On a dark and stormy night, just over two weeks ago, a young man walked into a store to purchase an item. This item was said to yield unspeakable power to those who possessed it. Much more powerful than anything else that had come before it. The man walked out of the shop carrying the item with him. That man was me and the item was my shiny new 17” iMac Core Duo.

I’ve wanted one ever since I set eyes on the iSight-equipped iMac G5 last October and I was all set on getting an iMac G5 when I had the money. Then Apple announced the iMac was the first Intel Mac, the 17” iMac G5 vanished from the Apple Store and then I got some money. So I decided to embrace the future and get an Intel Mac.

Setting Up

Setting up was simple. Unpack box, put on desk, plug in keyboard, mouse and power, turn on. I went through the process setting up OS X and moving my old computer over using the Migration Assistant (it took a while for it to find my laptop but that was most likely due to a faulty firewire cable). Then it was a simple case of installing the updates and rebooting. This, is of course, where my first shiny graph comes into the review. It shows the boot up speeds of my new iMac vs my old TiBook.

The iMac, being the 17” model, has a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and the TiBook has an 800 MHz G4 processor. In this test RAM made no difference so I haven’t bothered mentioning it (though as you’ll see later, RAM has a huge effect on other areas of performance).

Reports of the Intel Macs having faster boot speeds are obviously true. These tests were carried out when both Macs had identical software set ups, just after I migrated my data. While some people have been reporting boot up times of around 25 seconds, my figure seems to represent a more real world number, seeing as I have several apps open on start up, 2 of which are running under Rosetta (Desktop Manager & iScrobbler).

General Usage

The first thing I did was swap the Mighty Mouse for my old Logitech mouse. While the Mighty Mouse a good idea, its implementation is kinda poor. That said, I find it pretty usable in short bursts with my TiBook. After using a laptop as my main machine for the past few years having a full keyboard is nice and the Apple keyboard is great, though Apple’s strangeness in only having USB 1.1 ports means I have to reach behind my iMac to plug in my USB pen drive in order to get full USB 2.0 speeds.

The iMac itself is very fast and responsive. The lack of any major hardware related problems with it makes me think that releasing the iSight iMac G5 was just to make sure that these iMacs had less chance of the Rev A syndrome that seems to be affecting the MacBook Pros. After a few days of usage I managed to become quite proficient in finding the correct ports at the back of the computer. The built in iSight is really cool, not only because It Just Works™, but because of Photo Booth. It may have next to no point in life except to be fun, but it shines as one of the coolest apps Apple has ever made.

The main problem with the iMac is the amount of ram you are given. Open any more than a few basic applications and the 512 MB of ram included gets very restrictive, even more so if any open applications are running under Rosetta.

Front Row

Front Row is one of the reasons I wanted to get an iMac. As I’m going to university next year, I wanted something to let me watch DVDs and play my music from across the room. So instead of having to buy a DVD player, TV and stereo I could just use my iMac. I wasn’t looking for the full media experience that a Media Centre PC would offer me but I did get what I wanted with Front Row. Playing DVDs works just fine, but the optical drive can get pretty noisy (though it is pretty much the only computer related noise you’ll hear coming from it) and the music feature works great, although it isn’t quite as intelligent as iTunes.

There are a few problems with Front Row, though. The remote didn’t seem to want to register at first, though either an OS X or Front Row update seems to have fixed this. (On a side note, if you ever think your remote may have broken open iChat, click on the video icon at the top and hold your remote up to the iSight and press a button. You should be able to see it flashing if it’s working.) I haven’t been able to access the movie trailers as it constantly says the server is not available, though some searching has suggested that this could be a problem at Apple’s end and that they are aware of it.

The last problem is with the audio. Now while the audio is excellent (well actually it’s brilliant, though I’m not an audiophile so I’m not quite as good a judge as others) when I’m sat in front of the iMac, when I move to the other side of the room the audio level noticeably drops, especially when I sit down. It’s only a minor issue and not really a fault with this iMac but more the whole bounce-audio-off-the-desk idea with the iMac.

Installing RAM

As I mentioned before, the 512 MB of ram is painfully small on the iMac and I would have hoped Apple would have offered 1GB as standard, at least on the 20” model. Seeing as they don’t, I ordered up a 1GB module the night I got my iMac. Installing RAM is pretty much the only upgrade you can perform on these Macs, though you can upgrade the processor if you are up for voiding your warranty and opening up the Mac.

One would assume that Apple would make installing RAM easy, seeing as it is the only upgrade, and on first inspection, it does in fact seem easy. Remove two screws holding a plate it, slot the ram in, screw the plate in again. Unfortunately, I had to battle with the stand, which gets in the way, and over tightened screws that were hard to remove.

Performance

The biggest question on many people’s minds was how fast these machines run. My dad was very kind to point out at every possible opportunity that this iMac was going to be slower than his last gen AlBook (1.67 GHz/15"/1.5GB Ram) when running most apps. Well the two apps I decided to use to test performance were Photoshop and iTunes.

The graph shows Photoshop 7 launch speeds on my TiBook and my iMac pre- and post-RAM upgrade. As you can see, the TiBook launches Photoshop with enough time to spare for it to turn round and mock the iMac. In its standard configuration the iMac took twice as long as the TiBook (which in all fairness had twice the RAM at 1GB). Installing the extra RAM helped shave a few seconds off the launch time.

