apple

I'm used both Wintel and Mac my whole life, I always kept a PC around because for basic stuff because they are soo cheap and the mac around for my high end work.

I finally ditched that idea with the new emac.

don't let the Mhz fool you, 1.25Ghz G4 is a fast machine, certainly faster than any Celeron at *any* Mhz. The addition of the 512kb backside cache, better video card and hack to allow video spanning makes the new $799.99 emac a great first computer or 2nd addition to the family. It's all-in-one but the USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and up to 1GB of memory will keep you busy adding accessories to entend it's use for years to come.

My 10-year-old, that is, off the eMac, which sits alongside a Windows PC.

Recently, my household has undergone a revolution, a computer revolution. This spring, I realized that I had not purchased a new computer for myself since the 80s (!). Oh, we had (and still have) plenty of computers around, as I work with and on them, but I had purchased none of them for myself.

It was time. Though I have more than 20 years of experience, professional and personal, in the PC world, I changed religions and bought Apple computers, one iBook and one eMac, and of course related products.

The iBook came first; happy with that, I started looking seriously at iMacs and eMacs. The iMac is a beautiful machine, but the eMac, configured as I would want the iMac to be, was $750 less, and there's a lot this single mom can do with $750. I love great and beautiful design, but in this case, I loved that $750 more, so decided on the eMac over the iMac.

I ordered the eMac with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive, SuperDrive, and an AirPort Extreme card. I also got AppleCare for the eMac. As the product information above mentions, set up was easy: unpack, plug in, turn on.

My 10-year-old son was skeptical at first, as he is well-versed with all flavors of Windows. It took him about 30 seconds to come around, when he saw that he could surf the Web on the eMac while I surfed on the iBook, thanks to the AirPort Extreme network in the house. If that hadn't convinced him, other opportunities abounded.

The eMac comes nicely configured with all the software one would need straight off: AppleWorks for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and painting, and database functions, Quicken for personal finance, Apple's Safari browser (with Microsoft's IE also available), an email package, encyclopedia, games, and iLife, Apple's suite of software for photos, movies, music, and more.

One big hit, for at least two days, was the speech recognition software which comes with the eMac. Like other programs on the eMac, the included chess game can be controlled with voice commands; this is fun to play with, but has not become the method of choice over these weeks we've had the eMac. (You can tell the computer "Tell me a joke" to have it tell you a knock-knock joke, but the performance of the speech recognition software is pretty spotty. Still, a cute diversion!)

Another big (and continuing) hit is iMovie. With some of that $750 I saved getting the eMac instead of the iMac, I bought a digital video camera. iMovie is totally slick; I plug the camera into the firewire port, and iMovie takes over, allowing me to control the camera for rewinding, forwarding, and playback. Pulling the information from the camera into the computer is a snap: click "Play" and "Capture," and that's it. Each clip from the camera is pulled into iMovie as an individual clip, the software watching the timestamp to detect when you stopped shooting one clip and started shooting another.

iMovie lets you sequence the clips, add photos, music and other sounds, text (including titles and credits), transition from one clip to another in a variety of ways, and add effects such as rain and fog to clips... as I said, totally slick. With Brood X cicadas abounding a few weeks ago, my tall child shot and edited a short documentary about them in just a couple of hours, complete with sound effects, music, interesting transitions between clips, titles, and credits.

With iDVD part of iLife and a SuperDrive on the eMac, another choice for distributing your work is available. iDVD lets you combine movies, iPhoto slide shows, music, and other files into one cool DVD. It comes with a number of templates to give your final DVD a very professional look; you WILL amaze friends and family with your final product, even with just a slide show of still photos (set to music, of course!). iPhoto and iDVD are *that* cool.

One thing which the eMac (and iBook) did not come with that would have been useful is a Web page development tool. It's possible to create a Web page with AppleWorks, but a simple WYSIWYG tool, such as that the Mozilla browser comes with (Composer), would have been a nice addition. (This may well be available with .Mac, which I did not spring for.) With Mozilla a free download, this omission was readily corrected.

Another recommended addition, especially for those making the move from Windows to PC, is the book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition." We've used it a lot as we've explored the eMac and its software.

In the weeks we've had the eMac, it has become the computer of choice. Though the Windows PC right next to it on the desk has tons of software on it, including lots (and lots) of kid-friendly games and standard productivity tools, it just cannot hold a candle to the software that came with the eMac.

Good thing I have an iBook so I don't need to tell the tot to shove over and let me have my turn at the eMac.... more than once or twice a day, anyway.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants a fast, useful, well-engineered computer at a very reasonable price.

I just bought this to replace an aging iMac and what a great computer. At hundreds less than the iMac, this is a Mac that everyone can love...and at 800 bucks you're not going to bust the bank to get it. The perfect machine for the home user, this machine is a great box at a really competative price. One suggestion, upgrade the ram...you won't regret the extra cost and the performance difference is amazing.