Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Although I have some quibbles with the details, the iMac offers outstanding performance at a fair price. Still, lovely as the iMac is, I think Apple may be blowing an opportunity to expand its market.

Some functionality seems to have been lost in the interest of aesthetics. The previous generation of iMacs allowed almost unlimited adjustment of both horizontal and vertical screen angle and a considerable range of height. The new models offer effortless vertical tilt, but only up to 30 degrees. Horizontal movement is accomplished by swiveling the entire unit, which has a slippery plastic pad on the bottom of the aluminum foot. There is no height adjustment at all, a serious blow to good ergonomics.

Price is another concern. The cheapest iMac, the 17-in. with a 1.6 gigahertz G5 processor, doesn't sound too bad at $1,299. But Apple prices all of the iMacs with a bare minimum of 256 megabytes of memory, which will hobble performance. Bringing that to 512 MB adds $75; moving to a gigabyte, which you'll want for Garage Band or any serious photo or video editing, adds $225. Throw in the wireless options, and the base iMac is up to a hefty $1,702, while the 20-in. version goes well over $2,000. By contrast, you can get a Dell (DELL ) Dimension 4600 with a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, a gigabyte of memory, and a 17-in. flat panel display for $1,164. Elegance is expensive.

The average selling price of a desktop PC is below $750, and few go for more than $1,000. But Apple's only sub-$1,000 computers are two dated eMacs, bulbous all-in-ones with 17-in. CRT displays.

With any real improvement in Windows at least two years away, I think Apple could shake the industry by offering, for $700 or less, a PC-like Mac box for which consumers would provide their own displays.