Apple 17-inch flat panel iMac (Power PC G4, 800 MHz, 256MB SDRAM)

By Staff,John Rizzo
Sep 23, 2002

Each iteration of Apple's "Luxor lamp" iMac is a winner, and the newest choice--a top-of-the-line option with a new 17-inch display--stands on top of the pile. Sure, the original 15-inch iMac line offers a stylish, solid computer for the price, but for just US$200 more than the high-end 15-inch (US$1,999, S$3,289), Apple now adds a 17-inch wide-screen display, an 80GB hard drive, and faster graphics performance. Mix all this with an ample and versatile software bundle, and you have one of the best consumer Macs that Apple has ever designed--certainly worth the investment for anyone who spends a lot of time in front of the computer, likes to watch DVD movies, or could use the extra space of a 17-inch display for comparing multiple documents. Students can still get by with one of the lower-end iMac models. But we have to warn you: if you see the 17-inch iMac, you'll find it hard to resist.

Design
The new iMac's wide-screen format makes the second-generation design appear more balanced and less squat than the 15-inch model, and it also offers nearly two-thirds more desktop space. In fact, the display is wide enough to fit two word-processing or PDF pages side by side, with plenty of room left over to access the desktop.

The display also comes equipped with a higher, 1,440x900-pixel resolution, which may require you to zoom in on tiny text. But, for your trouble, you'll also get higher-quality display of graphics and movies. Plus, the screen's 16:10 aspect ratio means that DVD movies viewed in letterbox format now fill the entire screen, offering a significantly bigger image than before.

Of course, as on all current iMac displays, the chrome articulating arm not only holds up the monitor, but also lets you smoothly and easily raise and lower, rotate side to side, and tilt the screen to just about any position. The arm is so sturdy, in fact, that Apple recommends that you use it as a handle when you pick up the roughly 22-pound iMac.

The larger, 17-inch display usually hides the iMac's snow-white, dome-shaped CPU housing from sight while you work, and the system's nearly silent fan doesn't betray its presence, either--a nice plus in the home or small office. The 10.2-inch-wide dome saves a significant amount of desk space compared to the room needed for a clunky CRT monitor, though the small size also means there's little computer to hide cables behind. The small CPU housing also forces you to sacrifice a tiny bit more desk space for the two transparent, spherical, high-quality Apple Pro speakers. The audio amplifier is built into the iMac, so you don't see any electronics in the speakers themselves.

Features
The 17-inch iMac, available in only one configuration (though you can up the RAM or add a US$99 AirPort card when ordering), comes packed with more powerful features, including the Pioneer DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive, which performed without a hiccup at both reading and writing CDs and DVDs in our tests, 100BaseT Ethernet, and an ample variety of ports. Looking inside the dome chassis, you'll find the same 800MHz G4 processor as that of the high-end 15-inch model. It offers similarly decent performance but with slightly faster 3D graphics rendering, thanks to the included Nvidia GeForce4 MX card.

Alas, like all iMacs since the original Bondi Blue model, the 17-inch flat-panel iMac won't let you add internal drives, such as a second internal hard drive, and that's a pity, since 80GB can run out quickly if you work with a lot of digital video, for example. You can easily add an AirPort card for wireless access and a RAM module, however, just by popping off the bottom of the dome (holding the iMac sideways or upside down).

The dome also offers ports galore for external drives and devices: three USB ports, a VGA port, two FireWire ports, a 100MB Ethernet port, a modem, and speaker and headphone ports, plus two extra USB ports on the keyboard. We'd prefer at least one or two FireWire ports on the "front" of the dome, but the iMac's rotating display means that the front can become the back in an instant, as long as you don't need frequent access to the disc drive.

One of the iMac's best features is its seamless interoperability of hardware and software. Thanks to a full complement of bundled software, you can plug in an iPod, and the iMac will launch iTunes 3.0 and ask if you want to move songs to the MP3 player. The same goes for digital photos: plug in a digital camera, and iPhoto launches and lets you import pictures. Other software goodies that come standard with the iMac include Quicken 2002 Deluxe, FAXstf X, the World Book Encyclopedia, iMovie 2.0, iDVD 2.0 for burning DVDs, and AppleWorks 6.2, which can open Microsoft Office documents and save them in Office formats. You'll also get three games, including Pangea's engaging, 3D, '50s sci-fi adventure Otto Matic. Each new iMac also ships with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar preinstalled.

Performance
Application performance
In Photoshop, iMovie, and iTunes, the 800MHz iMac beat out the 700MHz eMac, Apple's lower-end home and education computer, by the narrowest of margins, thanks to the iMac's faster CPU and 256MB of RAM. Anecdotally, we found the iMac's performance to be snappy and responsive. The iMac boots Mac OS X 10.2 in less than two minutes, for example, and most applications launch within a few seconds.

Quake III
Thanks to a new, Nvidia GeForce4 MX graphics card, as well as a slightly faster CPU, the 17-inch iMac excelled in our Quake III test, beating the eMac by about seven frames per second, and we found that Quake ran about 20 percent faster on the new iMac than it did on the 15-inch iMac (both have 800MHz G4 processors).

Service and support
As usual, Apple backs its machines with a subpar one-year parts and service warranty and a stingy 90 days of toll-free technical support. However, you can extend all of this to three years, with the US$149 AppleCare Protection Plan. That's not a bad price, but we'd prefer free tech support for the life of the standard warranty.

Apple counters with substantial Web support, including online technical notes, FAQs, and large message boards, though you must submit to the site's free registration process before you can access the wealth of info. Also, thanks to OS X 10.2, you can now view much of the online help content from certain operating-system features: Sherlock 3.0 lets you search for and read knowledge base articles, and the help system can connect to the Internet and download info into the Help application.

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