imac

I am typing this on a working Core i7 iMac. It took in excess of a month to get the machine: was it worth the wait?

First, some background. I order the i7 after four days of planned dithering following the announcement of the new iMac range on the 20th. A review of my blog will find that until recently I have had, as my primary Macs, a MacBook and iMac 20" (among countless other computers; I am rather hardware obsessive).

As part of house move I decided to consolidate and upgrade my Macs. The first thing I did was to sell my MacBook as the opportunity arose to do so. The iMac has primarily been my mother's for many months now so instead of buying a her a new machine when I move out, she can keep that.

This planning started back in September; I sold the MacBook around the start of October.

So what was I going to buy? My initial thoughts were to get a new MacBook Pro. For nearly a year that had been my plan; the unibody Macs are magnificent machines. My other thoughts were to get the best possible. Apple's pricing certainly does encourage upselling - I found the top-end 15" to be ideal, but once you look at that then the basic (and only) model of 17" starts look affordable. And what a screen the 17" has... true HD resolution.

So that became the plan for few weeks. I was going to get myself a top-end, ultra expensive MacBook.

Then I started looking at MacPros. Do I really need a laptop? No. I am rarely in a situation where one makes sense. The best use I made of the MacBook was to watch TV in bed. Once you start to look at MacBook 17" prices, you start to realise that you can get a hell of a lot of power for that money. Now, I'm not in the market for a PC so granted that a built PC is cheaper again. But the low-end Pro has a quad core Xeon which is something like twice as fast as the high-end MacBook.

So that became the plan for a week or two. A MacPro running with my existing 20" HP monitor followed by a 30" monitor upgrade sometime in the future. But I held off; the rumours were circulating about an iMac refresh and while I try not to consciously make purchasing decisions based on rumour, my subconscious was all too aware of the two grand expense at stake.

And so that brings us to the 20th of October 2009 and the relatively quiet announcement of the new iMac range. It was perfect; everything I wanted from fast CPUs to big screens and at a price point lower that the Mac or MacBook Pro with the extra of the huge 27" display. So that was that; I waited for 4 days just to check whether I would change my mind, but I didn't and got out the card for the financial pain.

The quad iMacs shipped quite a while after the Core2Duo models. I received mine on the 14th of November. Unfortunately, after the excitement of the unboxing and setup the machine was dead. No matter how I pressed the power button, nothing happened. So we entered the RMA process for a new machine.

Forward to the 3rd of December when the replacement gets here and is thankfully working. I did see the screen flicker issue on the night of the 4th (this has also was widely reported on forums along with DOA and smashed screens), but that disappeared and has not come back so far (the machine has been on for 8 hours a day on the 5th and 6th); I don't really want to go through the pain of the RMA wait again.

So that is the background and experience of the buying process. What is the machine like to use?

First impressions: the screen. Wow. Moving up from a 20" to this is really something. The colour is even as you'd expect of an IPS screen; the TN screen of the 2007 20" and MacBook has terrible colour distortion if you move your head. The 16:9 ratio fits broadcast TV and screen is big enough for a good film experience in the living room.

Next: speed. Hmm, well. Somethings are indeed lightning fast. I'm loving Eclipse on this. However, the reality is that much of what I do, such as browsing the web, is perfectly happy on the old 2.0GHz C2D of the iMac and MacBook. That is to say, I generally can't tell the difference. That's not to say anything about multi-core or i7 speed but simply that current software is really well designed and suited to current hardware.
As for the graphics speed with the ATI 4850, I've only tried 2D so far and that is perfectly smooth. This was my main problem with the MacBook and the main driver of wanting to upgrade it - the 20" iMac's ATI 2400 was smooth in 2D in nearly all situations but could drop frames with Exposé with many open windows. The MacBook bogs down with any intense use (at least the improved Intel GMA X3100 does, which both my personal and work MacBooks have; the Nvidia 9400M should be much better).

Keyboard and mouse: the wireless keyboard is a MacBook laptop keyboard in a hard aluminium casing. I like it a lot. I have a full (with numeric keypad) aluminium keyboard on the 20" iMac and at work and would prefer that for work purposes. But for home use, the lack of keypad is not an issue.

The Magic Mouse is quite good. Like any new mouse, it'll take getting use to. The lack of a middle mouse button is actually the biggest issue so far (but I am aware of the patches to add to functionality). Accidental swipes are another issue. I'll let you know in a month or two. But so far, I'm not turned off it.

