The northlondonhippy

Archive for October 22nd, 2007

Here is my slightly delayed, but finally com­plete review of my brand new iMac!

Two weeks ago, I took deliv­ery of my brand new, shiny, super­fast iMac. It’s my sec­ond iMac and 5th Apple com­puter in the last 3 years. You could say, I’m a bit Apple-mad!

You could be onto some­thing if you did…

I fell in love with my last iMac, I’m talk­ing seri­ous techo-geek devo­tion. The pre­vi­ous one I had was a 20”, 1.8mhz G5 model, which I still have and is still going strong. I might try to sell it, or it might become the media cen­tre in the bed­room. I haven’t decided yet.

The sys­tem replac­ing my old iMac, is a 24” alu­minium, 2.8mhz Core Duo Extreme model, with 2gb of RAM and a ter­abyte of hard drive. It’s quite a tech­no­log­i­cal leap from my old one.

First of all, it’s big…considerably more screen real estate than my 20”, around 30% big­ger I think. The screen is glossy, the same as my Mac­Book and I do like the way it makes things look. It’s very bright and the colours are very deep. The down­side is that it shows smudges very well, but Apple give you a cloth to keep it nice and shiny. I haven’t found glare to be a prob­lem and I do have a double-window right behind me.

It’s also con­sid­er­ably thin­ner and sleeker than my pre­vi­ous model. The ports run along the bot­tom of the back and not along the side.

It is also much qui­eter than the last one, with the fans barely audible.

I pre­fer the alu­minium case much more than the plas­tic. It has a more sub­stan­tial look and feel.

I miss the sleep light, which has been omit­ted from this ver­sion. I liked the way it pulsed, almost like a visual ver­sion of snoring.

Unbox­ing my new com­puter took no time, as it lifts out in one piece. All I had to do was con­nect the power cable and plug it in. I also had to put bat­ter­ies into the wire­less mouse and wire­less key­board, but that wasn’t com­pli­cated either.

I plugged a firewire cable into my new iMac and my old iMac and used the Setup Assis­tant to trans­fer all my data and accounts and that was the only hitch I expe­ri­enced. The old iMac rebooted about 2 and 1/2 hours into the process and I had to start again from scratch. Had that not hap­pened, with would have only taken 3 and 1/2 hours to trans­fer around 120 giga­bytes of stuff.

When I finally started OS X on the new iMac, my desk­top looked iden­ti­cal to the old one in every respect. My desk­top pic­ture was there, so were all my files, appli­ca­tions, home fold­ers, even my login photo! It worked per­fectly and was rel­a­tively painless.

It was actu­ally kind of strange, hav­ing a brand new com­puter, but it look­ing and respond­ing like the old one.

My new com­puter is light­en­ing fast, and will only get faster when I max out the RAM to 4 gigs. It was a bit pricey to do that now, but in 6 months of so, it will be a lot cheaper. Even with only 2 gigs, it still per­forms excep­tion­ally well.

I’ve played with some of the new appli­ca­tions that shipped with my iMac and from what I’ve seen, I’m very impressed so far. The new iPhoto ’08 is amaz­ing and a giant leap for­ward for the pro­gram. I’ve also had a look at the new iMovie, and I can see the direc­tion they are try­ing to take with it. I think, in time, it will be regarded more highly than it is now, but it will take sev­eral revi­sions to get to that point.

I haven’t had a chance to use the other iLife app’s yet, but will get there even­tu­ally. I have used Final Cut Express and Logic Express and both run exceed­ingly well. I’m going to be upgrad­ing Logic Express to the full ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio 8 in the not too dis­tant future, which will give me the full ver­sion of every­thing in Apple’s audio pro­duc­tion suite of software.

I’ve also been test dri­ving iWork ’08 and I like it very much. I’m using Pages right now, to write this and I think I’m going to drop MS Office in favour of it. I’ve also used Keynote and think it is very pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple to use and could see using it for sim­ple ani­mated graph­ics again in the future. I’m going to buy a copy of iWork before my trial runs out.

Over­all, I’m glad I upgraded my desk­top sys­tem. I can see huge per­for­mance gains already and I really do appre­ci­ate the extra screen space. Leop­ard is ship­ping later this week and I’m sure it will run like a dream on my new machine.