The iMac makes a pretty good tool if you are using it for very specific reasons and don’t have to interact much with Windows machines.

My experiences with it have been very mixed. A few significant failings:

• No USB 2.0 support which limits the peripherals I’d want to use with it.

• I have only successfully burned 1 music CD and have about a dozen coasters. I’ve lowered the burn speed down to 1X and still get wacky unknown errors with numbers like 14009. Using Dejanews I’ve seen others report this but no solution has ever come up. Perhaps it’s defective hardware but it it hasn’t had any problems so far burning data CDs. I’ve only used iTunes with it so far. Another favorite error is to get half way through and give the error “CD burning failed because an unknown error occurred (-2147352542). Yea, real user friendly there.

• Now, I’d just move these MP3s to my PC from iTunes except that iTunes doesn’t reliably let me copy my MP3s. Some copy, some don’t. No rhyme or reason that I’ve been able to find. Moving them to the fireware drive has been similarly problematic. Strangely, I have had better (but not perfect) luck copying from iTunes to a desktop folder and then copying it to the Firewire drive. But this is quite tedious and doesn’t work on all songs. If you try dragging all your songs from iTunes then it won’t copy any. Basically it’s either all of them will copy or none of them will. This make iTunes a pretty crummy music library since I can’t burn CDs from it and can’t copy from iTunes. And if I try copy from the iTunes folder itself I get yet another unknown error (error code = -50).  Again, if I copy to the desktop from the iTunes folder it seems to work fine. It seems to be a problem specific to copying over Firewire. If it supported USB 2.0 I’d be willing to play around with my USB 2 hard drive more on it to see if the problem happened there.

• Extremely temperamental networking. Some machines on my home peer network it can connect to. Others it can’t. This particular machine it can’t connect to for some reason. But this machine can connect to the Mac.

• Given the above, you’d almost think that the thing had some sort of hardware defect. But what kinds of defects could account to such a wide variety of problems?

• Terrible printing support in MacOS X unless you run a pure Mac network.

• I’ve had instances where my Firewire connected camcorder wasn’t recognized. Rebooting the machine fixed it but then eventually something will happen and we’re back to the drawing board.

Now, with that said, I don’t want to make it sound like I think MacOS is junk. Windows XP has lots of problems too. But then again, Windows XP comes with machines that cost a lot less money and right off the bat allow me to do crazy video things like watch them full screen without having to pay extra.

And MacOS X (10.2.1) is a heck of a lot more polished. It does not multitask better than Windows XP but it does have one thing that is nice – you can drag windows around regardless of how busy they are. Whereas on Windows, if the app is busy, good luck trying to move the window.

If it were MacOS that was dominant and Windows that was the niche, then I’d be pointing out how much MacOS kicks Windows’ butt because a lot of these issues probably wouldn’t exist or if they did, they would be more than made up by the benefits of having vast third party support.

But the fact is, with only 3% of the market, the iMac just doesn’t cut it as a replacement computer for the general user. Believe me, as a former OS/2 fanatic I know the downsides of being on a niche platform. On Windows if I had the problems I’ve been having with this Mac I could just pop in some info on Google and it would show websites or news groups that have people who have had the same problem. When you’ve got 25 times the user base, there’s a much larger pool of experience to draw upon. My music CD ROM burning problem, for instance, how can there be no solutions to this? Others have posted this problem but no answer has ever come up.

As if peer support disadvantages weren’t enough, there’s the software.  Apple sets the tone itself by charging $30 for Quicktime Pro. There seems to be a much greater tendency to not have trial versions on the Mac. For instance, I’d love to try out “Toast” for Mac but there doesn’t seem to be a demo version.

I’ve gotten a lot of email from Mac users who think I’m some sort of Microsoft Windows zombie. Hey, I spent a good chunk of my career on OS/2. I know all about alternative platforms. And if you’re already a Mac user, the Mac continues to make sense. I don’t really see any reason why a seasoned Mac user would want to switch to Windows.