"These aren't bargain-basement prices, but they are surprisingly aggressive for a flat-panel computer as well-equipped as the iMacs.
I went to Dell's Web site (www.dell.com) and priced a Dimension 4400 model with a 15-inch flat-panel, DVD-recording drive and roughly the same specs as the iMac, including the FireWire ports, and came up with a price of $1,991, about $200 more than Apple's. A similar exercise, roughly matching the specs of the low-end iMac with a Dimension 4300S, yielded a price of $1,461, compared with $1,299 for the Apple.
Of course, the Dell has a few things the iMac lacks, like a beefier video card, a floppy disk drive and expansion slots. But the iMac has some things the Dell lacks, like an optical mouse, a built-in antenna for wireless networking, and of course the floating screen.
PLUS, THE IMAC comes with Apple's four free programs for handling digital content -- iTunes for music, iMovie for editing video, iDVD for burning DVDs, and the new iPhoto for handling photos. These programs are simpler and more capable than most of their Windows counterparts.
In my tests of the new iMac, the machine handled everything I threw at it. It ran Microsoft Office handily, opening numerous documents created in Windows without breaking a sweat, and creating documents I was able to open instantly on a Windows machine.
I copied songs from a music CD to the iMac's hard disk, burned a couple of custom CDs, and created a couple of DVDs that played fine on my TV-top DVD player. When I plugged in a digital camera, the iMac imported the pictures with speed and ease.
I also installed an Apple AirPort wireless networking card and was on my wireless home network in minutes, sharing a high-speed Internet connection with several Windows machines."