Well yesterday my new iMac arrived and so I thought I would post a few initial impressions. I think the first thing I have to say is Wow! The iMac is just so well designed, it's beautiful to look at yet it isn't design at the sacrifice of functionality. If anything the design compliments the functionality and simplicity is the keyword.

The first thing that struck me was how quick it was to set-up. I remember seeing this Mac advert when it first came out.

At the time I thought that this was just Apple exaggerating as other than when I have had to install Windows I never thought that a new PC took that long to set-up. Having now just set my iMac up I can definitely say that there is a difference and that the claims of "it works straight from the box" are very true.

The iMac comes in a large box which contains the iMac itself and the mouse, keyboard and Apple remote. Setting up the iMac is simply a case of taking it out of it's box, connecting the power lead, plugging the keyboard into one of the USB ports on the back of the iMac and then plugging the mouse into the keyboard. That's it, you are ready to go. Okay if you have printers, scanners, USB/Firewire drives etc than they would need plugging in too but you get the idea.

When you switch on the iMac for the first time you are prompted to create an Administrator account and can even take a photo of yourself using the built in webcam to identify that profile. It's then a case of adding your personal details which are saved in a secure keychain so that they can be easily added to other programs. Think of the way when you installed MS Office on a PC you fill in your name, address etc and how it then automatically appears in documents where you have an address but then make it secure, that's how the keychain work.

Once you've done that, in my case at least, it immediately detected my Wireless Network, asked me for my password and that's it I was connected to the Internet and had completed setting up my iMac. The whole process from taking it out of the box and getting online took me 5 - 10 minutes (plus another 10 minutes just oohing and ahhing). I was expecting the wireless networking side of things to be a lot more complicated than it was as PC's can be a real pain doing this having to first scan for networks, selecting them, entering a WEP key and then find that it still won't connect. The Mac by comparison was a joy and did it all instantly and without any hiccups.

OSX Tiger is obviously the biggest thing to get your head around but even that is not particularly difficult as OSX follows many conventions used by all computers like files are stored in folders, permissions can be set on files and folders etc, basically if you can use a computer, any computer, you can easily pick up OSX without any problems. In fact it's not so much the big differences between Mac's and PC's that catch you out but the small ones. On a PC if you want to copy a file or folder you press Ctrl+C but on a Mac it's Apple+C (the Ctrl key on a Mac does different things to on a PC). On all PC's I've ever used the @ sign is above the ' sign on the keyboard and the " mark is above the number 2. However on my Mac keyboard the @ sign and " mark are reversed. Hardly the most difficult thing to get used to but it catches me out a few times. Understandably I am a little slow at using OSX compared to Windows and there are numerous menu options and commands that I have no idea what they do but slowly but surely it's all starting to make more sense and I'm sure it won't be too long before I'm flying on the Mac like I do on the PC.

Installing programs in OSX is so easy, in fact it's almost too easy for a ex PC user who is used to sitting and watching a progress bar for a few minutes. So far all the programs I've installed, Office 2004, Photoshop CS2, iWork etc, have just been a case of putting the disc in the DVD drive and then dragging the program icon into the Applications folder in Finder. That's it. It installs in seconds!

Restoring my data from my PC was also very easy. OSX detected my NTFS formatted USB drive and allowed me to copy (OSX can read NTFS partitions but cannot write to them) all my data by dragging it into the relevant folders on my system drive or onto my other USB drive. Doing this revealed just how fast the iMac is, compared to my old PC it goes like lightning copying 1.5GB of data from my USB drive in 45 seconds. Importing my e-mails into Entourage was a lot easier than I expected thanks to the O2M program I had used on my PC to create an mbox file that can be read by many Mac e-mail clients. All I had to do was to set-up Entourage with my e-mail account settings and then drag the mbox file from my PC's e-mail client into a folder in Entourage and that was it. The whole process took just a few seconds.

All in all I am very impressed with the iMac and just wish I had made the switch earlier. The iMac/OSX just seems so much more streamlined and efficient than any PC/Windows I've used in the past and it's very fast. I had heard of a lot of problems people were having getting Photoshop CS2 to run satisfactorily on the Intel iMac under Rosetta but personally I've found it runs faster than it did on my old PC so I'm delighted.

I still might buy a book on OSX so that I can learn the nitty gritty stuff, not because you need to in order to be able to use OSX, just because I like to know everything about my computer.