Customer Reviews

Apple M9425LL/A eMac Combo (1.25 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, Optical Combo, 17" Flat CRT)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My 10-year-old, that is, off the eMac, which sits alongside a Windows PC.

Recently, my household has undergone a revolution, a computer revolution. This spring, I realized that I had not purchased a new computer for myself since the 80s (!). Oh, we had (and still have) plenty of computers around, as I work with and on them, but I had purchased none of them for myself.

It was time. Though I have more than 20 years of experience, professional and personal, in the PC world, I changed religions and bought Apple computers, one iBook and one eMac, and of course related products.

The iBook came first; happy with that, I started looking seriously at iMacs and eMacs. The iMac is a beautiful machine, but the eMac, configured as I would want the iMac to be, was $750 less, and there's a lot this single mom can do with $750. I love great and beautiful design, but in this case, I loved that $750 more, so decided on the eMac over the iMac.

I ordered the eMac with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive, SuperDrive, and an AirPort Extreme card. I also got AppleCare for the eMac. As the product information above mentions, set up was easy: unpack, plug in, turn on.

My 10-year-old son was skeptical at first, as he is well-versed with all flavors of Windows. It took him about 30 seconds to come around, when he saw that he could surf the Web on the eMac while I surfed on the iBook, thanks to the AirPort Extreme network in the house. If that hadn't convinced him, other opportunities abounded.

The eMac comes nicely configured with all the software one would need straight off: AppleWorks for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and painting, and database functions, Quicken for personal finance, Apple's Safari browser (with Microsoft's IE also available), an email package, encyclopedia, games, and iLife, Apple's suite of software for photos, movies, music, and more.

One big hit, for at least two days, was the speech recognition software which comes with the eMac. Like other programs on the eMac, the included chess game can be controlled with voice commands; this is fun to play with, but has not become the method of choice over these weeks we've had the eMac. (You can tell the computer "Tell me a joke" to have it tell you a knock-knock joke, but the performance of the speech recognition software is pretty spotty. Still, a cute diversion!)

Another big (and continuing) hit is iMovie. With some of that $750 I saved getting the eMac instead of the iMac, I bought a digital video camera. iMovie is totally slick; I plug the camera into the firewire port, and iMovie takes over, allowing me to control the camera for rewinding, forwarding, and playback. Pulling the information from the camera into the computer is a snap: click "Play" and "Capture," and that's it. Each clip from the camera is pulled into iMovie as an individual clip, the software watching the timestamp to detect when you stopped shooting one clip and started shooting another.

iMovie lets you sequence the clips, add photos, music and other sounds, text (including titles and credits), transition from one clip to another in a variety of ways, and add effects such as rain and fog to clips... as I said, totally slick. With Brood X cicadas abounding a few weeks ago, my tall child shot and edited a short documentary about them in just a couple of hours, complete with sound effects, music, interesting transitions between clips, titles, and credits.

With iDVD part of iLife and a SuperDrive on the eMac, another choice for distributing your work is available. iDVD lets you combine movies, iPhoto slide shows, music, and other files into one cool DVD. It comes with a number of templates to give your final DVD a very professional look; you WILL amaze friends and family with your final product, even with just a slide show of still photos (set to music, of course!). iPhoto and iDVD are *that* cool.

One thing which the eMac (and iBook) did not come with that would have been useful is a Web page development tool. It's possible to create a Web page with AppleWorks, but a simple WYSIWYG tool, such as that the Mozilla browser comes with (Composer), would have been a nice addition. (This may well be available with .Mac, which I did not spring for.) With Mozilla a free download, this omission was readily corrected.

Another recommended addition, especially for those making the move from Windows to PC, is the book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition." We've used it a lot as we've explored the eMac and its software.

In the weeks we've had the eMac, it has become the computer of choice. Though the Windows PC right next to it on the desk has tons of software on it, including lots (and lots) of kid-friendly games and standard productivity tools, it just cannot hold a candle to the software that came with the eMac.

Good thing I have an iBook so I don't need to tell the tot to shove over and let me have my turn at the eMac.... more than once or twice a day, anyway.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants a fast, useful, well-engineered computer at a very reasonable price.

A recent user survey in PC magazine identified Apple computers as the most reliable and easiest to use computers currently available. Yes, most people use Windows-based PCs, but do you want to be just another member of the PC herd -- with all of the problems and frustrations presented by Windows-based PCs -- or are you looking for a computer which is user friendly and seldom crashes? If ease of use and reliability are more important to you than being one of the crowd, please seriously consider buying an Apple. The eMac is Apple's least expensive computer, so it's a terrific way to enter the user friendly world of Apple computers at a very reasonable price. Furthermore, this new eMac is a very fast computer; faster than the previous eMac because it now uses a 1.25 GHz G4 processor which is equivalent in processor speed to a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. If you're looking for a fast, easy to use computer and are willing to try something off the beaten path, you'll love this new eMac.

