There are few critics of Apple’s industrial design, but like many designer labels the company has always had a tendency to charge over the odds for its products.

The latest revamp of the iMac range suggests, however, that Apple is starting to put more of an emphasis on affordability. Priced at just £679, the new 17in iMac is one of the cheapest all-in-one systems Apple has ever produced (not counting the monitor-less Mac Mini).

Alongside the 17in display, the new iMac includes a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 512MB Ram and 160GB hard disk. Should you require a larger screen, check out our Apple iMac 24in review .

It’s far from being top-of-the-range, but should be powerful enough for most home users who just want to edit their home videos and digital photographs, or surf the web. Other features include a built-in webcam and wireless networking support, along with Apple’s excellent iLife 06 software suite.

It does have a couple of weak spots though. The Intel 950 graphics chip shares 64Mb of system memory and, while this is fine for video-editing or digital photography, it’s not going to be particularly good for gaming.

Not everyone’s into games, of course, so many users probably won’t care about that. However, the combo drive (CD-RW and DVD-Rom) is a more serious weakness. There’s not much point giving people bundled, sophisticated video-editing software if they can’t burn their movies onto DVD.

You can get a DVD burner and Radeon X1600 graphics card as optional extras, but that will take the price up to £799.

The 17in iMac is certainly a good entry-level machine for people on a tight budget, but it’s a shame Apple couldn’t bite the bullet and chuck in a DVD burner as well – that would really have proved Apple is serious about making Macs more affordable.

Also consider:
Apple iMac 24in
Top-of-the-range iMac dazzles with 24-inch screen

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