I am interested in getting the basic 21.xx inch iMac, currently on sale for about 1k. We mainly do surfing, email, and skype, no real gaming stuff. I have iphone and ipad and have seen flawless performance from Apple. This would be our first non-pc.
Anybody care to talk me out of it?
Lots of experience with both Mac & PC. For the most part, I love the mac operating system OSX.
As others have said, you "must" get it with an SSD instead of the stock hard drive. The 256 G SSD is a $200 upgrade. It is a shame current Imacs still have hard drives as stock.
It you need more room for your stuff (tons of photos and, esp., videos), then buy an external USB 3 hard drive. If you have anything worth keeping, get another external drive USB 3 to run Time Machine, Apple's excellent built-in auto backup software.
Over the last decade, most of my friends with imacs lost their internal hard drives. One person lost 2 drives in 4 years. So I strongly recommend getting the internal SSD, for much improved speed & reliability. If you need more space, again, just use an external drive and backup on a second external drive.
As for RAM, I'd max out to 16 GB for an extra $200, but I don't think it's essential if you have a SSD.
If you buy the imac stock, with standard hard drive, you can always upgrade yourself with an SSD in an external enclosure run off of the Thunderbolt port (faster, more expensive) or even usb 3 (cheaper hardware, but slower).