Ahhh, it’s nice to be a tech geek.
Well I finally did it. I went and upgraded my old 2006 iMac. Doing photography and encoding a lot of my DVD’s recently I’d been a little annoyed at the speed (Or lack of) of my old iMac. While it boasted a Core 2 Duo running at a little over 2Ghz, it had started to show it’s age with raw throughput when using Adobe Lightroom and Handbrake. Apple had recently revved their lineup so I decided to look into an upgrade and see what it’d cost me. Of course, a small upgrade to the low end iMac would have still left me with tech envy, so I opted for the new Quad Core iMac.
I had ordered through JBHiFi but after some mucking around by them and being told in the end I wouldn’t get it until mid January I cancelled my order and bought instead from the Apple store. This was a good move for Apple because while I was there I noticed that for just a teeny bit more I could get the i7 Quad Core running at 2.8GHz as opposed to the i5 Quad Core @ 2.66GHz which is Apple’s stock top of the line model; the i7 is a custom build which benchmarks showed to be about 20% faster in some cases than the i5. So I hit the button and hunkered down for the guesstimated 6th Jan ship date. However, I must have been a good boy throughout the year because on the 29th of December Santa delivered my new toy!
I eagerly unpacked it and admired the predictably sexy Apple packaging then fired it up, grabbed my Firewire cable to join to my old iMac for migration and – uh oh – “Where do I stick this Firewire plug” – oh “I don’t, it only has a Firewire 800 port now”. This was my first hurdle and while very inconvenient, the Migration Assistant allows network migration. I hit Airport and started the process – “Oh, 13 hours to migrate? No way am I waiting for that!” so I cancelled it. In the end I had to resort to making a Time Machine backup of my old machine first and using that as my migration source.
Then issue two hit me and this was was a bit more worrisome. I let the migration progress, came back when it finished, looked at my files and noticed lots were missing. I then tried migrating again, and watched it. Part way through at some random time (I tried a few more times) my drive would just disappear from the system and so the migration wouldn’t finish. On top of that the Migration Assistant reported success so I thought it’d worked. In the end I turned off every setting to do with Sleeping, Screen Fading and what have you as well as trying a different USB port and managed to get migrated without the drive being lost. I really hope the issue doesn’t come back but I’ll spend some time later looking into it.
Anyway once up and running I have to say the machine is sexy. It looks good, with a 27″ anodised aluminium body and runs like the clappers. I did some test encodings of DVD’s of mine and the machine could encode at about 4x the speed of my old iMac. Very, Very nice. Everything opens fast, Lightroom flies and life is good. Apart from this keyboard which is already hurting my hands.
The mouse on the other hand feels quite nice, albeit small (Most mice are for my hands) and the touch sensitive surface for scrolling and swiping works well. It does suffer from Apple’s usual mouse issue of not tracking fast enough, but I found a little Preference Pane called Mouse Zoom that makes my mouse a lot faster, even if not quite fast enough for me.
Anyway, I can’t wait to get into some real work with this baby.
Related posts:
- Quad Core iMac (i7) Rant OK, the next little review I’m going to do in...
- The Apple Magic Mouse OK, now that I’ve had a little time to play...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.