I finally got ‘Mac’ed up at the weekend and bought my first iMac. A thing of beauty! I’ve seen a lot of them recently, but have never set one up so thought it was the ideal opportunity to do some real  ‘out of the box’ ‘Consumability’ testing.

First up, the whole lot comes in one box that’s easy to carry out of the shop. I got home and opend it up and decided to get as far as I could without reading the manuals. First out of the box comes the wireless keyboad, then the power cable, then the machine itself. Lastly a long white box with some books the mouse and some sort of remote control.

So the machine goes onto the table, the power lead can only go one place and there’s only one power on button that I pressed. A few seconds later a screen comes up telling me to sort the mouse out – simple enough.
Then the next screen tells me to get the keyboard ready. Easy – except I put the batteries in the wrong way and had to refer to the booklet to check (actually on closer inspection the keyboard had a little diagram on it telling me which way they went – so lets put it down to a user error)

Once the keyboard was on everything went smoothly – it asked me to run a few tests to check it was connected properly, then off it went setting up the machine.

So my out of the box experience and consumability testing have scored pretty high. Next step the ’11 year old test’. Could my daughter sync her phone up with the iMac using the bluetooth connection? Of course she could, it did take her a couple of minutes to work out which folder she need to connect to, but otherwise easy peazy!

Now onto some load testing……

Interesting to see that blogging could be the new “make or break” for a product:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/11/can_stephen_fry_kill_a_gadget.html

Is this because blogging is so immediate – so you’re much more likely to put down your first impressions? A powerful argument for ensuring that you get that all those consumability niggles sorted…