That sums up my first impressions. The main thing to say is that the quad core 27" iMac is genuinely good machine, but there are teething problems in Apple getting a working one shipped out to you! Once you have it and it works, it's everything they advertised.

A few weeks ago I bought myself an iMac.

My primary server developed faults which became too much for me to fix (it would lock up regularly). A second server also developed faults which led to the loss of a 220GB RAID5. The first machine was a proper server, with IPMI, watchdogs, multi-SCSI ports and a huge, well built chassis. But it was only a dual P3, capable but very slow for a primary machine.

So the decision was made to repurpose an existing desktop machine into a server and virtualise as much as possible onto it with VMWare Server. It's a consumer grade 939 motherboard in a 7 year old ATX case, with an Athlon X2 3800. It maxes out at 4GB of RAM, but that'll do for now. It's not bad in terms of speed, but I'm getting spoilt by some new dual Xeon Dell 1950s in work which are stunningly quick in all respects (we're talking 12GB/s disk buffer compared with 1GB/s on my machine, and Gentoo emerge --syncs which complete within seconds rather than minutes).

The replacement for this machine on the desktop was to be a Mac.
I wasted weeks deciding which to choose: a highly specced Mac Mini or an iMac. Both had stuff going for them:
* A highly specced Mini would cost as much as the entry level iMac, yet be less well specced and have a slower, smaller hard disk, and of course not include a 20" TFT.
* I have more than one machine on the desk in question, but really only want one monitor. You can't plug other machines into an iMac's screen.

Anyway, I obviously went for the iMac.
I should have pondered for another week. Exactly 8 days after I placed my order, Apple refreshed the iMac range. I could have had a 2.4GHz processor on a faster bus instead of the 2.0GHz 667Mhz machine I have. But never mind.

The iMac is fast. Although the basic spec seems very much similar to my MacBook, it is much faster in every respect. I suspect this is mainly the hard disk (the display is quicker on the ATI chip, but I'm talking launching programs and the like). Naturally the 3.5" SATA2 disk in the iMac is going to be quicker than the 2.5" laptop SATA2 in the MacBook. But it really does pervade everything you do.

The build quality is excellent. Everything about the iMac says high quality; the metals and glass used in the external construction are solid and really give the impression that you've got yourself value for money. The aluminium keyboard looks initially as if it would be flimsy, but it's not - it feels like a slab of aluminium with good weight to hold it on the desk and good key feedback. Although essentially the same as the MacBook's keyboard, it's more solid. The MacBook keyboard suffers from being mounted in plastic, which can flex while typing.

On the Mighty Mouse:
* It's smooth, no problems with movement of the pointer on screen. The tracking is high quality.
* It feels very plasticky, because it is.
* The ball - the replacement for the wheel - is excellent! 2D scrolling is well implemented.
* Touch sensitive buttons: left clicks work fine. Middle clicks (on the ball) work fine. Right clicks can be very awkward - you must remove your fingers from the left side of the mouse completely. As a one button mouse, it's good, but the touch sensitive top needs work.
* Side squeeze buttons: do not work as advertised. Apparently, you should press both together to activate. Not on mine. If either are pressed a click is registered. They are very sensitive and right under my fingers, so I found myself sending spurious clicks constantly. If you really did have to squeeze both, it'd be fine. Maybe my mouse is broken? Anyway, the buttons are disabled in System Preferences.
* You can't hold both left and right buttons down together. This is a problem if you want to run (e.g.) an Amiga in emulation.

I virtualised the old desktop PC into a VMWare machine using the Converter software (as it was my mother's machine, it primarily ran WindowsXP). It was painless to do this. I bought VMWare Fusion with the iMac and WindowsXP runs really well in it - faster than on the AMD processor in the old machine! Unity mode, where Windows applications are brought onto the iMac desktop, is good but you can tell the windows don't belong as they slice and stutter when moved about. My mother mostly uses Windows - still :( - and tends to stick to the full screen mode.

I got 1GB RAM in the machine, Apple's costs for upgrades were very high at the time. I bought 4GB from work, using the free Apple SODIMM to bring my MacBook up to 2GB. I obviously don't push my Macs much as the only place I see a difference is in VMWare, where obviously two operating systems fighting over the same 1GB of RAM will cause swapping and slowdown.

So, my opinion of the iMac? Given that I've always built my own PCs and work at a company which has a strict "no Macs" policy (I've even inadvertently had companies switch from Mac or Linux servers to Windows 2003 - I hate that I am now part of the problem)?

Buy one. They are flippin' great.

But a caveat: my servers still run Gentoo, or FreeBSD, CentOS, Mandriva, ... :-)