Hey guys, Jon Rettinger here with Jon4Lakers.com and I want to give you a review of my new 24-inch iMac. I’ll just do a recap, these are facts from the unboxing. They are highlighted by a 2.8Ghz Intel Core2 Duo processor, a 320-gigabyte hard drive, a Super Drive, ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro at 256 megabytes of video RAM. The computer came stock with 2 gigabytes RAM, I upgraded to 4. I’ll talk about that in a little bit.

My apologies in advance, my handheld camera is a little bit on the fritz, so I'm just going to be talking about computers instead of showing you what you guys saw in the unboxing. So first off I was coming from a MacBook Pro which was a year and a half old, the 2.4ghz processor and that computer was fantastic, I was just looking for more of a desktop than that. I got to say I have been thrilled with the iMac, the screen size, 24-inch gives enough real estate, I don’t miss that I had 2 monitors, great illusion is fantastic. The speed, even with 2 gigabytes of RAM, the computer was screaming fast, boot up time is under 20 seconds, that’s with everything working, from pushing power to being online, opening up any program is about 20 seconds, program will load it quickly. I had zero trouble using my Creation Assistant to migrate all my files out of my iMac, so kudos Apple for that. I just plugged in a FireWire cable and plugged it to the iMac and it plugged into the MacBook Pro perfectly.

Things I really like about the iMac, I really like the aluminum look, the brush aluminum is being featured into more prominently in all of Apple’s products. I like the glossy finish of the monitor. I know that the people prefer matte. I'm a glossy fan so I was really happy to have it. I haven’t had any reflection issues at all, my computer is right in front of a window. So I really like it, it makes the colors pop and makes them up to the low vibrant. The Mac, they may feel the more natural colors. I like the black band around the screen of the iMac, you can see it on the picture on Apple.com, just make the screen pop out a little bit more. Besides, the iMac has been fantastic. I like having the all in one feature, it’s got a very small footprint—a lot of room on my desk now I can do my work here than I could before. And with the wireless keyboard, I have much more real estates on my desk.

Again performance wise, I think that they are fantastic. It’s been fast, everything I've asked it to do, whether I'm editing movies in iMovie, uploading to YouTube, using Microsoft Word, playing a game online or using parallels, the computer is so fast. You can actually do that all at once, the computer is still able to handle it. Even with 2 gigabytes of RAM, it really was able to handle it well. So if you're thinking about upgrading to an iMac or getting an iMac, I can’t recommend it enough. I don’t know if they're going to get upgraded for a while. I think the specs right now are perfect. So definitely go ahead and do it if you're thinking about it.

I upgraded to 4 gigabytes if RAM because I do a lot of video editing and crucial with running a special $400.00, you have 4 gigs so I did it, probably didn’t have to but I did and I did know it’s a little bit of a performance increase, programs load a little bit quicker and then when I was running parallel, I would be able to dedicate full 2 gigabytes of RAM to Windows and I just made windows run a little bit faster.

So 4 gigabytes is not necessary but definitely a nice upgrade when I'm doing a lot of processor intensive stuff, or if you find that using Windows, either be it parallels or Bootcamp if you're going to use Vista on Bootcamp, 4 gigabytes is certainly preferred.

I’ll give you guys a real quick take on the iMac, it has been—I think it’s fantastic. It’s been quick, it’s quiet, doesn’t get hot, I don’t have any dead pixels, some other questions people have been asking. The computer has just been absolutely rock solid, I cant recommend it enough. If you're looking for a desktop, go for the iMac. It can give you the best of both worlds, you can run Windows in Bootcamp and still have the beauty if OS X, really kind of gives you everything. So just a quick take on the iMac, I want to get my hand held up and running, I’ll give you guys some more specs on it and some reviews and just in recap, it’s got three USB ports, a mini DVI port, for an extra monitor if you like, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, audio in, audio out and a microphone jack. It really has ports for everything. Well it’s just a fantastic computer. I can’t say enough good thingsw about it. Once again Apple impressed me with their hardware build and the quality of the operating system.

So, that’s a quick review guys, this is Jon Rettinger with Jon4Lakers.com giving you a quick review of my 24-inch iMac. I hope you guys enjoyed and if you like to write for the site at www.jon4lakers.com, go there and hit the apply button on the right and fill it out, send an sample post on a technology topic of your choice and we will get back to you. All right guys, talk to you soon. Bye!

[Bloopers]