Blazing Review of the New iMac

boxturtleme writes "Despite the sometimes lackluster reviews of the new Intel iMac over the past several weeks, what with speed tests and hardware bugs, the New York Times sure seemed to like it. And beyond the blazing review, the Times seems fully confident that someone will soon have Windows and OS X dual booting."

Comments

Re:Uh, oh...

[pjl5602]

+1 Geek Factor - For working a "Serenity" quote into a post. :-)

Re:Hi, My name is David Pogue

[Sparks23]

The only reason the Intel iMac and MacBook Pro can't run Windows, as I understand it, is that they don't have BIOS on the board, but do have 32-bit CPUs.

In the existing x86 world, all 32-bit stuff is still stuck on the old legacy BIOS system, whereas all the 64-bit stuff has moved on to EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). 64-bit versions of Windows will boot out of EFI just fine, but the 32-bit versions only support BIOS. Since the dual-core is a 32-bit CPU...

David Pogue's stuff is pretty hit and miss (I agree that he should be shot for 'Intellese'), but he's right inasmuch as someone probably /is/ going to hack together something that'll load in EFI and pretend to be a BIOS long enough to get Windows loaded. It will not, of course, be a 'driver pack.' ;)

"what with speed tests..."?

[harlows_monkeys]

I've got one of these new iMacs, and have been able to check out the speed in person. What people are overlooking is that the speed tests in the reviews are focusing on a few apps that are particularly bad for emulation, such as Photoshop, and even in that case, Photoshop comes out acceptable for quite a lot of tasks. It's not anything a pro would want to use--but pros are not the targets for the iMac. It looks like CPU-bound tasks are roughly about half as fast as they would be on a G5 at about the same clock speed. Most things aren't CPU-bound, and so the hit is smaller.

For things that the intended users of iMacs will use, the performance is fine under emulation. Here's what I've observed, in comparision to my 17" G4 PowerBook, and my 1.8 GHz G5 PowerMac. I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro in the G5, and previously had a GeForce FX 5200 in it.

Word on the iMac feels faster than on the PowerBook, and comparable to the G5. (And Word on the iMac totally kicks the ass of OpenOffice 2 on my Athlon 64 Linux box...).

World of Warcraft on the iMac is faster than on the PowerBook, and faster than on the G5 with the FX 5200, and slower than on the G5 with the Radeon 9800 Pro. It is the video card that is the main factor here, not CPU performance.

As for native apps, such as Safari, Mail, iLife, they are much much much faster than on my PowerMac. X launches in about 1/4 of the time, for example.

Summary: for most non-pro users, the new iMac will be the fastest Mac they've ever seen.

A quick review of my own.

[alistair]

I bought the new 20" Core Duo iMac yesterday, after much searching of the streets of London. My initial thoughts are as follows;

The machine is beautifully constructed, it is very clear a lot of thought went into it. The screen is very, very nice, the latest Sony machines seem a little nicer but it is better than I am used to from flat screens. It took about 4 minutes to get from opening the box to up and running which is very impressive. However, one point to note, it is much heavier than you might expect. I had visions of moving it round to watch movies on, use in the living room etc and I am now having doubts about the practicallity of this.

Start up is fast, as notes in other reviews. Safari is blazingly fast. However, Safari seem to be an earlier build, my version doesn't seem to have any tabs. The build reports as 2.05, has anyone else noted this about the Intel build, I couldn't find anything on the Web.

A bought an Airport base station and it was up and running with my broadband router in about 10 minutes (would have been sooner apart from a basic mistake on my part). I was very impressed with the Airport integration, there are cheaper solutions but this was very impressive.

I downloaded and installed Firefox without any issues. I don't think this is a universal binary yet, start time was much slower than Safari but once up and running it seemed at least as fast at page rendering and it has tabs.

There seems to be a shortage of media players at present. No Windows Media Player for the mac and the flip4mac plugin for Quicktime explicitly states that it isn't ready for Intel Macs yet. I tried to get Real Player but was fustrated by their awful web site, again it wasn't clear if I ever found the free version if it would work on an Intel iMac.

Installing dashboard widgets was also a little hit and miss. Some worked perfectly, others didn't respond as you might expect (I think the main issue was those with embedded Flash).

I installed Google Earth and this was a revelation. Again, I don't think this is a universal binary but it is hard to tell if it is running under emulation. This proved superb, if you want a single application to demonstrate the quality of the screen combined with the data provided by a decent network connection this is it. I was completely hooked and spend the next few hours simply playing with this.

Overall the machine feels superb in terms of hardware construction, after 5 hours it was barely warmer than a standard flat screen monitor and the fan(s) are very quiet, hard to hear in normal usage. The OS feels fast and responsive and I like the new Mighty Mouse. However, the OS also feels like a work in progress, it feels sparse compared to my previous G4 Mac with Tiger and a number of tools and utilities simply aren't there yet.

However, I feel I made the right choice, after just 5 hours I am hooked in a way I didn't expect to be working with computers day in day out. The machine has a real "WOW" factor as you put it through its paces and I have yet to find an app (Office, Mail, Web etc.) which feels less snappy than its Windows equivelent.