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iMac Businesses Apple Hardware

Blazing Review of the New iMac 150

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the non-nitty-gritty-reviews dept.
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."
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Blazing Review of the New iMac More

Blazing Review of the New iMac

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  • MSN (Score:5, Funny)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @04:57PM (#14561739) Journal
    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*

  • Why Dont you people wait. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:01PM (#14561780)
    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.
    • Not trying to complain about all the problems with them. I haven't personally tried them out yet (though I'd love to... but some of us are poor college kids). I just find it interesting that many of the things (that have made slashdot at least) weren't very flattering, while this is the opposite.
      • People will complain about anything and challenge any thing that comes out.

        I could say that my Favorite Text Editor is... And I will get a bunch of people saying how much my Text Editor sucks compared to theirs.

        By being able to complain about something makes them think they are smart because they knew enough about something to come up with a retort.
    • You're kidding, right? Slashdot? Wait? That's crazy talk!

      (Slow down, Cowboy!)
    • Faster Processor speeds,

      I don't think you're going to see much in the way of faster processor speeds over the next year. Yes, the Intel chips will still be dual core, and move from 32-bit to 64-bit processing, but don't look for a faster processor to bail you out.

      You sound a bit like an Apple Apologist. Apple releases a system that isn't that good, but just wait until the next one arrives. Frankly, Jobs didn't have to release anything at this time. Nothing was promised until June 06. The fact that

      • I don't get it. The iMacs are faster than the previous generation seem to work as well as ever, yet they're "substandard?" The new notebook, not that anyone's actually ever USED a PRODUCTION model looks to be a nice machine. Not substandard.

        I would be nice to have a 64-bit processor. Hopefully Intel gets on that. I suspect Intel will make faster processors over the next year too. You know, like they (and everyone else) have done since the microprocessor was invented. Those will probably be translated
    • You people want to complain about all the problems the new IntelMacs have.

      There are exactly zero top-level comments above this one that complain about the Intel Macs. Additionally, as I post this, I don't believe any of the responses to said comments complain about the Intel Macs. I realize the standard Apple geek knee-jerk response will get lots of attaboys, flames, and positive mods, but I'd appreciate it if you'd respond to what people are actually saying, rather than making things up.

      In fact, you s

  • web pages (Score:2, Insightful)

    by amazon10x ( 737466 )
    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).

    I might be wrong here but wouldn't the speed that a page comes up have nothing to do with whether your processor is a little faster and more to do with how many people are using broadband in your neighborhood at the time of the test?

    • Re:web pages (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sparks23 ( 412116 ) * on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:09PM (#14561851)
      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. :)

    • Re:web pages (Score:3, Informative)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) *
      Well yes and no.
      There is Download speed, then there is rendering speed, and then there is JavaScript speed.
      So in some cases say a large slashdot discussion, with many threads it may take a second or two to get all the data. But then it could take 2 - 3 more seconds for the browser to render the tables and fill the content, put the images in the correct spot. Follow rules for transparencies, If you have many images of the same type then you need to check to make sure you already have the image and only get
    • Not necessarily. I remember when I had cable and a pentium 200 mhz computer. My friend had a 56k connection and a pentium 3. Pages seemed to render at the same speeds. While mine certainly did download the pages faster, a 200mhz computer is painfully slow at rendering complex webpages whereas the better processor could manage that much faster. Now you did see big discrepancies on Downloads (No rendering required just write access) or simple pages with a few images, all loaded faster on the cable.

      Just my 2

    • Uh, wouldn't broadband in your neighborhood affect all remote sites equally?

  • Uh, oh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:05PM (#14561809)
    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.
  • "The next Mac to receive the Intel conversion will be the PowerBook laptop. The new MacBook Pro, as it has been renamed (to widespread befuddlement)"

    Did they mean the iBook?
    • Considering that Pixar and Disney are in bed together, I wouldn't be surprised if they rename the iBook as the iDuck. Of course, some kids might get creative in the French language department with that name.
    • Nope. The MacBook Pro [apple.com] is the renamed Powerbook, with the new Intel dual-core processor. (I suspect this is partly because power-user sorts would howl bloody murder if the iBook got a generational jump before the Powerbook -- sorry, 'MacBook Pro' -- did.)

      I'd imagine the iBooks won't get updated until later in the year.

    • Re:PowerBook (Score:3, Informative)

      by johnpaul191 ( 240105 )
      no, the MacBook Pro is the replacement for the 15" Powerbook. i guess technically the MacBook is not yet out, and the 15" Powerbook G4 is still available from Apple. i am pretty sure Apple said they have stopped, or will very soon stop, manufacturing the 15" Powerbooks and sell off remaining inventory to people not ready to do the Intel hop.... and i guess stash some for AppleCare replacements?

    • Re:PowerBook (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Gibberlins ( 714322 )
      Intel Macs will not have a "Power" name (PowerMac, PowerBook) associated with them because they no longer use PowerPC processors.

      • Re:PowerBook (Score:2, Informative)

        by morgdx ( 688154 )

        Er... PowerBook 100, 140, 170, all the way up to the 540C used 68000 to 68040 processors and were called *POWER* even before the first PowerPC chips had been released.

      • Re:PowerBook (Score:2, Informative)

        by TomMorrisey ( 912581 )
        "PowerBook" predates Apple's switch from 68k to PowerPC processors.

