When they announced the first Intel machines six months early, Apple graciously offered to allow developers to trade in their developer transition machines for a shiny new 17″ Intel iMac. Given that the offer was time limited and that we were obligated to return the machine at the end of the year, we took advantage of it. If we were buying a new machine, I probably would have opted for the 20″ 2.GHz model (it’s faster and has more video memory), but that wasn’t an option.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the 17″ model.

It’s fast. It’s quiet. There are some very nice thoughtful features - for instance, when you’re setting it up and creating your account, you can take a picture of yourself using the built-in iSight camera instead of only being able to pick from existing icons that ship with the system.

The display is very bright and easy to read.

The iMac includes FrontRow and Apple’s infrared remote (oh how I wish it were Bluetooth, but still). Apple’s done a nice job of gradually bundling more goodies in the baseline machines - every iMac now ships with Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, built-in iSight, and the remote. FrontRow is cute… it works well for using your iMac as a media player from across the room. But beware shuffling a huge MP3 library, it’ll take quite a while.

World of Warcraft plays surprisingly well on it. I found it quite playable even at full resolution with the graphics all cranked up. I didn’t enter Battlegrounds on it, and I could imagine it might stumble in Alterac Valley but for light play it worked very nicely.

Apple now bundles the “Mighty Mouse” with it, and I really dislike the Mighty Mouse… but then I really dislike Apple’s single button mice, too. I want multiple real buttons, not a real button and some fake pseudo-buttons. But there are a lot of Mighty Mouse lovers out there; they’ll be happy, and the rest of us can slap on a cheap multi-button mouse, which we would’ve done anyway.

I’ll leave software compatibility to my MacBook Pro article. I’ll probably never use the iMac heavily. But for now I can say that it is a very nice machine.

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