iMac’s Flower Power

Good news for Indian Mac lovers: iMac’s latest flavor–Flower Power–is here in India. Among the usual razzle-dazzle, Steve Jobs recently revealed the Flower Power and the Blue Dalmatian colors of the iMac in Tokyo. The Flower Power is here already and does it look good. 

Vital stats

They say about an iMac that it takes less than seven minutes to set it up and switch it on–and sure enough that’s what happened. In about seven minutes, the very few cables that had to be plugged were in place and all we had to do was touch the power button. The iMac that came to us was the iMac 600. It has a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 128 MB RAM and a 40 GB hard disk. It comes with Mac OS 9.1 pre-installed, a built-in 10/100 Mbps network card, and a 56K internal modem. The keyboard is extended USB and the mouse is optical

USB. There are the usual four USB ports–two on the keyboard and two on the body. There are two Firewire ports for high-speed transfer of heavy files, say to and from a video camera, a digital camera, or even an MP3 player. So, the entire package is aimed at high-speed computing. It also comes with a Matsushita 8x, 4x, 24x

CD-RW drive instead of a CD-drive. Audio has been integrated, and it comes with standard Harman Kordon speakers.

Picture perfect

Price: Rs 101,100 Features: G3 600 processor, 128 MB RAM, ATI range 128 graphics; USB with firewire ports. Pros: Great performance and software bundle; Great looks; CD-RW to burn CDs. Cons: Expensive. Source: Anything Mac E-mail: sales@ anymac.com Tel: 11-6867259 Fax: 011-6858682 Address: 2F Yusuf Sarai, New Delhi 110016. RQS# E31

iMacs give a lot of importance to display and graphics. This one has a built-in AGP card–the Rage128 Ultra with 16 MB VRAM–making it a breeze to work with graphics-intensive software. It gives a maximum display of 1,024x768 and millions

of colors. 

Performance

For performance, we ran MacBench 5 on the machine and found that in the test for processor power, it only gave a score of 1,046 as against a score of 1,000 of the based processor, the G3 300. In FPU power, however, it gave an impressive score of 2,007 as against 1,000. This clearly indicates that the new iMac is great for graphics and gaming. 

Bundle of fun

The iMac 600 comes with a whole bunch of cool software, which is a relief considering how difficult it is to get hold of Mac compatible software in India. This one has with five CDs–iMac Software Restore, Software Installer, Applications, iMovie 2 and Apple Hardware Test. The Software Installer CD has some useful utilities like Acrobat Reader 4, AppleWorks6 and drivers, while the Applications CD has games like

Bugdom, Gro-Mag and Nanosaur. There are also a couple of blank CD-Rs for you to record your creativity on. 

But, before you buy

While the first reaction an iMac evokes is ‘gotta have it!’, not everyone will be

able to buy it, considering the

Rs 101,100 price tag. 

The iMac 600 is a good desktop if you have the money to spare and if looks matter. But more than that, this iMac’s for you if you want your desktop to be your entertainment center as well as workstation.

Nupur Chaturvedi at PCQ Labs