Thursday, October 31, 2002
I announced my intention to buy an iMac months ago, but today I finally went through with it. Primary reason for the purchase is to have an iMac of my own for testing purposes: checking my Web page and the CSS code I've been writing for the book (up 'til now I've been borrowing other people's machines to do this). But I'm also curious about OS X, and I just want to know how current Macs "tick".
Earlier in the week I ran across an online ad announcing a special offer on older models. I can't readily afford the newer models (I was tempted to buy an eMac, but I find it hard to justify paying almost $2K -- including taxes -- just to buy a computer. My high-end Dell desktop cost just over $1K by comparison). For my purposes, all I needed was a decent G3-based system, sufficient enough to run OS X. The price being offered was a couple hundred dollars cheaper than a comparable system that had gone on sale at a competitor I had been tracking and was cheaper even than some slower, used systems I had seen, so I decided to take the plunge. I placed a couple of calls to Andy at SimmplyMacs and decided upon a 500Mhz G3 iMac with a DVD drive and a Firewire connection (Graphite model). I also bought a copy of Mac OS X to go with it (version 10.1 -- will see if I can persuade Apple Canada to send me a copy of the new 10.2 "Jaguar" OS as a reviewer for The Computer Paper).
I got it set up in our bedroom -- one of the few remaining places to put a computer in the house. After getting it started I installed OS X. I couldn't get the Internet connection to work, which I suspect is do to a mislabeled CAT-5 cable running from the data switch in the basement, but it gave me a chance to "look under the hood" a bit and play with some of the iMac's settings. First impression: the iMac doesn’t really lend itself to tinkering. I started playing with some of its Network settings and got a bit frustrated at the lack of options.
Early days yet though. Am looking forward to "playing" with it and finding out what it's really made of.
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