Got our 20" iMac G5 today!
I had ordered it a couple of hours after the Paris keynote, with Bluetooth/Wireless Keyboard and Mouse, Airport card and 512MB RAM.
I have since ordered 2 1GB Crucial memory modules, to get the full benefit of 128bit memory mode. Not got them yet.
I cannot as yet comment on performance. I'm still installing stuff on it and I have to wait until my wife comes home with her 12" 1.33GHz Albook to transfer her files onto the new iMac. (I'll be using the 17" 1.25GHz iMac G4 instead).
First impressions, for those of you who may be thinking about getting one, or have been following the various discussions on the Apple fora:
[fingers crossed on all the following points, in case I'm trying my luck...]
- it's indeed whisper quiet. It is quieter than the G4 iMac. At no time during the installation did it go into fan overdrive. When doing installations on the Albook the CPU temperature rises quite a lot. Not so on the iMac. It breezed through everything with fans at a minimum. Which means: you barely hear them. Our house is quiet, so you would hear any noise. This computer is seriously quiet.
- it's quite big obviously, in fact the thing that strikes on most is how much computer one gets for the money. The 20" screen looks like a swimming pool at times... You feel like jumping in, especially when the screen saver starts with the tropical beach images...
- while it cannot be called 'breathtaking' in the way the two previous iMacs were, this machine grows on you very quickly. It is really quite strange. Every time you look again, you think, well, I quite like this little fella here. I wasn't sure from the photos, but now I can say that I find the front is actually quite beautiful. There is a transparent rim around the main white body, much thinner than on the G4 iMac, but it still gives that kind of impression the Cube used to give, of a white thing floating in the outer transparent case. The stand looks great from the front. I'm not sure I entirely like the view from the side or back. The stand and the iMac do not seem to go too well together. But we'll probably get a wall arm to hang it from, and then it will be quite something. The back proper is wonderful, and of course it makes any sort of upgrading/maintenance (like replacing the PRAM battery) very easy indeed. The screen is really huge, as I said, and it makes my 17" FP iMac seem tiny. It's crisp and it has no dead pixels (phew!).
- the Bluetooth keyboard is brilliant. The action is very smooth, smoother than the wired Pro keyboard. The Bluetooth mouse is even better. Quite stunning to look at and reasonably reliable in use (tracking is occasionally jerky, but it's a question of getting used to it. It's heavier than its wired cousin).
Perfomance-wise I can't say much as yet. I checked in Terminal (type 'top') the number of pageouts, and even with 512MB, I'm getting quite a lot of them already (in excess of 20,000). It definitely needs all the memory you can give it. I'm therefore waiting for the new memory to arrive before putting it through its paces. I read a review on the 'net that pointed out that normal operations within the Finder are not noticeably faster than on a G4 and I have to agree that so far I've noticed no major difference there. I expect that when Tiger comes along, that will sort the boys (G4s) from the men (G5s)... And the same perhaps applies to applications, given that few have been G5-optimised. I think it feels like having a Rolls-Royce but still driving it only along slow lanes... You can feel the potential, but just now it is not that big a jump from the G4 iMac. I have yet to try Photoshop of course. I did a little exploration in GoLive CS (which is abysmally slow on any machine, I think) and while certain things were definitely faster than on the G4, it was still sluggish. But I blame Adobe, not the iMac, of course. The problem, that is, is that the applications we use most (Word, GoLive), are not, as far as I understand, really optimised for *any* Mac. But make no mistake, you can feel the difference in performance between the G4 and the G5 iMac.
I'll report back once everything is setup and I get the new memory.
Feel free to ask any questions!
Walter
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