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Mac Lab Report

Five Ways to Improve the LCD iMac

...that don't involve the one-button mouse

- 2002.02.12

Having had some time to reflect on my experience with the flat-panel iMac at Macworld, I have come up with five ways to improve the product which range from the impractical to the irresistable. Here they are:

  1. Make the very bottom of the base, where the ports lie, rotatable. You don't want your ports in the back? Fine. Rotate them to the front. (It might be easier to make the split just below the Superdrive, but it'd look awful. Or maybe RoadTools wants to expand into desktops....)
  2. Provide Pro speaker mounts on the sides of the monitor and run jacks down through the neck.
  3. Include in the box a package of PostIt™ notes and a package of screen cleaner to clean fingerprints off the frame. (I've not purchased one yet - do they already come with something like that?)
  4. Make the monitor port a true second monitor port which can serve as an extended desktop instead of just a mirror. Use an ATI video card, though, so you don't hurt Power Mac sales.
  5. Give the keyboard a snappier response. Apple hasn't make a decent keyboard since the old Extended Keyboard; everything else is squishy. I want a nice solid click, and I don't care if it's noisy. I actually went to the effort of trying out a bunch of third-party keyboards, but they're all squishy clones. That's one of the reasons I love my old G3 MT; it has an ADB port.

Jeff Adkins is a science teacher who isn't afraid to state his preferences in computing platforms. In his classroom he has everything from a beige All-in-One to a a G4 XServe, and they all work together nicely. He calls himself the "poster child for technology integration" in the classroom. He was the 2006 Outstanding Educator of the Year for the California Computer Using Educators (CUE) organization. He also maintains a site for astronomy teachers at www.AstronomyTeacher.com.

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