Since the birth of the iMac in 1998, there have been several innovations and some awesome designs. Keeping up with this trend, Apple has now released an upgraded version of the iMac, available in 20-inch and 24-inch sizes.

Designed elegantly in a brushed aluminum casing, the latest iMac has everything behind the screen. As compared to its previous version which had a plastic body, this is impossibly slim-as slim as many stand alone LCD monitors out there today.

Running on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.4 GHz, this machine includes 1 GB of DDR 2 RAM which is expandable up to 4 GB, a 320 GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon HD 2700 graphics engine. This machine also has the latest version of Mac OS X-Leopard. Apple says that there are over 300 enhancements in Leopard. Predominantly, we found visual enhancements and a few extra apps. Boot camp is included by default, to help you install Windows XP or Vista. As far as connectivity options are concerned, it has built-in Bluetooth, WiFi and three USB ports. A webcam is nicely hidden behind the protective LCD glass. The wireless remote is bundled, to use with Front Row. The keyboard is a visual delight; svelte and slick. I couldn't help but wish for a wireless keyboard and mouse though. It would've made the desktop look truly minimalistic.

To stress the hardware, we used X-bench, a benchmarking utility specifically for MACs. In this test, it scored 156 marks. We used Cinebench 9.5 for 3D performance and it scored 398 CB in single CPU based rendering and 496 CB in multiprocessor based rendering. These results mean that the machine is more than adequate for both day-to-day computing.

Compared to its predecessor, the overall performance of this iMac was slightly better, but nothing extraordinary.

Now, the big question; to buy or not to buy? I'd say that if you're a MAC user and are looking to upgrade your two-year old iMac, then a big yes! If you're a Windows user who wants to now start using both Windows and MAC, yes again! But stay away if you want gaming performance, because you'll be able to get yourself a Dell XPS 420 for about the same price. And it'll simply eat this one up when it comes to sheer performance.