I just bought this to replace an aging iMac and what a great computer. At hundreds less than the iMac, this is a Mac that everyone can love...and at 800 bucks you're not going to bust the bank to get it. The perfect machine for the home user, this machine is a great box at a really competative price. One suggestion, upgrade the ram...you won't regret the extra cost and the performance difference is amazing.

This computer is simply amazing for its price. Mac OS X Panther and iLife '04 make it worth perhaps three hundred dollars more than sells for. It's much more for your money than a PC. The 1.25 GHz G4 model has been benchmarked and is comparative in speed to a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.

I'm used both Wintel and Mac my whole life, I always kept a PC around because for basic stuff because they are soo cheap and the mac around for my high end work.

I finally ditched that idea with the new emac.

don't let the Mhz fool you, 1.25Ghz G4 is a fast machine, certainly faster than any Celeron at *any* Mhz. The addition of the 512kb backside cache, better video card and hack to allow video spanning makes the new $799.99 emac a great first computer or 2nd addition to the family. It's all-in-one but the USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and up to 1GB of memory will keep you busy adding accessories to entend it's use for years to come.

This computer is really a fantastic value. This is the first time I've ever owned a Mac, after years of working with PC's. As a writer who uses computers primarily for email and the internet, I was disappointed when my previous computer, a laptop, began physically falling apart after years of use, with a lid that could no longer close, a dying fan, and general keyboard failures that made typing a sentence two or three times the effort. I knew I wanted part-interchangability on my next computer, but I also wanted something between a laptop and a desktop in terms of number of components, space requirements, etc. At the same time, I had really started to get sick of Microsoft and was doggedly attached to my Windows 98 SP operating system, which, though no longer supported, at least had most of the bugs worked out of it and ran as a relatively stable system, with the additional advantage of being immune to many of the more serious PC "worms" that have since targeted Windows 2000 and XP.

The eMac immediately caught my eye, primarily due to it's affordability and space-saving design (i.e., no tower). I purchased this model about 5 months ago and have been thoroughly satisfied with it ever since. It virtually never has conflicts between programs; it is always quietly running at the same volume whether idle or hard at work; it is aesthetically pleasing with its large, flat glass screen. I've never had any problem with it whatsoever, in fact, and I found the "cold" transition from PC to Mac very easy as the two are similar enough to understand either implicitly, with the Mac being more forgiving overall (although I've never used Windows XP extensively enough to know it well). OS X definitely lives up to the "no brainer" reputation Macs regularly receive: I even managed to download my important PC documents from the old computer into the eMac through my home network with relative ease (OS X is designed to communicate with the PC platform for such purposes).

A final note which may be of interest to PC users generally: Mac is immune to PC viruses and spyware. That's virtually *all* viruses and spyware. I happen to have Norton installed on this Mac just as a precaution, but the fact is there's a good chance I don't even need it. This type of invasive programming simply isn't written for Macs, or so it would seem.

I have been using apple computers all my life so I've used quite a few models and this one is one of the best.
The pre-installed software let you start doing things right away (If you have the right stuff, canon camera and bunch of re-writable disks for example).

iMovie is fairly simple but at the same time, allows you to make a great looking movie. You import AVIs into the program (You end up with DVs which take up about 3x as much memory as the original AVIs, make sure you throw them out after you export your movie- dont worry, your AVIs are safe)
You can speed up or slow down the clips, edit the sound levels, make them shorter or longer and lots of other cool things!
You can also use the computors built-in microphone to record other music/sounds and put them in you movie.

iTunes. You only have half if you don't have internet access. But, if you do you do tons of things like download music by your favorite artist!
But don't despair (If you don't have internet access) you can still import music from your favorite CDs!

iPhoto lets you import images from your digitel camera! Then you can drag them onto your desktop and bring them into another program and tamper with them or mess with them in the program!

Garage band is a music program that lets you make you own songs. I haven't figured it out yet so I can't really tell you much of anything about it...

iChat is a nice small I.M. program, a little like AIM but simpler.
You just open it up and click an online person on you buddy list and press the 'A' in the lower left corner. You can even customize you chat backround with your favorite pic!

Safari is a great internet browser, much better than IE.
You have a bookmarks bar and the usual folder thing. It is really easy to delete you bookmarks too.
Everything runs smoothly and when you click a link, nothing appears around it, you just go to where link is supposed to take you.

