iMac G5 20in review

The first Mac directly aimed at the iPod generation has started to ship in the UK. We secured one of the earliest units to land on these shores and tested it in MacUser's Labs.

This 20in, 1.8GHz, G5-powered slab of white plastic may be the third revision of the iMac family, but Apple would much rather you saw it as the perfect partner for your Apple-made digital music player. It's marketing the iMac as 'from the makers of the iPod' and there are lots of references to the digital music player on the iMac information pages on Apple's website.

The iMac clearly takes lots of its design cues from the iPod: the sleek lines, curved corners and glossy white plastic all echo the iPod much more than they do any other Mac. And, like the iPod, the iMac is more expensive than its competitors. Where the iPod has its super-slim case, click-wheel and iTunes integration, the iMac has a super-slim case, G5 processor and Mac OS X. Will this be enough to tempt PC-using iPod owners, or Mac users looking for a new computer?

The answer to that question for most of us is dependent, not on Apple hype, but on good, old-fashioned value for money. Despite its powerful processor and 1680 x 1050 pixel wide-screen, the iMac is let down on a number of fronts. In paticular, while the hard drive capacity of 160GB is fine, the supplied 256MB of RAM is, frankly, insulting on a computer that costs £1349. This is particularly galling as 256MB is the minimum required to run the bundled iLife '04 suite.

The Nvidia GeForce Ultra 5200 graphics card with its 64MB RAM does a decent enough job, and while we would have liked to have seen an 8x SuperDrive, the 4x one installed in the iMac will be fast enough for all but the most fevered DVD makers.

The new iMac has three USB 2 ports on the main body of the machine, as well as two USB 1.1 ports on the keyboard. There are two FireWire 400 ports (but no FireWire 800), and a port for an Apple adaptor, which can output a VGA signal for mirroring or S-Video, or composite video for connection to a projector.

The iMac also has 10/100 Base-T Ethernet and a 56K modem port. However, AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth capability have to be bought as optional extras. You have to specify at the time of purchase whether you want the Bluetooth module built in, as it can't be added internally later. If you want to use your iMac the way Apple intends - with a wireless keyboard and mouse - it will cost you £70 to add the Bluetooth module and buy the keyboard and mouse as a build-to-order option on the online Apple Store. That's expensive, but, to Apple's credit, it's £83 cheaper than buying the items separately.

The iMac is easy to set up, and the attention to detail is excellent. There's a hole in the stand so that whatever cables you have attached to the back of the iMac can feed through and disappear behind your desk. Although the power button is on the back of the unit, it's easy to locate without swivelling the whole machine, and the speakers are situated at the bottom of the bezel, facing downwards so they reflect sound waves off your desk. The swivel action on the arm was a little loose, so the iMac had a tendency to swing ever so slightly when it was adjusted.

In our tests, the iMac's G5 processor didn't perform as well as we had hoped. Obviously, it's not going to beat the current crop of dual-processor Power Macs, whose motherboard architecture is geared for maximum power, but it struggles against older, single-processor G5s, too. For example, last year's Power Mac G5 1.6GHz was a third faster in some tests than this 1.8GHz iMac. That said, it's still significantly faster than the previous generation of iMacs and cheaper than the Power Mac range, when you take the screen into account.