Apple iMac 21.5" Desktop - MC309LL/A (May, 2011) (Latest Model)

This is the first Mac I've ever owned myself. I've had plenty of experience using them, but at home I've used Windows and Linux for a long time. Whereas the price of Macs always kept me away from buying, I've always known from my Mac-head friends that they last longer, perform better, and are composed of higher quality parts. So, I needed a new machine, because my Dell isn't doing well, and I saved up and bought the iMac.

I admit to being seriously impressed. It's by far the quickest responding machine I've ever owned. It's also exceedingly stable. Currently my iMac has been running for about a month straight without crashing, needing to restart, or even slowing down one bit, and I've been running resource intensive applications such as Ableton Live along with a slew of software synth plugins, and the Netbeans IDE and the Eclipse IDE. All along video chatting with people over Skype.

Oddly enough, and this is very strange, after an update to iTunes, iTunes began to perform strangely, like it sometimes won't respond right away to mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts. Who knows what that's about though. The only other complaint I have is that the keyboard is really quite small, and I have big hands. I'd also like to have a numeric keypad on the right hand side in addition to the keys above.

I am very pleased with my iMac. Just how resource efficient it is while running my Digital Audio Workstation apps is reason enough. If you need a powerful machine with rock solid stability then consider one of these iMacs. Or if you can afford it then get a Mac Pro tower with 12 cores and 64GB of memory!

I have been a MAC user for a long time. I own an iMac and a Macbook Pro.
Apple products are honestly made of top quality materials and they always last way longer than Windows. Macs have the fastest responding time and are very user friendly. Whatever you need is just one click away. The touchpad is really smart, too. Although there are many people say Mac is bad and expensive for no reason, it's because most of them have not used one for a while. You can use a mac for a long time without needing to restart it or shut it down. Also over the past years that I have been using Mac neither on my macbook pro and iMac it has crashed. I know it is more expensive than Windows, but it honestly pays for itself. Don't be afraid and invest your money on something that will hold its value for a long time and you don't have to be afraid of any crashes or anything. If you still need to use windows, you can have windows on it too! so there are no other excuses ;)
But seriously a mac will keeps its value always high. You can still sell a 6 year old macbook more expensive than a windows laptop that you but today!!
Just buy it, I guarantee you won't regret it. Don't listen to windows lovers, because they are yet to experience MAC!!!

I can say that this 2.5GHz i5 iMac processor has only shown itself to be slightly faster than the four year-old iMac Core2Duo 2.33GHz it replaced—on "regular" tasks like word-processing and web-surfing.

But I HAVE noticed a difference in heavy-lifting with Final Cut Pro on rendering large Hi-Def clips. But I'm still running Snow Leopard, because of all my legacy apps requiring Rosetta (MS Office, Adobe Photoshop CS, etc).

It could be that only Lion can make this machine roar. If so, it'll be a year or more before I find out. Purchased this because the old iMac was becoming unreliable following a lightning strike that killed the screen (even though my surge-protector insurance paid for a new screen). I had the money for a new one, and got a $100 discount on this machine.

Great purchase...easy and quick. The best computer in the house...the display is just beautiful. Mac does it right...fast processor built in WiFi and slim to fit almost anywhere.

I work with computers for a living and I'm very knowledgable on the Windows operating system, but I still choose to use a Mac for my personal use because it just works. My last Mac lasted me 4 years and was still working by the time I chose to upgrade to a newer one. My favorite thing about the iMac is that I also use an iPhone and iCloud, and the Mac integrates beautifully with iOS devices.

The only downside to iMacs in general would be that you cannot upgrade or replace individual parts yourself, but that's true of any all-in-one computer no matter the brand.