The iMac is a great Macintosh-- let's not beat around the bush, here. It represents a paradigm shift for the whole computer industry by presenting a low-cost option to consumers who value simplicity and style. It's also revolutionary for Apple, since the iMac is the first system that Apple's produced in years that even comes close to the simplicity and clean lines of the original toaster-style Mac. But for true Mac fanatics, the iMac is also one frustrating machine-- only because it's both too good at what it does, and not good enough for what many of us need it to do. Confused yet? Bear with us for a moment.

Basically, we're talking about the simplicity vs. expandibility conundrum. We'd love to replace our aging PowerTower Pro with a brand new iMac, but of course, then we'd have to give up our multiple hard drives, our TV tuner and QuickTime capture capability, our QuickCam, our graphics tablet-- all kinds of stuff we kludged onto the big ugly box to let us get various kinds of work done. Sure, there are ways of kludging most-- if not all-- of that stuff into an iMac, but it would wreck the whole aura of simplicity that is fundamental to the iMac's soul. The iMac isn't just a stripped-down, low-cost Mac motherboard in a neat-looking enclosure; it's a being unto itself, both more and less than the sum of its parts. There's the tricky bit: true Mac fanatics would love to get an iMac, but so many of them need More Machine. And if the iMac were More Machine, it would cease to be an iMac. And if Apple Insider is correct, than Apple, too, understands what the iMac represents, and while they plan to revise it every six months, they don't expect to do away with its fundamental simplicity (or inexpandibility). For many Mac fans, it's a tragic love story, indeed.

So future iMacs won't be any bigger, though they will continue to get faster, cheaper, and more spacious (in terms of hard drive space). DVD probably won't show up any time soon-- at least, not until DVD-ROM storage becomes ubiquitous. Graphics and games performance are going to progress to blinding speed, and we wouldn't be too surprised to find that one day Apple is shipping iMacs with Virtual Game Station pre-installed with Playstation-style USB game controllers in the box. New enclosures with different colors, textures, and surfaces, as well as a more consumer-friendly design, are all apparently in the cards. That all sounds really, really cool, and it all sounds like real growth on the iMac's path to continued greatness as a consumer Macintosh. But as we eye the gee-whiz features of the new Yosemites, which are much more suited to AtAT's needs, we find that we don't wish that the iMac better fit our requirements; rather, we wish that our requirements fit the iMac's personality. But that's love for you...