So who says no one at Apple is tuning in? Many longtime viewers will recall our occasional frothing-at-the-mouth diatribes against what we consider the single most egregious mistake in the iMac's otherwise awesome design: the built-in 3D acceleration. ("Oh geez," most of you are thinking, "they're back on that again.") Yes, the iMac is a consummate consumer-oriented computer system, except that one of the biggest reasons (if not the biggest reason) consumers buy computers is to play games, whether they admit it or not. And the most popular games these days are of the 3D variety, like Quake and Unreal. Games that support 3D hardware acceleration look a lot better and play a lot smoother when the right hardware is present. Unfortunately, Apple stuck the wrong hardware in the iMac; they used the ATI Rage IIc, which is a capable 2D graphics chip with sadly poor 3D performance. Unreal, for example, detects the Rage II upon startup and announces that it's not even going to try to use it because it's too slow to improve things. Now, the Rage Pro is a much more capable chip, and we'd been saying from the beginning that it should be in the iMac. Heck, we even harangued some poor Apple rep about it for half an hour at last July's Macworld Expo, as we watched a beta of Unreal run on an iMac in software-rendered mode. The guy was adamant-- nobody would mind the Rage II, he claimed.

Now, the real disparity here is that now all other Macs have a Rage Pro in them. All new Power Macs, all new PowerBooks, and even the late lamented Power Mac G3 All-in-one (targeted at the education market-- who obviously needs good Quake performance) had Rage Pro chips pumping out the graphics. So why in heaven's name was Apple's only consumer-oriented computer-- the one by definition targeted at the gaming market-- the only one still shipping with the dinky old Rage II? Well, the good news is, that's about to change. According to NoBeige, the new "revision B" iMacs, in addition to being preloaded with Mac OS 8.5, will ship with 6MB of SGRAM and a Rage Pro on the motherboard. Other sites have mentioned this as rumor, but NoBeige has the photos to prove it. (The other nice change is that to force a restart on a crashed rev. B, you apparently won't need a paperclip.)

What does this mean to the big picture? Well, for starters, owners of older Macs who were ready to upgrade but didn't want to get an iMac because the 3D gaming performance was subpar may start shelling out the dough for a revision B model. And if revision B iMacs are used as store demo systems and are preloaded with Unreal or the Quake demo running in their true hardware-accelerated glory, little Johnny might not steer his relatively clueless parents away from the iMac as the family computer. We're expecting Apple to be very quiet about the addition of Rage Pro to the iMac, because to announce that they've fixed the problem means acknowledging that there was a problem in the first place. But the good news is, early adopters of the iMac are more than likely not hardcore gamers who are going to feel cheated out of a decent hardware accelerator anyway. So listen up, Mac gamers; the iMac is now definitely worth a second look.