Okay, now that we've all had a full day to digest the whole iMac G5 info blitz, where do you stand on Apple's latest all-in-one desktop design? (The first person who says "on the back, about an inch to the right of the top FireWire port" gets a smack upside the head.) Because judging by the white-hot messages sizzling in our inbox, most Mac fans' gut reactions were pretty polar on the look: drool or dry heave, with not much in between. Of course, those with the strongest opinions are always the ones who bother to write in about them, but we're still sensing a lot of the same love-it-or-hate-it vibe that accompanied the last iMac design to hit the airwaves. Well, yesterday we here at AtAT were sort of lukewarm on the aesthetics of the iMac G5, but now we're pretty comfortable with coming down squarely on the "drool / love it" side of the fence.

What made up our minds? Simple: seeing it in video form, instead of focusing endlessly on those few still product shots on Apple's web site. (We don't know why, but Apple's product photos just never look anywhere near as gorgeous as the products really are.) The QuickTime VR let us get a better overall sense of the geometry of the unit, at which point we started feeling better about the design, but it was really the product video shown at the Philnote (as noted by faithful viewer Ryan Stern) that tipped the scales by giving us a much clearer sense of how its lines intersect and surprising us by how good the glossy white plastic looks against that anodized aluminum base. Okay, sure, the most concise and accurate summary of the new iMac's look is still "assless eMac" (as forwarded to us by faithful viewer Alan Brooks), but our main problem with the eMac's look has always been that it's just too bulky to pull off its white-and-curves motif without looking like some monstrous kitchen appliance gone awry. If the iMac G5 is an eMac post-assectomy, well, it's far the better for it.

Move beyond the issue of the iMac's new look, and the vast gulf of opinion narrows a bit-- especially among the professional pundits out there, most of the loudest of whom seem to think that the iMac G5 is a happy lil' sack of lead preparing to pin Apple to the ocean floor. True, several analysts see the new system as a major plus and have upgraded their ratings on AAPL appropriately, but a chorus of the usual suspects is doing its best to drown out the murmurs of approval. For example, faithful viewer Joe Mac User notes the presence of typical Rob Enderle cluelessness in a Mercury News article; apparently ol' Rob feels that every all-in-one computer that will ever come to market is doomed to fail just like IBM's and Gateway's, because "consumers want the freedom to change desktop monitors."

Oh, yeah. That's why the original iMac was such a flop. Not that there isn't a market for a headless iMac, of course, but there are plenty of people who like the simplicity of a single, unified device. For Rob to say that IBM's and Gateway's all-in-ones failed because they were all-in-ones (and not, for example, because they sucked rocks audibly) sortakinda ignores the fact that a certain blue-green all-in-one saved Apple instead of sinking it.

And yet, believe it or not, as faithful viewer mrmgraphics points out, John Dvorak manages to sound even more brain-dead over at Investor's Business Daily. Unfortunately the link seems to have died, so you'll have to take our word for the fact that he registers apparent surprise that Apple "jammed the entire computer into the screen, making the idea of changing 'monitors' or screens impractical," implying that he had no idea that the iMac has always been an all-in-one design. He would also "like to know what happened to all those fancy colors Apple was promoting," evidently unaware that Apple hasn't shipped a non-white consumer Mac for over two and a half years. This is all especially weird considering how he didn't seem to mind the built-in-screen concept and the lack of pretty colors back when he praised the iMac G4's design to the skies in January of 2002.

And this is just a taste of the naysaying. There's Salkever over at BusinessWeek calling the iMac G5 "form over function" and a "pretty package but nothing much that is new or different on the inside" (like, say, a 64-bit consumer PC that takes up about as much desk space as your average three-hole punch). There's Paul Jackson of Forrester Research spouting off at CNET about how iMac G5 will fail because-- wait for it-- an AirPort Express card doesn't come standard and it doesn't have a TV tuner built-in. If we could roll our eyes any further, we'd be staring down our own digestive tracts.

Well, time will tell. For our part, we love the specs, we love the price, and now we even love the look-- and that's just from seeing QuickTime video; once we see one of these in person, we'll probably have to Taser ourselves to keep from flinging a handful of credit cards at the nearest salesperson. If Apple can pitch this puppy effectively (Joe Shmoe has no idea what a great deal a G5-based system is at these prices, but the whole "hey, it's like an iPod" thing might work) and IBM can crank out enough chips to keep up with demand, we think the iMac G5 might collar more switchers this holiday season than the Switch campaign ever could. Who knows? Maybe Janie Porche won't be the only one saving Christmas this year.