Actually, Apple was the originator of the personal computer revolution as we know it, producing the first such machine - the Apple I - in co- founder Steve Wozniak's garage in the late 1970s.

Years later it launched the Macintosh, an all-in-one device that looked a little like a large toaster.

It was a rectangular, beige plastic machine, with a small, monochrome screen.

It featured two revolutionary additions that were soon to become mainstream: the mouse and a stiffy drive (instead of the much larger floppy) that could store 10 times more data.

About 10 years ago I was the proud owner of one of these machines. In high school my best friend and I did our science project on his father's Mac, which had 128K of RAM and could only open one program at a time. We had to work in either the word-processing program or the picture editor.

I tell you all of this not only to remind you about where computing has come from, but where it is going. If there is a god - be it of marketing, technology or aesthetics - this is the future of computing.

The "beige box" syndrome has been partially broken in recent years, but computers still look like boxes with big TV-monitor-like screens. Advances in technology, such as the miniaturisation that has made laptops and their thin LCD screens possible, are expensive and have yet to supersede the price-sensitive market for beige boxes.

Mac feature Part 1: My month on a mac Part 2: Everything's fine at the Office Part 3: iMac makes you a pix pro

Apple punches much heavier than its weight. With an estimated 5% of the worldwide market, it has played a more prominent role than its market share would suggest - and gets a whole lot of publicity.

Time magazine splashed the new iMac on its front cover - headlined "Flat-out cool!" - in March. The last time a computer got such prominence was when Time named the IBM PC "Man of the Year" in 1984.

What may appear to be the biggest departure is the iMac's physical configuration: a 20cm half-sphere that contains all the computer's innards, with a chrome arm supporting its flat-panel screen. The speakers are little clear orbs, made by Harman Kardon, that are simply beautiful. No wonder designers the world over have raved about it. Computers seldom inspire such design kudos, but considering the sheer beauty of the machine, it's all worth it.

Apple boss and co-founder Steve Jobs famously announced this computer as heralding the "death of CRT". Cathode ray tube monitors are much like our TVs and take up the most desk space of all the components, but predicting their demise might be a little premature. Last year 90-million CRT monitors were sold compared to 15-million flat-panel LCD ones.

But Jobs is aiming much higher. Not only does he want you to use an iMac as you default computer, but he wants it to be the "hub of your digital life".

Most modern users now have a digital camera and a digital music collection, in MP3 format, as llwell as a MP3 player. Your computer is the ideal nexus for storing, updating and sharing all of these.

This is a trend that has been around for a while, but Apple wants to make it much easier for users, arguing, quite correctly, that the average computer user doesn't understand the technology or how it works, and doesn't really want to.

To this end, software makers are bundling the packages that handle these into the operating system.

However, Apple arguably has done this better and more smoothly than anything I've seen. As I will elaborate on in later articles, the iPhoto and iTunes programs - for digital images and music - are the best I've used. I was especially impressed with iPhoto, which resized a few hundred digital images in real time. While I have many other computer and Internet skills, I've never been strong on graphic-design programs, but I was able to create photo slide shows and web pages of pictures using this one. Nearly a year and a half after my wedding, I still haven't got a video - a combination of things - so I'm using the iMovie software to edit my own movie, already with some success.

Visually, the iMac is a beautiful machine. Experientially all the marketing hype that it is the "digital hub" is fairly spot on.

Apple has had varied results with its operating systems (OS) over the years, but has seemingly hit gold with its latest one, Mac OS X (pronounced 10). Geeks are impressed because it was built using Unix, the stable OS that is used to run big servers but is difficult, and unintelligible, for ordinary consumers to use. OS X has its faults - as any chat room for passionate Mac users will show - but it is a great improvement on previous versions. For non-tech-literate users, it is, quite simply, a dream.

As part of my showing off to friends, I asked several non-computer users to play around with it. Most succeeded. To a Windows power user like me, it is a quaint world where the programs look slightly different. The usual "close, maximise or minimise" buttons on the top right of a Windows panel are on the left of the iMac, while the standard-issue mouse only has one button. It's quite simple to add a USB mouse, which the iMac instantly recognised. I also installed my ergonomic Microsoft Natural keyboard. I reverted to the pristine white Apple keyboard because it has several function buttons (including the one to open or close the CD tray) built into it.

Perhaps it is the calming blue wallpaper or the shape of the machine, but I fell in love with the new iMac almost immediately.

Apple has all the Microsoft Office programs - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Outlook-equivalent called Entourage. They all work fine, but it took me a while to change my 10-year-old computer habits, especially learning the new keyboard shortcuts. For someone who seldom uses his mouse, it was a touch irksome but not insurmountable. I was pleased to discover that OS X lets you "alt tab" between programs just like Windows does.

Unlike Windows, which lets you swop to the last-used programs, the iMac follows the sequence of open packages along "the dock". This is the task-bar equivalent, a beautiful row of icons along the bottom of the screen that pleasingly enlarge as you draw the mouse over them.

Amazingly, I never turned the machine off. I'm accustomed to having to reboot my Windows 2000 machine every few days for a variety of reasons, so the stability of this Apple was refreshing.

The "commercialisation" of Unix is perhaps the most significant feature. Unix is often called an "industrial-strength" operating system and is the OS of choice for most big businesses that run their mission-critical systems on it. Until now, it has been for use by serious techies only.

Desktop software has been limited to DOS, Windows and Linux (which is impossible to use for us ordinary folk). Unix has been the preserve of programmers, who can operate in its hardly user-friendly environment. But with Mac OS X that has all changed. It hides all the complexity behind the veil and is just so solid.

I've long been a fan of Apple's innovative spirit. Apple is responsible for so many of the everyday computer innovations that we have and know, including the mouse, the CD drive and the stiffy, and liberating us from it. It was also the first to use the wireless networks - it branded it AirPort - and a super-fast cable connector called FireWire.

In fact, the first Apple, made by Jobs and Wozniak, was the first all-in- one computer, as it came with its own monitor (a grotty little nine-inch screen) and keyboard. Machines before that, like the MITS Altair 880, had no keyboard, monitor or programming language. Users had to input the program by hand using binary machine code and rows of flashing lights and switches on the front of it.

Apple is always proud to tell us that it is the only maker of personal computers that makes everything, the hardware and software, from design lab to your desk. I noticed this week that Apple is running a campaign on its website to encourage switching to this platform, while highlighting the benefits of Macs, which was one of the points they made. As I found, doing such a "switch" was relatively easy, as I will elaborate on.

I hardly need to add that another Apple innovation is the graphical user interface, the icon-based world of Windows. Recently, one of the most vaunted versions of this - System 6, on which my best friend and I did our science project - has been resurrected on the web as the look and feel for a music website (www.lowercasesound.com).

It brought back so many memories for me, of learning how to use a computer, but with any luck this operating system and its beautiful casing will have as far-reaching an influence.