For those baffled by talk of Intel and Athlon, megahertz and gigabytes, there is a simpler way. Apple computers have been around since the late 1970s, pioneering the mass adoption of the point-and-click interface used by nearly all computers today, and putting ease of use at the top of its agenda.
Today, however, Apple is as famous for its colourful and innovative hardware designs (none of which sport floppy disk drives) as it is for its operating system, MacOS. The company's motto is Think Different, but its machines also all look different.
The Apple range is quite simple to understand. There are two lines targeted at the home market - the iMac desktop range, and the iBook laptop machines.
The iMac is a colourful all-in-one computer, with a built-in 15-inch monitor and a range of processor speeds and capabilities. The lowest priced iMac costs £649, including VAT, and comes only in indigo (blue). It sports a 350MHz processor, 64MB of memory and a 7GB hard drive, and has a modem and CD-Rom drive but no DVD-playing capabilities.
The most expensive iMac (there are two other price levels in between) is the DV Special Edition, available in graphite (grey) or snow (white), which costs £1199, including VAT. This is an more powerful machine, with a 500MHz processor, 30GB hard drive and 128MB of memory as standard. This last point - the memory - is important as Apple's new operating system, called OS X, arrives next year and needs at least 128MB to run.
The Special Edition also sports two FireWire ports, which means you can plug a digital camcorder into your Mac and download movies to edit on the video editing software included with the machine, iMovie. This is Apple's attempt to corner what the company's chief executive Steve Jobs calls the "desktop movie" market, in much the same way it captured the desktop publishing market in the 1980s.
On the portable side, Apple has the iBook - a rugged laptop with rubberised, curved corners and a good 12-inch screen, available in two versions. The standard iBook (£1249 including VAT) has now been upgraded from its previous rather puny specification, and has a 366MHz processor, 64MB of memory and a 10GB hard drive. Available in indigo and key lime (lurid green) it has one FireWire port, and boasts impressive battery life of around five hours in "real world" use - which beats most PC-compatable laptops hands down. Like the basic iMac, however, it has a CD-Rom drive but no DVD capabilities. For that you need to look to the iBook Special Edition (£1,499, including VAT), which also has a faster 466MHz processor and comes in Apple's standard go-faster graphite, as well as key lime.
But before you buy, there is one important thing to bear in mind: the operating system. Buying Apple means you get to use the Mac OS, which its advocates say is much easier to understand than Microsoft's Windows system. But buying a Mac also puts you in a minority of computer users, and that means that the library of software you have to choose from is much smaller than your Windows-using counterparts.
That may not have much of an impact if your computing needs are straightforward or focused in Apple's strongholds of publishing, education or the internet. Microsoft produces Mac versions of Office 2000, Outlook Express (for email) and Internet Explorer (for web browsing) while the situation for Mac gamers is improving, with classics such as Championship Manager also being brought to the OS.
But should your software needs be more esoteric, it makes sense to check that what you need is available for the Mac before you invest in any hardware.
