43 Responses to “eMac 2007”

1. bdkennedy1 Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

   I thought this was an excellent machine. It saved our asses numerous times at FastSigns because it was cheap enough to convince the owner to get one. It was fast, all-in-one to save space in our cramped computer room and was worth the money.

2. SiO2man Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:02 pm

   This was an excellent machine for young kids to get familiar with computers. The all in on design allowed kids as young as 18 months to use it. The kids can actually go and pick tier favorite shows/music from iTunes and enjoy writing in TextEdit.

   This is/was a wonderful machine!

3. trailingedge Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 pm

   Great machine for the money and includes a 17″ screen! My daughter did her web searches and homework on it without fear. My wife long time Win user even felt in love with it.

4. bertfw Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:45 pm

   This was probably the best bang for the buck Mac ever made. Sure, it came in a now antiquated form factor, but you really got a lot of computer for the money.

5. MacMonkeyMark Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 pm

   We bought 5 and one by one they all went back. Great looking and a great price, sadly not backed up with reliability. This and the IIfx were the real low spots in the Apple line for me - the Quadra 700 being a real high point.

6. Jetexas Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm

   This machine was a piece of junk. It came out at a time when Apple was transitioning things from OS9 to OSX and I had to dual boot to run all my applications. It was a disaster. No matter how much memory I put in it the screen wouldn’t refresh when I clicked between frames, and it was guaranteed to die on me at 4:45 p.m. before 5:00 print deadlines after a full day of pagination, which always meant an hour of running Norton repair discs before being able to boot it back up and continue working.

7. Paul Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm

   It was still the best bang for the buck Apple ever made. It made convincing the spouse to upgrade the old Performa (now, there’s a candidate for you) easy by having a $700 price tag. Sure, if money was no object, there were several other machines that would have fit the bill more than nicely. But for what it was, at the time it was, it was a machine worth every penny of its price tag.

   Ditto the comments about young kids and computers. Ours still sits in the den and is the work horse for all things web, music, mail and text-related.

8. Gene Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 2:30 pm

   Are you kidding? This is a great machine. The performance improved dramatically since I upgraded RAM to 2 GB. THAT IS AN ABSOLUTE MUST!

   The price was right and the styling was typically Apple-slick. I love my eMac and will keep this one for a long time. My previous machine was a 9500 which I kept for 10 years, long past its prime.

9. Adam Says:
   October 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 pm

   As a former teacher (stopped teaching in 2006) and Computer Coordinator of a school, this Mac was the perfect desktop for schools. In an elementary school, you needed a glass screen, so the student’s woudn’t destroy the monitor. The iMac was no good, because it did not yet have the glass covering over the screen.

   It is completely ridiculous that this machine is on this list. it was the eMac for a reason, e = education. It was a niche market machine, that regular users clamored for when it was released. It served its purpose.

10. Amanda Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    It is a great, sturdy, dependable machine, so long as you don’t have one of the logic boards that go nutso. Great for schools where you don’t want kids trying to pick up or steal compys, and lord knows how many people bought them for their grandparents/elderly parents when they wanted to get them a computer they didn’t have to worry about viruses or spyware on (which tends to be a big grandparent/elderly parent worry, it seems).

11. liin Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    I’m on Mac Pro now. I loved my eMac, and miss it more than my last flat-panel iMac. I got tons of heavy duty work done on that dirt cheap, bulit-like-a-tank machine.

    That it’s the most beautiful CRT equiped computer ever made, affordable for institutions to purchase on the bulk, and met its design goal of being able to handle abusive uses in public spaces by kids, easily made it among the best PCs ever made.

12. Anonymous Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    Yeah, this is BULL! I got my 1.25GHz emac for $300! Not only that, but I used it as my main desktop up until recently when I got the new imac. For the money, there wasn’t a better deal, period. I do a lot of work in Flash, Photoshop and other editing software and only had slowdowns when I was doing big animations with lots of things on screen. Even still, for money, best computer I’ve owned. PowerPC was good mojo.

13. Dirkus Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 3:37 pm

    Bah! I’m posting this comment from my eMac (which was a freebie dumpster rescue) right now!

    Granted, this one was has been modded a bit, but that was half the fun of the eMac. Add some RAM, pop the cover off and do the little mobo-jumper-overclock hack, use patchburn to drop in a new drive…. My 800MHz/128mb/CDROM/OS 10.1 dumpster-dived eMac is now a 1.33GHz/512MB/DVD-RW/OS 10.4 winner. No overheating problems either, they real over-engineered the cooling in this thing.

    It’s also a power sipping alternative to the PC I had been using, with the eMac and the PC maxxing out at 175 and 550 watts respectively.

