In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

The PowerShot G series has earned Canon a good reputation and, thankfully, the G5 does nothing to dent it. Not that it will win awards for styling, as the G5 remains slightly boxy for our liking and the casing has more plastic than the G3. It also feels every gram of its 487g weight; the similarly heavy Fuji S5000 is more comfortable to hold and use.

A solid, general-purpose pedestal server with good storage and a classy management act – plus it’s quiet as a mouse

The mouse from gaming nirvana gets an update.

The iMac has always been a little more about style than function and the latest iteration is testament to this philosophy. The most noticeable thing about the iMac G5 is the massive 20 inch widescreen. It's a Big Mac. Geddit?

Using a Canon lens and sharing a chunky, rectangular design, the 5-megapixel QV-5700 bears more than a passing resemblance to the PowerShot G5. The G5 has a 4x optical zoom against Casio’s 3x, though, and several other features, such as time-lapse shooting, are missing.

We've lauded Logitech's G5, G6 and G7 series of mice. Now, here comes the G9x with all the features from previous versions and some new tricks.

The Nikon Coolpix 5400 is the descendent of the Coolpix 5000. In the revamp, it has gained a new 1/1.8in CCD and 4x optical zoom but also loses a couple of useful features, like the LCD status panel and RAW file mode. True, there is a TIFF option, but this is a backwards move in our view.

It's a little ironic that every new version of Mac OS comes closer to Windows when you consider that Microsoft was originally accused of hijacking Apple's interface. Apple claims to have put 150 new features into Panther, but the two it highlights first are improvements to Finder and the new Exposé[alt+0233 in courier new]. The improvements to Finder bring it one step closer to the Windows menu system, which since 95 has been superior to Apple's. The new one click-reveals-all Finder was sorely needed and makes Panther much easier to navigate than its predecessors.

Beautifully engineered and constructed, the Mac Pro is also the fastest PC we’ve ever seen by some margin.

The 5-megapixel DSC-V1 offers a great combination of features and performance in a relatively small body. While it’s smaller than its prime competitors – the Canon G5 and the Nikon 5400 – there are even smaller models in this month’s company.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.

Wondering how to take advantage of the new 50% tax break for small business IT purchases? Our tax resource centre explains everything you need to know.

Chance or coincidence? AMD releases the Athlon 64, specifically targeted at the consumer performance market, and only days later Intel announces a secret processor aimed squarely at the same MHz-hungry community: the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE).

Why be anything less than perfectly comfortable when using your computer?

We heard that Apple may be changing its slogan from “Think Different” to “CONFORM!”

Eighteen months after the release of Panther, Apple's Mac OS X 10.4, codenamed Tiger, is finally here, and it has been well worth the wait.

GarageBand very much fits the mould of a very simplified and intuitive approach to something that is traditionally quite complex - it's to music editing what iMovie is to video editing. The interface for GarageBand is very straight forward, and most functions are ready to hand. Setup is also very simple, with little need to worry about things like MIDI in/out/through or ASIO drivers and such.