From: Art Landrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: New iMac Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:43:36 -0700
On Sep 29, 2004, at 10:27 AM, walter wrote:
I expect that when Tiger comes along, that will sort the boys (G4s) from the men (G5s).
Ouch! And that makes the rest of us (G3s) ...? ;-)
Art
Good point! Actually, i wasn't finding OS X too bad on our two previous G3s - an iMac DVSE 500MHz and a FIrewire iBook 366MHz. But as so many times before, we are now led to believe that Tiger, if the 64bit mode is activated, will be so much faster than Panther, so I will be curious to see whether the difference in performance between our two iMacs (G4 and G5) will show as sharply as they say it will under Tiger. It would be great if all Macs able to run OSX would show gains in performance obviously...
A little update on our new machine: got the new memory from Crucial. Installed it and I am pleased to say that the 128bit mode got engaged no problem at all. The wife is using the computer now, so I can't quite tell whether it made an impact on performance. The computer certainly made an impact on her! She's loving it so much I'm getting worried...
When I opened the iMac up to install the RAM (the module that came with the iMac was a Samsung, in case anyone is interested for the purpose of matching it) I was really struck by how easy and quick it is to access the innards of the iMac. It looks as if do-it-yourself repairs/upgrades are now a very straightforward possiblity even for non-technical guys like myself and hopefully that will make this computer retains its edge a little longer than previous all-in-ones (I still remember the sheer terror of adding RAM to our old Performas...). This alone, it seems to me, provides a good reason to buy a G5 iMac.
We continue to find it just about the quietest computer ever, only the Powerbook is quieter, but when the fan comes on in the 12" Albook, it is louder than the standard fan in the iMac. Of course, if all the fans come on in the iMac, as they do when you run the Hardware Test to put the RAM through its paces, then it's like having a small blow-drier on your desk (I chose 'extended test' and with 2GB of RAM it took 90 minutes to check everything up!). In normal use, however, we've yet to hear even the middle fan starting up, it's just purrs nicely along, kinda like the noise of one of those battery-operated little fans you get at airports to keep yourself cool on a journey. Completely unobtrusive. You would't think you have a computer in your study.
We are having only one problem, I'd say. And it has got to do with the size of the screen! It takes a hell of a lot to track things around the screen. At first we thought it was the Bluetooth Mouse being jerky and unreliable, or the interference from the Aiport Base Station. But we swapped over the wired keyboard and mouse from the G4 iMac and it felt just as slowly and hard to control. I think it is only a question of getting used to the real estate now on offer... I installed a little program called MouseZoom that increases tracking speed greatly and that seems to help. Probably it is also the size of the screen that does not convey the full power of the processor. The eye has to take in a lot, when a window opens up, and it probably *seems* slower than it really is (when we bought the 12" Albook, everything seemed a lot snappier than on the 17" FP iMac, although the processor speed etc. wasn't that different).
A rather funny thing: we used the Setup Assistant to transfer files and settings from the Albook to the iMac. Thing is, the dumm thing didn't notice we had Bluetooth on in the new machine and so at startup we had no way of talking to the iMac! The silly assistant had turned off Bluetooth altogether, just because it was turned off on the Powerbook! Luckily we have the wired keyboard from the other iMac and it was easy enough to start bluetooth again, but I thought this may be a problem if one is moving files over from an older Mac without a USB keyboard.
I still can't see that much of a difference in 'real world' performance. I'm pretty sure it is wonderful in some Photoshop tasks, but Word launches in two dock bounces, just as it does on the G4, for instance. I'll run Xbench tomorrow and post back the results. I'll also try some 'find and replace' and iPhoto things of that sort.
But whatever the performance gains, it is a stunning machine, and the ease of access to its components give a certain peace of mind, I think. Inside it is really incredibly neat. And as for the outside, we keep discovering little details hidden away behind the 'minimalist' severity. As I've said before, this is a 'quiet' computer, both as to noise output, and as to the way in which it doesn't 'shout' at you in a 'look-at-me' way, but just draws you in. It's functional in the best sense of the word, I think.
Cheers,
Walter
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