So we’ve talked about the hardware itself, but what about the software? Well in the box I got OS X Leopard and iLife ‘08 pre-installed. There was also a 30 day trial of MS Office 2004 and iWork ’08. Suffice it to say the trials were taken away pretty quickly and replaced with the real products. Those are the only 2 bits of “trialware” that come with any Mac.

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There are a lot of useful applications that are a part of OS X Leopard, so instead of detailing them all, I will talk about the ones I use most often. Starting with Spaces, which is virtual desktops and allows you to organise your work into work spaces. While I’m not a heavy user of this features, it has proved useful on a few occasions when I have multiple applications open but am only really doing 2 or 3 specific things.

Time Machine is in constant use, automatic backup that works in the background without eating resources is a real bonus. And for someone like me who is not the best at backing things up, it’s given me real peace of mind. I haven’t had to recover anything yet, but knowing it’s there is always good.

Spotlight is probably one of my favourite features, as it enables me to keep my dock relatively tidy and just launch apps by typing in their name instead. It’s also been incredibly useful for tracking down old files I ported across from my previous computer as well as old emails. The usefulness of this feature cannot be understated, it save immense amounts of time!

Exposé is my favourite feature by far, and is probably the most genuinely useful way to switch between applications. The only drawback is that I have found myself trying to squeeze mice at work to switch between apps, then I realise I’m using Windows and not my Mac. Stacks I’ve also made use of, you get a Downloads and Documents ones pre done, but I’ve added one for my OS X games and for London Underground timetable information. Useful and tidy, 2 things I really like in a computer.

Mail is simple, well thought out and a pleasure to use. I think it was about 2 days after I got my iMac that I started using Mail full time. It had a few stability issues to start with, but subsequent patches have resolved them. Address Book and iCal I use a lot as well. Back when I was using Windows I basically lived by Outlook (which is a cracking piece of software in my opinion). Since the move to Mac, I’ve found MS Enotourage to be less pleasurable to use than the Apple equivalents.

The Dock really hasn’t taken any getting used to, it’s one of those things where you start using it and wonder why others don’t use something similar. It’s colourful but functional, and powerful too.

Finally in the OS X Leopard Corner I want to talk about Boot Camp. Now this has been around as a beta since Tiger, and allows you to install Windows as a second boot option on your Intel based Mac. For me this has meant I can still play my Windows based games, but it also means that pieces of software that I can’t afford the Mac equivalents of can still see regular use. Granted for non gaming applications I don’t really boot out of OS X but use a virtual machine, but the point is the capability is there if I need it. The wizard was pretty straight forwards, which is helpful for people new to the Mac platform.

So that’s a rundown of the features that are part of OS X, but that’s only part of the picture. The most important question is on how I have found Leopard overall. Generally I’d say really good, it’s certainly my favourite operating system by a long way. It’s fast and secure, and easy to use but has plenty of power features if you need them. When I first started using it, I did have some stability issues, some slight slow down and a couple of crashes. But over time Apple has been releasing updates which have gradually fixed many of these issues. It’s still not 100% though with the odd occasional bug such as when I wake the system up from sleep, the dock goes completely clear rather than with the metal look background, but it’s still a lot more stable than Windows. For anyone thinking it’s the perfect OS, I don’t believe there is such a thing. However OS X offers a lot of powerful features and will do pretty much everything you could ask of it. I highly recommend it.

iLife has proven itself invaluable, and in terms of value added to the complete package, this is huge. First off I will say that I haven’t made use of iWeb or iDVD at all, so can’t comment on them. GarageBand I have played around with a bit, and it certainly seems like it’s a handy tool for podcasting and recording music.

The two applications I’ve made use of though are iPhoto and iMovie. iPhoto opened up the first time I plugged in my digital camera and started importing photos straight away. It worked without much effort and now I have all my holiday photos organised using it. It also does some nifty editing, but if you’re serious about making changes to photos then something like Photoshop is still the answer.

iMovie is my main application however, as I use it for all my videos. Before I got the computer I had never edited a video, so I was really appreciative of the way iMovie 08 handles things, and doesn’t bother with the timeline. It has its moments when it won’t always play ball, but most of the time it works spot on. It’s only recently that I uncovered how useful it really is, when I started adding background music to a video and could edit sound levels and all manner of things like that. I could even chop out sections of music, this is an under rated package. Over the last few months it’s proven itself to me time and again, and for the average consumer it’s a great introduction to movie editing.

I think I have probably written way too much, but I wanted to convey the main points I have found in the time I’ve owned my iMac. iLife is definitely a useful addition to any Mac, and kudos to Apple for including it with all new computers.

The Verdict

After several months of use, the iMac has proven to be a fantastic computer. It looks good, works great and has really made light work of tasks that often saw me cursing my old Windows computer.

As I have said before though, this is not a computer for heavy gamers. That doesn’t mean it can’t play games, but beware that it was never designed to play Crysis etc. I have absolutely no regrets about buying the iMac, it’s a magnificent machine, and at the time of purchase it fitted my needs exactly. Now time has moved on it still fits perfectly. There’s the occasional bug in the software, the lack of USB ports is occasionally irritating but overall I think it was worth every last penny and I can’t see myself going back to windows any time soon.

Part 1 - Hardware