So my Mom bought an iMac after I suggested it. She had been using an ancient PC up to then, and it was thoroughly hosed. Here is my impression so far:
Store experience: Quite good Out of box experience: Good Using digital camera: Good OS Stability: Awesome Installing printer: Crap Using external floppy: Fair Appleworks: Absolute Crap
Fairly mixed, isn't it... Well, let me tell you the whole story...
My Father and I went to the Apple store to pick it up. I love just about everything about the Apple retail stores, except the tax. We picked up a good photo-printer and a USB floppy drive as well.
So we get home, and of course the packaging is awesome. Just like most Japanese products, the instructions are in cellophane packages sealed with that medium-sticky glue that's easy to open. It all looks great, so I hook up the Printer. Nada. To make a long story short, I needed to download the latest printer drivers for the printer. Not something I think a new iMac user should be expected to do. Strike one.
By the way, by this time I've realized that it's sweet to be able to get a unix prompt just like a NeXT machine, but the "Help" system absolutely sucks rocks. I honestly don't even know why they bothered with it. Another thing — the browser for the help system has the forward and back buttons on the lower right of the window... yeah, real intuitive... Anyway, the help system is crap.
So I plug in the floppy thinking that it will just work. Guess what? I get nothing. So I pull it out and plug it in again — a little whirring and the drive finally shows up. This was pretty nice. No drivers or anything... But why didn't it show up the first time? Hmmm. Well no big deal right? So I unplug the drive thinking it will automatically unmount, being the smart iMac that it is... ;) Guess what? Everything froze, and I had to do a hard reboot. Totally counter-intuitively, you must drag the drive to the trash can to eject it, or you crash... Now I don't care about the dragging part to eject disks, but the machine should not crash if you don't do it... Very bad for beginners, or even people like me who are Windows/Unix people...
Finally everything is working, and my Mom starts using the machine daily. iPhoto rocks, and she has no trouble using it, but still there's almost no useful help! I don't get it. It even lacks tooltips on the inscrutable graphically labelled buttons you need to use... I just had to click them and see what happened! I'm thinking "This is easy to use?"
So now we get to Appleworks (or should I say 'Crappleworks'). The first problem is that with our beautifully anti-aliased fonts, the default size that documents pop up in (100%) is too small to see well. If you hit the zoom-in button, it goes to 150% which is way too big. So you actually have to open a dialog and type in "120%" to get the stupid thing to resize to a workable level.
But all this pales, pales, in comparison to using the Crappleworks spreadsheet software. I spent over an hour trying to print a simple spreadsheet for my Mom. There is absolutely no easy way to transfer a spreadsheet to a table in a document. You see, tables in documents don't split across pages! So you have to make a separate table for each friggin' page!! Well, I won't go into it all, but it's horrible. The default behavior in printing a spreadsheet is totally broken too. You actually need to select your cells that have data, choose "Set Print Range" from the menu, and hit ok in the dialog, just to prevent it from printing pages and pages of blank cells...
In the end, I have to say it's not all bad — iPhoto and other things work great, even sans help. But I'm definitely disillusioned with Apple's marketing about it all being so easy to use. It's not. It's not even easier than a PC sometimes. It is much more stable and reliable though, and hopefully they'll continue to improve everything... I'm just hoping that I won't be taken to task for suggesting an iMac. ;)