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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."
Web pages appear startlingly quickly: nytimes.com pops open in about 1 second (versus 2), Amazon is ready in 2 seconds (versus 4) and MSN appears in 6 seconds (versus 8).
*giggles like a little girl*
You people want to complain about all the problems the new IntelMacs have. Did you seriously think Apple/or Any Company. Is going to release a Version 1 of a new system without having some problems. If you don't want to deal with the Glitches of a Version 1 Apple. Wait a year, most apps should be universal, Faster Processor speeds, and Apple will fix all the Generation 1 problems, Also OS X 10.5 should be out. I think the NYT had a fare review. They basically said it is an iMac with what iMacs said to have, and it runs most of the apps currently pretty well, but there are some that don't work yet and others that will never work. If you want an Intel Mac Now go get one. But if you want a good Intel Mac wait next year after some updates and fixes, and a OS that has a stronger focus on the chip.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Blazing...
I know the new Macs are fast, but does that mean the new CPUs are smoking (i.e., Oh God, oh God, the CPU is on fire and we all gonna die!). That would be bad.
Not necessarily. Even if it's stored locally (taking broadband out of the equation entirely), a graphics-intensive page -- or one with Flash advertisements -- will always take a longer time to render than one which is, say, mostly text and CSS. Occasionally it will take a MUCH longer time.
:)
This is because of the actual cost of laying out and rendering the page, which is something that can be affected by CPU performance. (If I have a Pentium 233 and a Pentium 4 on the same network link, both running Firefox 1.5, pages will still come up faster on the Pentium 4 than they do on the Pentium 233.)
I suspect that this was what the NYTimes reviewer was referring to, even if he wasn't really *clear* about it.
--Rachel
He suffers from "widespread befuddlement"
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.
/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.' ;)
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
--Rachel
David Pogue's got forthcoming books to sell.
Bricking a computer by flashing unsupported code into the part of the computer responsible for making it boot is not a hardware bug. It is a user bug.
Or did I miss a memo somewhere?
David Pogue, like myself, is a huge Mac geek. I have to treat what he writes with a grain of salt, as he sees the world with a Steve Jobs reality distortion field on him at all times. As much as I love the Macintosh and use one every day, I would never say that David Pogue is an impartial source when it comes to reviewing Macintosh hardware or software.
Is he knowledgeable? Yes. Hugely. Author of several very popular and very well respected Mac books. Knows the technologies, their histories, the players, knows how to write, and knows what folks are interested in reading.
Is he a rah-rah Mac fanboy? No.
He, like Walt Mossberg, has been quite good about calling out Apple on their failures. Any number of times he's pointed out when the emperor has no clothes, that a great-leap-forward ain't necessarily so, that Apple hasn't gotten something right.
Does he claim not to like the Mac platform? No. Does he present himself as some sort of unopinioniated ideal, absolutely agnostic on the subjects he writes about? Not at all. He is completely clear about his appreciation for the Mac and then goes ahead and reports about it rather fairly and honestly.
So, partial or not, he's a damn good source of news and reviews about the Mac platform and certainly a heck of a lot better then either the fanboys and the not-without-a-2-button-mouse cranks.
Read the review, then judge it by it's content, decide for yourself if Pogue's fondness for Macs makes him unsuitable to report on 'em.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Well, for one thing it's not really a review of anything; it's a story about Apple's transition to Intel chips.
He does note that some things are faster on the Intel iMac, and that some software will run natively, some will run with Rosetta, and some won't run at all. Anyway, hardly a review...
My other sig is extremely clever...
From TFA: "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." Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
will it copy a 17MB file in under 20 minutes?
Did you seriously hold onto that blog entry for SEVEN YEARS to post it?
Latewire
I dunno how good his predictions have been, and for a tech-writer, his knowledge level about tech stuff sometimes seems depressingly low (while above average for the general populace, it's certainly way below that of the typical slashdot denizen).
:-). He seems genuinely willing to explore his mistakes and learn from them -- all in print.
David Pogue does have one big saving grace though: when he's wrong/muddled about something, he seems to have no problem admitting it his next column (after being informed of the problem by 23,347 email messages from slashdot readers
I think this sets a great example, and is indeed even educational for the average reader. It's certainly a refreshing change from typical tech-journal pundits (who will never admit error or change their position, despite being off in bizarro-land about 75% of the time).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I don't want to start a holy war here but what is the deal with this seven-year-old Mac troll? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig browsing slashdot when I should be working for about twenty minutes while it attempts to to make me laugh 17 times. At home, while looking at the *BSD troll, which by all standards should be a lot less funny than the Mac troll, I'd be giggling in two minutes, if that.... From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Mac troll is a superior troll. 7-year-old Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use the Mac troll over other faster, funnier, more reliable trolls.
The comment would be legitiately "Insightful" if Pogue were using web pages as a measure of processor power. However for those who bother to read the article will discover, he doesn't. In fact engagebot's argument is a straw man.
Pogue writes:Pogue is clearly describing how fast the new Intel-Macs feel doing things the the old Power-Macs do, but with the new Intel-based universal applications. No reference to the CPU here, none to megafoofoos-per-second, bajillions-of-fakestones, or other like esoterica. Not even the Intel processor makes these faster. Just that this new Intel Mac boots fast and runs these Intel-compiled apps just as well or better then the older Macs.
In case anyone was too obtuse to clearly understand this the next paragraph makes this absolutely clear by spelling it out:
Pogue writes:"Speed". Not CPU speed, just speed. Indeed later in the article he takes care to point out all of the places where things run slower, and why, and how some won't run at all.
So, the only one "therefore killing any authority he has in the first place" is engagebot for setting up a completely false argument then using it to grind his own axe. And whoever so carelessly moderated his posting as "Insightful".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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.
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.