      • Re:PowerBook (Score:2, Informative)

        by ClamIAm ( 926466 )
        This is really just Steve Jobs being, well, Steve Jobs. The original Powerbooks didn't use PowerPC chips. Now that they've jumped ship to Intel, ol' Steve probably thought it would be fun to zing IBM/Motorola a bit. It's somewhat ironic, whereas they originally hated on Intel and promoted the PPC, now they do the opposite.
    • If the PowerBook has been renamed to the MacBook, does that mean the PowerMac will be renamed the MacMac?


      I suspect that the PowerBook was renamed to remove the association with PowerPC that the word "Power" in the name provided. This leads me to beleive that the PowerMac will be renamed once the Intel switch reaches it.
      Place your bets on what it will be named!

  • Of course it's a blazing review! (Score:3, Funny)

    by chrism238 ( 657741 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:26PM (#14561999)
    David Pogue's got forthcoming books to sell.

  • Hardware bugs? What hardware bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Radak ( 126696 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:30PM (#14562049) Journal
    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?
    • Here I go talking to myself...

      Ah, the fabled list of Core Duo/Solo errata. Given that such a list is typical of every processor, and previous Slashdot discussion has noted that the Core Duo/Solo errata list actually shorter than most, it almost seems irrelevant...

      *shrug*

  • Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by plazman30 ( 531348 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @05:37PM (#14562124) Homepage
    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.

    • A damn good reporter nonetheless (Score:4, Insightful)

      by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:06PM (#14562438) Homepage Journal
      I would never say that David Pogue is an impartial source when it comes to reviewing Macintosh hardware or software.
      Actually I find him to be quite accurate, if not impartial.

      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.

    • ...Walt Mossberg rates a shaker. :) If Macs had butts, he'd kiss 'em. Pogue at least writes some books and stuff, too.

      (And I'm saying this as someone who's bought 6 Macs in the last 5 years...)

  • So the real question is (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will it copy a 17MB file in under 20 minutes [kottke.org]?

    • Re:So the real question is (Score:4, Funny)

      by slughead ( 592713 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:30PM (#14562643) Homepage Journal
      will it copy a 17MB file in under 20 minutes [kottke.org]?

      Did you seriously hold onto that blog entry for SEVEN YEARS to post it?

  • Blazing Review? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Microsift ( 223381 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:10PM (#14562478)
    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...

  • Windows on Mac (Score:5, Funny)

    by tidewaterblues ( 784797 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @06:20PM (#14562557)
    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...
    • ...starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60...

      Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...

      Also sounds like Steve Jobs was on his startup time hobby horse again, hectoring the engineers about startup time. He's had a thing about that since 1984; one of the "insanely great" traits of the first Macs was their startup time, from an OS on a single floppy no less.

      (It's interesting that anyone notices, really, given how stable OS X is. I haven't rebooted since we

  • Not to overly complain (and for the laptop users, this point is moot), but the previous version of the iMac was 64-bit, G5 based. This meant that you could buy an iMac as a development platform, then push the package up to PowerMacs or XServes. The new iMac, while I'm sure quite snappy and all that, can only do that for 32-bit code. I know, you can cross-compile, and test it on the remote system, but that's less convenient than local compiling, testing, and debugging.

    In the end, maybe this doesn't mat

    • Re:We lost 64-bit (Score:3, Interesting)

      by javaxman ( 705658 )
      the previous version of the iMac was 64-bit, G5 based

      Repeat after me : the iMac is not a Pro machine. The iMac is a consumer machine.

      It's entirely likely that Apple never wanted to use the same chip in the iMac and the PowerMac at the same time, and were just forced into that situation by the dual pressures of increasing performance in the Intel world and no new developments in from IBM and Freescale.

      While eventually the iMac might be 64-bit again some day, it'll be well after the Pro-level tower machin

  • Oh wow! Good thing we have ANOTHER review of the same friggin machine. At least this time it's by a media source, and we know the media is never biased. Those stupid reviews with numbers and benchmarks, what do they know?

  • "what with speed tests..."? (Score:4, Informative)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @11:21PM (#14564672) Homepage
    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.

    • It's not as if all these apps will be emulated forever. The idea is to get some machines out there so that Adobe will have some incentive to get that porting going.

      Rosetta is the same as Classic on OS X was... a handy compatibility layer to get you by until native versions become available.

      Has anyone noticed how Apple's about the only OS maker who manages to do these architecture transitions? This one, like the last one, seems to be VERY good considering that nobody else will even attempt it. It's pretty
  • I published an article: "Will Macs run Windows?" That looks at what stands in the way now, and the likely workarounds to come.

    http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Jan06.IntelMacsWin1. html [roughlydrafted.com]

    I always like corrections or comments.

  • A quick review of my own. (Score:5, Informative)

    by alistair ( 31390 ) <[alistair] [at] [hotldap.com]> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @06:30AM (#14565980)
    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.
    • 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.

      Tabs aren't enabled in Safari by default, you need to go into preferences and switch them on. No, I have no idea why they don't just switch them on and have done with it.

      Cheers,
      Ian

      • Thanks, I didn't know that. I don't remember ever having to do that through my previous Safari upgrades and I agree that enabling tabs by default would be the most logical behaviour, especially as even IE will have this feature and it makes a lot of sense on a widescreen, as favoured by Apple.
    • Safari tabs must be enabled explicitly in the preferences.
    • Find the application file, either by browsing /Applications or doing a click-and-hold on an application's Dock icon and selecting "Show in Finder" from the menu that appears.

      Do a "Get Info" on the application by either:
      -Ctrl-clicking on its icon and selecting "Get Info" from the context menu.
      -Clicking on it once to select it and then doing Command-I on the keyboard or File -> Get Info in the menu bar.

      If the application is a Universal Binary, it will say "Application (Universal)" in the "Kind" field in th

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