I have a certain sentimentality for the iMac. My first Mac was a 20″ G5 iMac, acquired just a bit over four years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed cutting my teeth on it. I guess there’s always a certain nostalgia for your first love, eh?

This morning, the twitterverse is all agog about a potentially new iMac on the near horizon. The buzz is that it would be thinner, and include Blu-Ray.

Myself, I’d welcome that.

I have a great attraction for an all-in-one environment like the iMac, but I also see some pitfalls. The latest gen of iMacs allow for easy memory upgrades by the user, but a nearly impossible internal harddrive replacement. Last I saw, that operation involved removing the screen from the chassis, and that’s not a comfy spot for most, myself included. That leaves you with only USB or FW800 externals drives. Where’s eSATA? That would definitely solve the need for replacing the internal harddrive, as eSATA bays are available all over the place.

Another thing missing from the current line is a second Ethernet port. While I don’t have an immediate need for that extra port, it’s interesting to see companies like Drobo begin using that for faster-than-eSATA iSCSI drive connections across a second Ethernet port for their DroboPro high-end storage solution. For a data junkie like myself, that’s a real attractive path, despite the quite high entry pricepoint.

However, I think an iMac might be the only way to foist the last Windows machine in the house my spouse’s clutched fingers. She’s been on Windows for better than a decade, and I suspect that moving her to a Mac is unlikely. We’re running into some issues where she can’t browse my photo archive easily from her machine. Microsoft and RAW files still don’t get along with a piece of software to act as referee. She’s been going through an incredibly convoluted series of steps to view, select and print images from the datastore, and I’d no idea she was doing all that. An iMac would solve that in a snap, but I don’t know that she’s ready for that leap.

With new announcements coming though, anything is possible!