iMac, uMac
As a rabid Mac enthusiast, I have no shortage of Apple hardware in my house, although I'm neglectful about sharing it. Part of it is sheer, unadulterated greed. Most of it, though, is just craven laziness. I'm a lazy, lazy man.
So this summer has, slowly, been my venue for upgrading the household equipment. First on the list was Bonnie, who has been making do quite nicely with a 233MHz "Rev B"-era iMac that I bought back in early 1999, when prices on them had dropped as vendors flushed them out for the new "fruit" colored models. It has served us well over the years, and continues to do a great job. I stopped using the machine as my daily driver when I gained employment later that year with MacCentral and was provided with a company-issue system. I've been the beneficiary of corporate largesse since then.
Bonnie now has a G4/500MHz system upgraded with a Radeon 8500 graphics card that's attached to an olde 17-inch Panasonic VGA display which seems to be working out quite well for her. She's happy with the added performance, and has transitioned to Mac OS X easier than I expected her to.
This week, I finally got the iMac situated and hooked up in the boys' room, so the kids now have their own computer. There's no question that my own Power Mac G4 1GHz dual-processor system is ideal for gaming -- there isn't a game on the Mac out there that doesn't play spectacularly, unless it's an utter piece of crap. But I'm actually surprised, watching Bob go at it, at how competently the old iMac handles what he's been throwing at it. I'd forgotten the fun I'd had with it, playing games like Myth: The Fallen Lords and the first Carmageddon.
Bob's needs are fairly modest, in all honesty. He has a plethora of game consoles to choose from when he's in the mood for something more up-to-date, but he's quite content to use the iMac to play games like Backyard Soccer or other mainstream fare. And he's just *delighted* to have a computer to call his own, rather than having to beg for time on his mother's machine.
I'm delighted to be able to let him and the other kids have that time -- I think it's important that all of them feel a sense of ownership for their computer equipment, especially since their time at school with computers is so limited. And I long enough ago absorbed the cost of that hardware that I'm not much concerned if they break it (though I'd prefer for them to be gentle with it).
My next step for that system will be to get it on the household network, so they can do things like store backup files on our household server (I have a 40GB NAS system attached) and use the shared printers. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to actually allow the iMac to be connected to the Internet, but we'll see. The sticking point there is that I don't want the kids to access the Internet unsupervised, though Bob's usually pretty good about sticking to benign Web sites like places where he can play games.
The iMac is running Mac OS 9.2, and I don't much think I'll upgrade it to OS X unless I buy a new hard drive for it. The iMac is already fully loaded with memory, with 284MB of RAM (a 256MB chip in the lower expansion slot, and a 32MB chip in the upper), so that isn't too much of a restriction. But with 4GB of storage capacity, that just doesn't leave a lot of space for games and application software, especially if I leave the Mac ready to run OS 9 software too.
That leaves me in something of a bind with network connectivity. The easiest thing for me to do is to slap the D-Link WiFi USB adapter I already have on it, but that requires me to use Mac OS X. So I'm going to price out an Ethernet-WiFi bridge instead. Those are platform-independent and don't require drivers to operate.