Yesterday, I returned home around 8:30 in the evening. Since the iMac I ordered was scheduled to arrive Monday (after initially being set for next Thursday), I wasn’t expecting anything to be waiting for me Friday evening. Still, I checked the mail slot box on my front door–and sure enough, there was the express delivery company’s “while you were out” attempted delivery slip, saying that they had tried to deliver a package just after noon.

Had I arrived home an hour earlier, I could’ve had it delivered before they shut down for the night, but as it was, it was too late–which actually turned out to be OK, because I wasn’t even ready to get it set up yet. I had to clear out my PC and old G3 Mac tower from my main computer desk and set them up at the other end of the apartment, then clean up and arrange the desk so it’d be iMac-ready.

So this morning, at about 10:00 am, the delivery came, and I was ready to go:

I unpacked it and set it up on the desk, and it’s beautiful. It’s framed perfectly–just as much space between the bottom of the machine and the desktop as there is between the top of the machine and the shelf above. And virtually the entire desktop is now free, a stark contrast from previously, when my PC’s 17″ CRT monitor took up half the desk. The iMac looks perfect here. Of course, I’m always dreading dead or stuck pixels, but this time I came out OK. There is one semi-dead pixel (it appears that the green element is out), but it’s way up in the upper-left corner of the screen, and heck–on this monster of a monitor, you have to strain to even notice it.

And the monitor is a beaut. Bright as hell–maybe even too bright. At night, I’m probably going to have to turn the thing way down. Here’s a pic of the new machine on my desk, with my 15-inch Powerbook G4 sitting next to it, to compare both the size and brightness.

I am very pleased to have gotten this delivered early Saturday, especially as I have Mondays off; I’ll have three days with nothing to do but play with my new toy. And if you think you might quickly get sick of reading about it on my blog, well, you’ll just have to leave and come back on Tuesday. You can count on quite a bit of 24″ iMac “pr0n” between now and then.

Update: Busy Saturday for Apple–my replacement battery for my PowerBook just arrived. No more shutting down every time I move the computer! No more lugging the power cable and brick around everywhere! It’s about time…