Yes, hell hath frozen over: I bought an iMac. Since Apple switched to Intel’s blazing fast Core processors in January, and since that means you can run Windows on your Mac if you *really* have to, I have been extremely tempted. Well, I sold three PCs that I used at my desk for various tasks in order to pay for my 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac (plus a second matching widescreen 20″ monitor, coming soon), and now, 48 hours later, I have to say that I don’t miss any of them one bit. The iMac is incredibly fast, incredibly slick, and rock-solid stable. Apple has come a long way in the last few years; this isn’t the piece of crap iFruit iMacs we used to have in high school that would crash every time you opened a Word document. With the explosion in popularity of Macs, even more software has become available now too; there’s nothing I could do on my PC that I haven’t been able to do on my Mac. Except that it’s easier and more stable now.

One big difference is the space, heat, and power. It’s so wierd to walk into my room and not hear a constant thrum of fans and hard drives, not to mention the fact that there’s no longer a huge rat’s nest of wires under my desk. Since the iMac is all self-contained, there’s a minimum of wires and it’s virtually silent. If I’m in my room I can’t tell whether it’s turned on or not unless I look at the screen.

So far, then, a very positive experience. The screen is insanely bright with rich colors, the processor is faster than anything I’ve ever used, and as soon as memory prices come back down to earth I’ll be upgrading from the stock 1GB to 2GB of RAM so I can run OSX and Windows simultaneously (via Parallels) if I need to.