Sigh... Well, we didn't really want to dignify the insult with any extra traffic, but faithful viewer Moogintroll was only the first of about a kajillion people who insisted that we take PC Magazine to task for proclaiming the eMac to be the "Worst Desktop PC of the Year," so we suppose we ought to say something about it. In his article, Jim Louderback calls the eMac "slow, underpowered, and pathetic" because it only has a 40 GB hard drive, a RADEON 9200 graphics subsystem that "won't run this fall's hot Mac games", and no DVD burner, which he claims "makes offloading files impossible." (That's right, impossible. Apparently it's a total myth that computers can connect to networks or external storage devices! Who knew?)

Now, before you go ballistic over the Mac-bashing, let's all take a nice, deep breath and remember that PC Magazine itself has actually been pretty Mac-friendly lately; it did, after all, award the iMac G5 a perfect 5-out-of-5 rating last September. Jim Louderback, on the other hand, just apparently Doesn't Get It™, because he's criticizing the eMac for shortcomings that generally aren't even the faintest blip on the Issue Radar for the people to whom it's actually targeted.

See, Louderback's problem is that no one seems to have taught him anything about a little concept called "context." The eMac, as you probably recall, was originally designed and offered exclusively for the education market. For what it's designed to be, the eMac succeeds very well: it's just the ticket as a relatively low-cost Mac terminal for a networked school lab environment. Schools most certainly do not need (or want) a DVD burner in every lab system. Any local hard drive space over the 40 GB in the entry-level model is probably a waste in most school labs. And unless some school is trying to teach its students about anatomy and physics by tossing them headlong into DOOM 3 deathmatches, that RADEON 9200 isn't a problem, either. Louderback has apparently missed all this, and likely also whines about how the Xserve G5 doesn't ship with stereo speakers and a copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4.

Granted, Apple now sells eMacs as consumer systems, and that's because there are indeed consumers out there for whom the eMac is a perfect fit; indeed, it only became available to the general public when those people begged Apple to open it up to the world at large. For what it's worth, we have two close friends/family members who bought eMacs in the past year or two, and they both seem deliriously happy with their choice. News flash for Loudermouth (yes, we went there; we are not proud): there are plenty of consumers out there who just want a $799 all-in-one Mac that'll handle email and the Web, run iTunes and iPhoto, and maybe let them dabble a little with iMovie or GarageBand. Not everyone needs 400 GB of disk space and a SuperDrive to work on three DVD projects at once. Some people are far happier playing Solitaire and Snood instead of fragging in the latest 3D shooters. Just because there are plenty of folks who do need more than an entry-level eMac can offer, that doesn't mean the eMac is bad-- and certainly not the "Worst Desktop PC of the Year."

Incidentally, we took a quick peek at those cheap Dells that Louderback seems so enamored with and which he claims are better buys than the crappy-video-having, non-DVD-burning eMac. While the Dimension 3000 configurations do offer higher specs than the eMac in many ways (Dell's whole raison d'être is cost savings via economies of scale, after all), for video they have an "Integrated Intel® Extreme Graphics 2" chipset, which Tom's Hardware describes as "nowhere near convincing in a gaming environment"; the site wonders if the word "Extreme" refers to "extremely slow." Want better graphics performance for gaming? Step up to a more expensive Dimension 4700, which instead has the faster "Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900"-- a graphics subsystem that AnandTech says "can't keep up with the cheapest PCI Express graphics solution," so "people who are interested in gaming should stay very far away."

Meanwhile, none of the presented configurations of the Dimension 3000 or 4700 offers a DVD burner, either-- oh no, offloading files is impossible on all of those, too!

Not to be mean mere days before Santa does the final Naughty vs. Nice tally, but here's hoping that on Christmas someone gives Jim a gift certificate for Clues 'R' Us, because he could really do to restock.