    Wouldn’t give this thing up for the world. Well, maybe for a Macbook Pro, but even then I’d probably still keep it around for the kids to use.

    Search around my blog a bit to find linkage to the instructions for overclocking the eMac. It’s a huge performance boost.

14. Dirkus Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    Found the link doe overclocking these: http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/eMac/eMac-upgrade.html

15. Chris D Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Writing from my eMac - the unstealable computer

    These things are great - our office gets burgled regularly, and they steal the iMacs and Mac Pros but they never take the eMacs…to darned heavy and with no handles…you just can’t pick them up…and you certainly can’t man-handle them through a window!!

16. John Galt Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 3:50 pm

    Are you telling me this is making the list simply because of its built in CRT? The eMac may qualify for the 16 all time UGLIEST Macs but I don’t see how it’s one of the worst just because it didn’t use an LCD, which would have priced it far beyond the terrific bang-for-buck computer that it became.

17. electrikALIEN Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    One of these babies used to hold it’s own as the central server for my entire office of 15 people. We had a cheap owner back then and he didn’t want to spend too much on a server. He got this and to my dismay, it preformed perfectly. The eMac was one of Apple’s best products for the insanely low price point.

18. Dan Palka Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    Do you even know anything about computers at all? Why is this the worst?

19. CollegeITGuy Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    Oh give me a break….this little guy was great, even in the college environment. I’ve managed 12 labs with a minimum of 15 of these in each….they’ve worked just fine. Extra bonus: they’re heavy enough the average college kid won’t try walking out the door with them. Who can argue with two machines that have gone bad out of 180, over a three year period?!? That, and at $600 a pop in quantity, there’s nothing to complain about. Sure, we don’t put them in the video labs, but for general internet access, paper writing, and minimal photoshop, they rock.

    I love lists like this (and how those of us who feel passionate like to reply)!.

20. admin Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 10:01 pm

    OK so you all disagree with m on this one - feel free to vote it out.

    The eMac was certainly good value for the spec, but this list is really intended to be more about product design and ergonomics rather than horsepower. The last eMac was released only 2 years ago. It seemed a little old fashioned in terms of its design, being largely similar to the ten year old iMac, an eternity in terms of Apple’s own rate of innovation and at a period in time when CRTs were being replaced everywhere. Of course, the very point was that the eMac was intended to be cheap, in which case it is valid to criticize its inclusion in this list, when its design purpose is economy.

    Its pretty difficult to pick the worst Macs because most Macs are excellent.

21. Mari Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    admin Says:
    The eMac was certainly good value for the spec, but this list is really intended to be more about product design and ergonomics rather than horsepower.

    ====

    Then please clearly state this in your blog title! “All time worst Apple products” is clearly misleading if this list simply focuses on the worst Apple product design and ergonomics.

22. kakue Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    Hello,

    I loved the eMac for its design when I bought it back in 2002.
    Personally, it is exactly what the original iMac should have looked like and honestly, it doen’t look outdated to me.

    But my 700 MHz G4 original eMac was increadibly loud (the fan made a constand noise) and the CRT died due to a rastershift-problem after 2 years.
    The quality was poor, not the design or the overall specs!!

23. brassman Says:
    October 27th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    I’m baffled. I work in a graphic design firm where we have a dozen emacs working all day long. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator all function as expected. the all-in-one design makes for real easy office rearrangements (which our managers have a real fetish for.)

    Just because a design is not brand new doesn’t make it bad. Consider the Kitchenaid mixer which was introduced in 1919 and is still the most desirable countertop kitchen appliance with minor changes in it’s design (the original weighed 69 lbs.)

    Cheap, reliable, relatively powerful and not as bad to look at as some have suggested (have you seen the competetion?) Excellent machine, excellent design.

24. Joe Says:
    November 7th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    eMacs are nice machines but unfortunately share a flaw with the G3 iMac in that the video can be unreliable, albeit for different reasons. I do question why Apple marketed two G4 models with built in monitors. The eMac design was dated, bearing a strong resemblance to the iMac G3, and bulky. Once you set it down, you left it where it lay because they weighed in the vicinity of 50 pounds. Those 17″ CRT’s are heavy. I strongly suspect that heat from the CRT contributes to the eventual deaths of both these and the G3 iMacs. Otherwise it was a nice machine. The design was good, the execution was bad. Additional cooling in the right places might have helped increase the lifespan.

25. Dan Says:
    November 18th, 2007 at 10:49 am

    Writing on my eMac right now. I have a first generation eMac ( 2002) and this thing is solid. We have three other computers in the house: an iBook and two hp laptops. My eMac is still my main machine to browse the internet and find sites like this one.
    I think that in terms of design, the eMac beats the colored iMac G3 that preceded it. Purple? Polka dots blue? Come on!

