[drloomis]

Hello.

I want to buy the 15 inch iMac. I prefer it to the 17inch, which just doesn't look right to me.

My conerns are, I think the NEW keyboard is terrible. I want the old pro keyboard. I could buy the older iMac from a reseller, but I would ratehr have a 1ghz iMac and just find a keyboard a like, or the old one.

• What do you think of the NEW keyboards?

I was thinking a bluetooth keyboard would be cool, but besides apple are there any good ones? Since I don't like the keyboard, the wireless one won't do me any good.

• I want to burn DVD's down the road.

Which external DVD do you recommend. I want at least 4X to burn DVD-R.

• What is a good DVD authoring software? Toast 6 seems to be the only option after iDVD (which you can't use with an external drive) or DVD Studio Pro 2?

And anything else you guys can think of. I really think the 15 inch is a great deal. The eMac is even better, but I like the flat screen and it takes up less desk space.

Thanks.

[tRr]

My girlfriend just picked up her 15in iMac today. She actually loves the new keyboard, I didn't really have much time to type on it but she was actually concerned as she feels my Pro is a bit to soft. So she is ecstatic with it.

I will mention it doesn't come with a USB keyboard extender cable so we had to buy that separate (a bit of a drag considering they still come with G5's.)

I never really hanged around the other 15in or 17in, but the screen seems really nice, no dead or stuck pixels and very fast operation compared to my 466mhz G4. I think at the end she had the brightness down to a little lower then 75%. That was the first thing she had to change

The fan is also barley noticeable, and once we opened the window it just disappeared into the background.

The thing I found a bit weird was that the white light on the monitor only glows when its sleeping, and not when its on running. I don't know if its always been like that its nothing to complain about I just though it was broken or something at first.

And its great that Apple includes 7200 RPM hard drives on low end models.

Can't help you really with any of the other stuff

We have another switcher

[Luca Rescigno]

I think the new keyboard is fine. My eMac came with one and it's comfortable and has a good feel to it. I don't understand all the negative sentiments towards it. It feels basically the same as the Pro Keyboard with just a few differences... the location of the USB ports, the plastic border around the outside, and the fact that there's no annoying "Num Lock" light on the Clear button. Yeah, it has that weird plastic platform thing between the PgUp/PgDn/etc keys and the arrow keys, but it actually helps because the grooves and stuff in that area of the keyboard make it easy to locate the arrow keys without looking.

If performance is anything like my 1 GHz eMac, you'll be happy. Just make sure you put at least 512 MB of RAM in it (ideally, you'd configure a 512 MB module in the non-user slot and buy an extra 512 MB for the user slot, but that might not be feasible).

[Nessie]

You might be able to find older iMac keyboards on eBay. A friend of mine with a 333 MHZ iMac broke his and got one cheap online. I don't know much about the ones on the new iMac, but I loved the feel of his old keyboard.

[drloomis]

Originally posted by Nessie:
You might be able to find older iMac keyboards on eBay. A friend of mine with a 333 MHZ iMac broke his and got one cheap online. I don't know much about the ones on the new iMac, but I loved the feel of his old keyboard.

I was thinking of that. Actually I went to CompUSA and they had some great keyboards... one of the best ones was a Microsoft one... wireless and great to type on... so I would probably buy a new keyboard and mouse (need that scroll wheel) and sell my apple keyboard and mouse on e-bay.

I have yet to see a dead pixel on the imac screens... is this common?

Anyway, I looked at the 17inch again... looked better... I think having the superdrive built in did it.... I like the widescreen look... but would prefer say the 15.2 widescreen look of the Ti powebook...

Anyway, I'm totally in love with the "i" series right now. Love live the ibook, imac.

they better now mess this up and get ride of them anytime soon.