Saw one today at the Apple Store - F U G L Y. It's a jumbled mishmash of mismatched metallic surfaces and black and white plastic. The back of the unit is dull black, which just looks cheap. The metallic surface of the keyboard doesn't match the metal on the front of the iMac, or the stand. The keyboard has white chiclet gap toothed keys, but Apple's mouse still sports the glossy white finish of the old iMac. The white cables linking the components together clash with the black and metal of the system unit.

The face of the machine ends up looking like a raccoon, with the black glossy monitor frame sitting above the aluminum chin of the iMac. I think they were trying to make the chin look less prominent than it did on the old iMac. They succeeded, but man does it look pedestrian now. Feels like something HP would come up with if they tried to make a Taiwan knockoff of the white iMac, but were unable to resist their el cheapo brushed metal and glossy black plastic design fetish.

If I wanted something this ugly, I'd buy a Dell and save $500.

The high-gloss screen boasts high-reflections and poor color accuracy. Unless you do all of your computing in an unlit basement the glare is likely to be an issue, and forget about trying to get accurate color for video or photo editing out of this thing.

The keyboard sucks. You're already paying laptop prices ($2200 for the high end 24" model) for a desktop system - you'd think they could at least throw in a decent desktop keyboard, instead of a giant-sized version of the one that comes with the MacBooks.

The guts of this thing are pure laptop - last year's laptop. It has a slow system bus and even slower RAM. The CPU is fast, but it's kinda like a hamster running really fast on its wheel - it's not going anywhere caged behind a slow system bus and sluggish RAM. Sort of a waste. And the standard 1GB of RAM on these systems is a joke - PC laptops are shipping with that much RAM at the $2000 price point.

The ATI graphics card is also a dud, having received scathing reviews earlier this year. It's actually inferior to the nVidia card shipping in the old 24" iMac. Thanks for the downgrade, Apple (and you can't swap out the video card anymore, either).

I think Apple designed this thing for release in the first or second quarter of 2007, when it wouldn't have looked quite so obsolete, then had to delay it to make room for the iPhone launch.

Better luck next time, Steve. It's just as well - I didn't want to get a Mac until after the next version of OS X is released, anyhow.

You know, I don't have a problem with plastic goods designed for longterm use, like a plastic desk organizer, a plastic plant pot or a plastic clothes hamper. I think those are effective uses of plastic. If anything, it might ultimately be more resource and energy efficient to use plastics for these things as opposed to other items, simply because the plastics don't corrode, don't easily dent or break, and weigh less and cost less to ship. They also don't require potentially toxic paints or other finishes.

Disposable plastic junk on the other hand is a real problem, especially the stuff that can't even be recycled. Grocery bags, soda bottles and all that instant garbage, especially since it's somewhere between difficult to get many of those things recycled in much of the US. And if toxic crap really is leaking out of some plastics, that just makes them even more of a disaster.

"If we wait for comparable human data and it comes out like animal data, we aren't going to be breeding as a species."

I think I saw a movie about this . . .

I'm just amused by how obsessed the Judeo-Christian God supposedly is with little boys' wee wees.

Guess that helps to explain all the kiddie-f'ing priests . . .