26. Brendan C Says:
    December 28th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    Yeah, it does look a bit clunky but my eMac will not die, has never crashed and I am hard pressed to justify buying a new iMac. Sabotage suggestions soon required.

27. Wolf Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 12:10 pm

    I found this eMac a very good deal for the money.
    Much cheaper as the LCD iMac but same hardware power under the hood.
    It has served me well and was very very reliable (Zero Problems since 2004 and still my backup solution)
    I just recently have replaced it with a new aluminum IMac.

28. WTPhuqet Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    I’m starting to believe this site pushes sensationalistic headings with controversial lists in order to “simulate” feedback… or else the “admin” just has his head up his…

29. Ned Ludd Says:
    April 18th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    I bought a 700 Mhz eMac when they first came out, and it’s been a solid workhorse. The stock 256 MB RAM was ridiculous (but typical of Apple), but with a gig stuffed in there it’s fine for Photoshop etc. The 17″ CRT is a really nice screen — much better for design than 95% of LCDs I’ve seen.
    It’s also a damned nice-looking unit.

30. Lucas Martin-King Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 9:51 am

    I still use one of these fairly often (running Linux, actually). It’s not bad, if a little noisy.

31. William Weir Says:
    November 27th, 2008 at 11:56 pm

    These things are like the old big clunky Volvo’s: not sexy but damm reliable. They are still a very functional machine and quite a bargin (buy locally…avoid shipping) I’ve taken 8 of these apart and upgraded the drives (not difficult). As far as CRT are concerned, how long do some old TV’s last? Many, many years. Get one for under $100 and pass it along to your friends with PC troubles.

32. Robert Says:
    January 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 am

    Whoever wrote this list is on crack. First the LC series is on this list near the top, and the emac even made it here.. My wife still to this day uses her emac I bought her, I mean yes, It’s a machine not centered on speed, but on price, and thats what they sold me. With a 17 inch monitor, and 256mb ram, it was a good value. I recently upgraded it to a gig of ram, and mac os x 10.4, but I dont think my wife would trade it for anything.. I know I wouldnt want anything with an intel logo my self, even if it’s from apple. I know, where keeping with our ppc systems till we can’t use them any longer. Want a shitty mac, I’ll give you one. The single core (intel) mac mini. There you go, now thats a bastard child. Digg that.

33. jm Says:
    January 23rd, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    This computer was great wile it lasted. I bought it with panther and 128 mb ram. It was so slow that i had to update the ram. panther was good and it came with all the necessary software for home users and inclued a skateboardgame. \

    The video car died in 4 years. it was a god coputer and would be great if it lasted.

34. Роман Морозов Says:
    May 31st, 2009 at 1:47 pm

    Интересный пост, спасибо вам. Интересует только вопрос - будет ли продолжение? :)

35. Novosel Says:
    August 9th, 2009 at 4:58 am

    Автору заЧОт )))

36. Mashunya88 Says:
    August 9th, 2009 at 4:59 am

    Полностью согласна с постом выше!

37. KISAmur Says:
    August 9th, 2009 at 4:59 am

    аФтору спасибки. Всех лю. Чмок…

38. Cameron Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 11:41 am

    The eMac was okay, but we have a few at my school and they suck really badly. The main reason is that the computer is really slow, but that is probably because there are a few hundred accounts on there. Also the cable that connects it to the wall does not work very well because it does not stay into the computer. The computer is also really ugly… I have a mac mini at home, and I am getting a macbook pro, and this really can’t compare. It does run the OS perfectly fine though with few flaws unless there are idiots messing around with it.

39. vidsuide Says:
    September 23rd, 2009 at 4:53 am

    Отлично написано.

40. Флэш игры Says:
    September 23rd, 2009 at 10:33 am

    Отлично написано.

41. Эротика Says:
    September 28th, 2009 at 5:35 pm

    Фигня какая-то. Извените конечно.

42. Teddy B Says:
    December 9th, 2010 at 9:07 pm

    The eMac was an awesome computer. It was inexpensive, and it was rock solid. I had one in continuous service for over 7 years, and it could run up to Leopard without a problem. Yeah, it didn’t have an LCD. For that, at the time, spend 50% more. No thanks.

43. Robert Whitaker Sirignano Says:
    August 25th, 2011 at 8:15 am

    The only problems I had with tis Mac was keeping my kid off of it, and it was pretty heavy.

    The power supply burnt out, but it took five years.

    Not bad.

    RWS

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