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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."
I know the new Macs are fast, but does that mean the new CPUs are smoking
No, no, Intel has ABSOLUTELY no heat problems. Steve Jobs said that was IBM's fault!
January 25, 2006
David Pogue
Intel Inside. Huh?!
THE buzzwords for the 2006 technology outlook fly thick and fast in nerd circles: high-definition DVD. À la carte TV shows from the Internet. Windows Vista.
Most of these goodies will take time to reach the masses. One, however, has already arrived, six months ahead of schedule: Apple's switch to Intel chips for its Macintosh computers.
The first such retrofitted model, the iMac, went on sale last week. Like the existing iMac model, which remains available, the new one is a sleek, thin, snow-white flat-panel screen with no actual computer box; the guts of the computer are hidden inside. The new iMac, like the old, is virus-free, spyware-free and gorgeous to behold. It still has a built-in camera for live Internet videoconferences, still can record DVD's, still comes with a remote for controlling music, photo slideshows and DVD playback from across the room, and still has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless networking. Even the price is the same: $1,300 for the 17-inch model, $1,700 for the 20-incher.
But now there's Intel inside.
Why on earth would Apple abandon the I.B.M.-Freescale processors that have served Mac fans so well for so many years? The official reasons are speed and heat; Intel's newest chip, the Core Duo, offers more of the first with less of the second. That's a big deal, especially in laptops; Apple's existing PowerBook laptops already get so hot, the smell of barbecued meat practically wafts from your thighs.
The switch is also good for Apple because it puts to death the Megahertz Myth. For years, Apple was at a public-perception disadvantage because consumers mistakenly believed you could rate a computer's speed by its chip. "That 3-gigahertz PC must be faster than a 2-gigahertz Mac," they would say. But megahertz comparisons are valid only between two chips of the same family - say, two Pentium 4's.
Now, though, many Macs and PC's will indeed contain the same processor, Intel's new Core Duo chip. As a computer-speed measurement, the chip-speed rating is still bogus - memory, operating system, circuitry, hard drive and other factors also determine a computer's speed - but less bogus than before.
Now, you can't just drop a new chip into a computer and expect it to work. Tens of thousands of software programs run on the Mac - and every one of them expects to find, at the other end, a PowerPC chip (the old Mac kind). Each one, not to mention the operating system itself, must be rewritten in the Intel language.
That's a nightmarish mountain of work, but Apple has pulled it off almost flawlessly. The operating system, Mac OS X 10.4.4, has indeed been rejiggered to speak Intellese, while otherwise remaining 100 percent identical in look, feel and features. The armada of Mac OS X ancillary programs has also been rewritten: Safari (Web browser), Mail (e-mail), Address Book, iCal (calendar), iTunes (music playback), Calculator, Chess, Dictionary, DVD Player and on and on. Even Apple's new iLife '06 suite has also been converted, and is included on all new Macs: iPhoto (for photos), iMovie (for editing your home videos), GarageBand (for podcasting and music composition) and iWeb (a new supersimple Web site-creation program).
For some real fun some Saturday afternoon, set up an Intel iMac and its identical-looking predecessor side by side. Sit there with a stopwatch, perform the same software timing tests on each one, and keep score in a notebook. Invite some friends over to share in the excitement.
What you'll discover is that the new iMac is deliciously fast when it's running Intel-ready software. Just turning the machine on is a joy, because starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60, like the previous model; you'll want to do it again and again. Programs open up a lot faster, too: GarageBand, for example, is ready for your musical inspiration in only 9 seconds, rather than 20. Web pages appear startlingly quickly: nytimes.com pops open in about 1 second (versus 2), Ama
They are quieter than the PPC machines they replace. Although that might just mean the fan has already melted. But probably not.
This is probably the dumbest benchmark I've ever seen. I realize it's something the average person can relate to, but it really only takes a sentence to explain a benchmark. For example "this test has the machine run a bunch of graphical operations on a large image. It tests how fast the computer can perform the tasks required for image editing". Okay, that was two sentences. But I'm still a better writer than whatever hacks the NYT has write their tech articles.