You have a program called mail too.
You just need to click on it and as soon as the program opens a little red circle with a white number in the middle appeers, but only if you're online and you have an e-mail.
It' smuch easier than going to optonline.net or whatever and logging in and all.

iDVD is also great, it's like iMovie but it gives your film a more pro look. It makes it look like a real DVD

AppleWorks is really useful too, great for... um... typing stuff.
It IS good for school projects, you have lots of (Hundreds of) font types and a whole bunch of font sizes. You can also make spreadsheets and lots of other things

The voice command is just fun. You can make it tell you jokes and open doccuments. That program could use a little work though.

This is a great computor for the price, 1.25 GHz is about half the speed of the G5 but faster (I think) than the G4 but that is still very fast and 40 GBs will last quite a while (If you use the space well)
I highly reccoment this and all other mac computors.
A much better bue than a Windows computor and if you are absolutly in love with Windows you can use it on macs, there's some software out there called, 'Virtual PC, Windows for the mac' or something

I've had my eMac 1.25GHz Combo for 6 months, and never had a ounce of trouble with it. I am was a switcher when I got my eMac and had no idea how to use Mac OS X. In about 3 days, I was easily using the OS like I had been using it for years. It's so much more intuitive and nicer to look at than Windows XP. But this review is about the hardware, not the software so I'll give you a overview of what you will get with this eMac:

1. G4 Processor
This processor is excellent for managing photos and music, playing games, or just browsing the internet. The G5 might get all the hype these days, but the G4 stll has plenty of life left in it since it is being used in the iBook, Mac Mini, and PowerBook. My 1.25GHz is very speedy and has more power than I need. Heck, I would be fine using a 700MHz G3. I also have a HP Pavilion laptop with AMD Athlon XP-M 1.67GHz processor and it's much slower.

2. Display
The eMac uses a Flat 17" CRT Display that has 5 great resolutions (I currently using it at 1024x768) and all the resolutions display nicely. This is one of my favorite things about my eMac. There have been some reported problems with eMac displays, but AppleCare will handle all of these.

3. Mac OS X and other Software
My eMac came included with Mac OS X 10.3.4 "Panther". The OS is very simple and easy to use; it's also very stable. Now, it has crashed on my 3 times, but this was with my iPod Shuffle plugged in and me not ejecting, so it was my fault. My eMac also came loaded with iLife '04, which includes iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband, and iDVD (which is only useful if you have SuperDrive). They are all integrated so tightly, so if you want to organize a Slideshow using iPhoto, iTunes will let you play music in the background. Same with iMovie and iDVD as well. Apple now has iLife '05, so all new Macs come with it instead of '04. The eMac also had 2 games: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 and Deimos Rising; it also includes: Quicken 2004, Sound Studio, Earthlink Dial-up, World Book 2004, AppleWorks, etc.

4. Design and Speakers
The design of the eMac is no-nonsense, clean, and compact. Compared to PC's with regular towers, the eMac is a all-in-one design which allows you to save space and have have less cables hanging off it. However, there are some downsides to this; For exapmle, you can't upgrade the video card (which is a ATI Radeon 9200 32MB) and you can't add any PCI stuff. So the only thing you really can upgrade is the RAM, HD, and add a Airport Extreme card.

The speakers are also built into the case. They are not great for listening to music. I ended up buying some JBL Duets at they're website for $30 and sound very good. I also recommend them wholeheartedly.

5. Graphics Card
The included graphics card is a ATI Radeon 9200 32MB. This card is fine for basic gaming, or just using the internet but if you want to play Halo or Doom 3, don't pick up the eMac. I find that even games like Ford Racing 2 or Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 (included with eMac) don't play so well at higher resolutions and become choppy after a certain amount of time. You also can't upgrade the video card, so don't expect to play high-end games on the eMac.

Overall, the eMac is a excellent machine for managing a large library of music, storing and editing photos, web browsing and e-mail, making music with Garageband, or playing a light game. My biggest recommendation is to upgrade the RAM from 256MB to 512MB for the best Mac OS X performance.

As a writer for LowEndMac (http://www.lowendmac.com/) I know low end macs. Owning this eMac has been one of the biggest pleasures I've ever had. It's plenty fast to run the latest applications, the screen looks great, and the style is awesome! Not to mention the price as well. This is a great Mac for basically anyone from a kid to a college student, parent, or grandparent. It's super affordable and easy to use.

Very very good computer but I highly recoment the emac with supper drive and douple the memory. And if your under i tight budget this one would probly be better thant the supper drive 80 gb edition.