The very first computer I ever owned was a Mac SE. It was one of those traditional Macs, where everything was contained inside a single box, including a 20MB hard drive and a tiny black and white screen. Since then, I’ve had three Macs and three Windows machines, and I’m probably never going to switch back to using a Macintosh. The price/performance I get out of my Dell is far superior to that of a Mac, or even many Windows PC manufacturers.

That said, the new Apple iMac G5 is very cool. Ever since Jobs returned to Apple, he’s been moving the company from a computer manufacturer to a design object manufacturer, and this latest iMac is the latest expression of that direction. This is a computer you could feature in an art exhibit. Sure, it still has the same limited expandibility issue that the SE had, but the marginal improvement you get from upgrades nowadays aren’t as significant as they once were. And of course, most consumers aren’t going to upgrade their machines anyway (many of them don’t even know how to change their desktop image), so it’s kind of a moot point. The new iMac also has built in wireless and bluetooth, so the only cord you’ll need to plug in is power.

The one thing I would have done to really make this the hot computer product of Christmas 2004 is to add a 6 hour battery and a pen interface (a la the Tablet PC). Sure it looks great on your desk, but really you want to browse the web while sitting on your couch or out in the yard. Of course, Tablet PCs command about a thousand dollar premium over notebooks, so this is probably out of the question. More importantly, since the major poker sites don’t support Macs, any Mac is a big waste of money.