine is made and how much fun it is to use. It doesn’t hurt that they come in all those nifty colors, either. So, all I ask is take an iMac for a test drive before you lay down the cash for your next beige box. You may be as pleasantly surprised as I was. See the iMac online at http://www.apple.com/imac/ and send rants and raves to srose@cycline3.com.
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