“It’s not just Windows boxes in the $1K Club anymore. Apple, despite its reputation as a provider of premium products at premium prices (with premium hype), makes a desktop machine, the eMac, that costs significantly less than its long-necked flat-screen iMacs. Like the iMac, the eMac runs on a G4 PowerPC processor, but it uses a built-in 17-inch C.R.T. monitor,” J.D. Biersdorfer writes for the New York Times.
“Once relegated to the education market, the eMac is gaining attention as an affordable all-in-one system for Apple fans. In fact, Apple upgraded its eMac line last week, boosting the G4 processor to 1.25 gigahertz in its $999 model (with a DVD burner and an 80-gigabyte hard drive) and in its $799 edition (with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and a 40-gigabyte hard drive). Both models come with 256 megabytes of memory and a 32-megabyte ATI Radeon 9200 video card and now have U.S.B. 2.0 ports (standard on most new PC’s but late to arrive on Macs) mixed in with those iPod-friendly FireWire ports that also make connecting a digital camcorder a breeze,” Biersdorfer writes.
“The eMac comes with Mac OS X 10.3, Apple’s elegant yet simple operating system, and the company’s iLife ’04 suite: the self-explanatory iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD and the newcomer GarageBand, which lets you cook up personal audio compositions till the cows boogie home. There’s no free Microsoft ride here, but you do get AppleWorks, the Macintosh word-processing and spreadsheet software that will let you save files in PC-compatible formats, and a 30-day test drive of Microsoft Office for the Mac. World Book Encyclopedia 2004, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 and Quicken 2004 for Mac add to the onboard software selection,” Biersdorfer writes.
“The eMac was by far the easiest to set up of all the machines I tried out – power cord, keyboard, mouse and network cable, and you’re all plugged in. (Not that a PC setup is hard anymore, since with most systems you get a color poster and colored-coded cables to guide you.) Software compatibility is still the Mac’s Achilles’ heel, however, as many programs are still Windows-only and gamers often face a frustrating lag until popular titles get ported over from their PC versions,” Biersdorfer writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Two points to be made here: 1) If you want to play games, get a PlayStation and you’ll have a better time, and 2) There are currently over 18,000 Macintosh applications and software titles, so even if you find a piece of Windows-only software, odds are high that there is a Mac title that will do the same or a better job for you. Click here to browse over 18,000 Mac software applications (including games!). Bonus 3rd point: If you are a Windows user thinking about adding a Mac to your computing arsenal, DO IT! You can thank us later.
Clear the fog and go try an eMac. You can produce slideshows and make music and use Office and burn CDs and DVDs and watch movies and surf and email on a PC running windows, but if you want to enjoy the experience of learning one app and transferring that knowledge straight into nearly every other app you care to use, and you dont want to be turning apps on and off just in case your computer slows down, and you dont want to be scared about viruses or being hacked by a 9 year old and you dont want to configure the protection from trojans and pop ups and dial home apps, then try a Mac.
Geez, what I could do with an entry level 1.25GHz eMac. I have a Powerbook that cost me �2000, it is a measly 867 MHz but blows my mates �1000 2MHz PC laptop into the dust – not because this Mac, in order to justifiy the extra �1000 price tag, is a work of engineering art that is built to last for many years, but because it runs Mac OS X Panther.
A poxy Mac can-t open apps in a millisecond, my mates PC does that, and it has a slower hard drive than his and the PC screen resolution is supposed to be better – but this Mac just runs so many apps at once and just doesnt seem to care what you throw at it. There are more apps for 95% of tasks than you can imagine, and they seem to follow a system so your head doesnt spin trying to work out where the programmer is coming from.
You can take one look at both our screens with a shed full of windows open, press a hotkey on a Mac to see every window Expos�d or you can faff around for a Windows “shortcut” to achieve the same. With an array of windows on screen, a film playing in the corner, word open, camera downloading blah blah, suddenly MHz and resolution numbers on a spec sheet mean zilch. There is a good reason why designers use Macs.
So for �500-�600 it is a no brainer to get a 1.25MHz straight out the box eMac and just see why you cant really go wrong trying a Mac computer set up that most Dell �500 PC users have absolutely no experience of.