“Apple’s iMac range continues to be the most preposterously expensive series of home computers known to man. Towards the top-end, the 3.1GHz quad-core i5 edition with 27in display is one of the most pernicious offenders, setting you back in excess of £1,600 for the shallow glam of brushed aluminium, unnecessary space-age design and the kind of performance that’s wasted on its target domestic buyer,” Alistair Dabbs reports for The Register. “In other words, it’s god-damned gorgeous.”

“Now, before I go any further, there is a 3.4GHz quad core-i7 build-to-order model available, which, if you went with all the possible hardware extras (16GB RAM, SSD etc), would set you back in excess of £3k,” Dabbs reports.

MacDailyNews Note: Our SSD-equipped 3.4GHz i7 27-inch iMacs arrived on Tuesday. Over two weeks early. Leave it to Apple to under-promise and wildly over-deliver! We got our 16GB RAM from a third-party vendor, so we saved big there. Friends don’t let friends buy RAM from Apple!

Besides soft and, hence, easily-strippable, phillips head screws on the RAM cover plate that we’ll have to replace, these machines are perfect and, more importantly, obscenely fast. Thanks to the SSD, they start up in around ten seconds. Apps are running before you finish clicking them in the Dock. Even Photoshop launches quickly! Our Docks have never experienced such a dearth of icon bouncing. The 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics chipsets don’t hurt either.

Our Geekbench results:
• 32-bit
• 64-bit

We now restart our Macs for the fun of it.

As usual, we expect to have these machines for years along with their companion 11-inch MacBook Air units, just like the 2.16GHz Core Duo do-everything MacBook Pro 1,2 units (which we got in spring 2006) that they replaced. Divide the purchase price by 5 – or even 3 – years and the price is more than right. The MBPs never failed us and no additional costs were ever incurred. They just worked – every damn day for half a decade. Macintosh. You get what you pay for.

Dabbs continues, “Register Hardware’s current testing methodology for Mac computers is to instal 64-bit Microsoft Windows 7 natively (remember, you can dual-boot a Mac) and run our standard PC tests. When I last did this on one of Apple’s previous range of 27in quad-core iMacs, it turned out to be the fastest PC I had ever tested.”

Advertisement: Students, parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.

“Factor in the beautiful screen, superb performance, top-quality input devices and (let’s face it) minimal support downtime, this 27in 3.1GHz iMac is the ideal affordable workstation for the creative professional,” Dabbs reports. “Frankly, if you’re in the market for a home computer, forget it – it’s too good for you.”

Much more in the full review here.