Overall, Rosetta doesn’t really shine with launch speeds, to the point where it becomes very obvious which apps are native and which are not by the fact that non-native apps take 5+ bounces to launch (as opposed to the 1-3 bounces of native apps). Where it does shine is running the applications. Using Photoshop and Illustrator to produce the graphs for this review was just as fast, if not faster than if I’d done it on my TiBook. But statements like that don’t really help give a picture of how fast Rosetta actually is, so we devised a Photoshop test.

Using a nice 40 MB panoramic image supplied by Arden, I ran a series of actions and timed how long it took each machine to complete them. In addition to the 3 configurations above, and to stop people nagging me, I performed the test on my TiBook with only 512 MB of RAM and my dad’s AlBook with it’s 1.5GB of RAM.

The actions performed for this test were (in order):

• Rotate 90º
• Skew
• Rotate 11º
• 4px Gaussian Blur
• 81px Motion Blur
• Ocean Ripples Filter
• Random Colour Balance Changes
• Random Curve Changes
• Mosaic Tiles Filter
• Invert Colours
• Lighting Effect Filter

RAM plays an important role regardless of the platform, but it does show that the iMac is roughly halfway between an 800 MHz and 1.67 GHz G4, though this will obviously depend on what applications you use and how. For example, I rendered the benchmark image for Strata 3D CX and got it to render in just over 28 minutes, which is about on par with a 1 GHz G4 according to StrataCafe’s long list of benchmarks. Needless to say, the latest G4’s do beat the iMac by a respectable margin in this test, though the fact that the margin is only 1 minute goes to show just how impressive Rosetta actually is. It also highlights the fact that these machines should leave the G4’s in the dust when the major apps are released as Universal Binaries if these figures are native vs. translation.

Another commonly-used benchmark of performance is iTunes ripping speed. The following two graphs show the time and speed at which the iMac and TiBook encoded a CD. The CD used is Urban Hymns by The Verve which weighs in at 718.5 MB or 1.1 hours and it was encoded at 192 kbps as MP3.

As you can see, the iMac and TiBook are roughly on par regarding CD encoding time, but you do gain quite a bit when you add more RAM. But the encoding times don’t tell the whole story. As you can see, the iMac reaches a much higher encoding speed. What I found was that the TiBook reached its max much faster, getting to around 14-15x after only the first few songs. the iMac took longer to reach its max speed, ripping at only 8-10x for the first 2-3 songs.

The last performance test I did was to test video playback. For 1080p H.264 movies Apple recommends a Dual 2 GHz G5 or 2 GHz Core Duo or faster. Well I managed to watch the X Men trailer full screen at 1080p at 24 frames per second just fine, even though my machine falls under the requirements.

Mopping Up

Well the end of the review is drawing near so I’ll just point out a few minor niggles I’m having that I haven’t mentioned. One of the more critical ones is that Mac Help doesn’t seem to want to work. I can search but that’s about it, every link appears to point back to the home page. No other help sections seem affected, so I suspect this isn’t to do with Help Viewer itself. I am also finding problems with plugins in Safari. Flip4Mac isn’t yet native so I don’t have WMV capabilities in Safari, Sibelius Scorch doesn’t want to register even though I installed it and although Flash works fine, Shockwave doesn’t seem to want to work, which means no online pool for me.

By far, though, the most annoying problem I’m having is with Desktop Manager. I can’t seem to move windows between desktops. I tried downloading the source and compiling it as a Universal Binary myself but I hit a wall when I find out that it uses Mach_Inject which, it turns out, isn’t yet Intel native.

I’m not a huge gamer but I installed Sim City 4 to see how it ran (kudos to Aspyr support for helping me when my serial code sticker somehow vanished from the face of the earth.. or at least the CD case). It seems to run just fine and at quite a usable speed, though I wouldn’t suggest turning all the settings onto full.

I also had a go at trying to get Windows to run using Q, an open source emulator based on QEMU. Well I’m happy to report that I’ve gotten Windows 98 to run under Q. I just haven’t actually managed to get it to do anything except occasionally BSOD on start up (which it does a lot, even for Windows 9x). I was hoping to play a few PC games that I have but it doesn’t want to recognise my CD drive (though it will when I put in the Windows 98 CD and boot via that). Luckily, there is talk of getting it to run Windows at near native speeds on Intel Macs, which is great news for those of us who want to run Windows but don’t have XP SP2.

In Summary

All in all the iMac represents probably the best value-for-money Mac ever made and probably one of the best value-for-money PCs available. Not only do you get a well-spec’d computer, but you get a high quality display and a lot of nice extras you would normally have to buy separately (webcam, media software, etc). There are a few bugs here and there but these are pretty much all software-related. Rosetta is amazing when you think of what it is doing and then compare it to the likes of PearPC and the speeds it can currently achieve. The only major problem is the amount of RAM you get as standard, and that is the only thing stopping the iMac from getting a perfect score.

NB. A word of advice to UK readers, don’t get the iMac from Apple. PC World and Computer Warehouse are selling 17” iMacs for £899 as opposed to the £929 charged by Apple.