I’ve been deliberating long and hard over what computer to buy. For the last decade or so I’ve run Linux on my desktop, mainly because the things that I do with my machine are all, with the notable exception of video editing, covered admirably by both free software and not exactly cutting-edge hardware.

Having said that, I’ve recently bought a new DSLR camera and found that the video it churns out to be astonishingly good. Yes, it’s a pain to handle and yes, it has a CMOS sensor so it has a rolling shutter, but again for the kind of stuff I’ve found myself shooting (mainly outdoors) it’s done a marvellous job.

This leaves me with the problem that my existing Core-2 laptop wasn’t exactly man enough to properly wrangle the photos and video this thing churns out, be it either multiple exposures for HDR image processing or high-def footage. The first thought was to build a top-spec PC, but to be frank I’m starting to get bored with build-it-yourself hardware, especially if it’s not doing anything particularly specialist.

Looking round at all of the pre-built machines from the usual suspects (Dell, HP, local PC vendors, Overclockers UK etc) was a deeply depressing slog through uninspiring boxes of chips and specs and mundane hideousness, so I ventured into the Apple on-line store.

No matter what you think of Apple machines, their store is quick and clean and you can find what you want easily and with plenty of pretty pictures. So I bought an iMac :-)

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing – I did actually do some due diligence by playing fantasy PC with the Overclockers price list and tried to build an equivalent spec PC complete with OS, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. and at the end of it all found that I was saving perhaps £100 by going down the build-it-yourself PC route.

As much as I’d like to think I will upgrade my machine piecemeal in the future the reality is I very rarely actually do so. They tend to have a life cycle of approximately three years with me as a workstation, by which time any upgrade parts available are a complete non-starter as to make the upgrade really meaningful you usually end up with a new motherboard, chip, memory and graphics card. As such they’re usually stuffed in a cupboard somewhere and left to depreciate or re-cased and stuffed into a rack as a poor excuse for a server.

So, I now have an all-in-one with the hardware user-friendliness of a pissed off gorilla, but it does look very nice and the entire computer fits in the same amount of space as my previous monitor used to. It has enough IO – optical audio gives me multichannel sound (now that I’ve repaired my amplifier), gigabit ethernet gives me 112 megabytes-a-second access to my data via a Linux server providing native Apple AFP file shares, the two Thunderbolt ports (while currently useless as general purpose IO given there are no available storage or connectivity devices available) which allow me to hook up my old 24″ monitor and my video projector simultaneously, four USB ports (three used: one for keyboard, one for printer, one for phone) and a FireWire 800 hole that is currently plugged into a 1TB desktop hard drive.

It also has the amazing attribute of it running in almost complete silence. True, if you set it a massive render to get on with it does get a little more shouty, but nowhere near the level of my previous machine.

So, I’m a happy bunny and a new Mac switcher, and from Gentoo Linux, no less. As OSX is just BSD in a pretty dress, using the command line feels very familiar and with projects like MacPorts and Fink it’s almost as good as Gentoo ;-)

Overall, I’m very pleased and would strongly suggest anyone who’s put off by Apple’s pricing to give it a fair chance. I was genuinely surprised that actually they weren’t as expensive as I thought considering what you got for your cash.