OK, the next little review I’m going to do in my rundown of my new machine is the machine itself seeing as the opener was just about Apple’s new Magic Mouse (which you can read here). I’ll finish off with a little article later about the keyboard, which while not a new design, is the first time I’ve used one of Apple’s flat type keyboards so I have a bit to say about it.

Hmm, where to start? I had an aging iMac (2006 Model) that sported a Core 2 Duo running at I think about 2.06GHz. The machine served me well but when Apple announced their Quad Core’s the temptation was a little too much especially because I do quite a bit more photography and video encoding than I used to. As mentioned in another post I had initially ordered from JBHiFi only to be told over a week later that they wouldn’t be arriving until mid Jan. I cancelled the order and bought from the Apple store; the machine arrived DEcember 29th. Buying from the Apple store was fortuitous for me, but not my bank balance because while ordering online I made the decision to get the i7 Quad core as opposed to the i5. Some benchmarks showed up to around 30% increase in performance compared to the i5 model, and for a measly couple of hundred bucks it seemed like a silly thing not to do it.

So, some basic specs:

• Quad Core i7 Intel Processor with 8MB L3 cache, Hyperthreading and Turbo mode (realtime overclocking).
• 4GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066MHz with 2 slots spare.
• 1TB Hard drive.
• 27″ LED backlit screen.
• Various USB, Firewire 800 and other ports.

As with my other review, I’ll break it down into a few parts (along with a rating): Setup, Screen, Performance, Peripherals and Connectors.

Setup (D)

Setup on this thing was abysmal. This is the first Apple machine that I have had problems with during the initial setup, and this time they were twofold; one much more serious than the other. First the not-quite-as-serious-but-damned-annoying.

The machine has NO, that’s NONE, NOT ONE, Firewire 400 port. When migrating from one Mac to another, using a Firewire cable between your new machine and old one is a pretty standard way of connecting them together. You just plug them in, boot one of them in Target disk mode and away you go without a care in the world. Unfortunately because the new Quad Core has no FW 400 port and I was upgrading from a machine that only had FW400, I didn’t have a cable or adapter do link up my machines. I would have needed to have purchased the correct cable beforehand. You could argue I should have looked at the specs more closely but I would say it’s pretty reasonably to expect FW400 to still in machines these days. Maybe I’m just too much of an old fogey.

The second issue was much more serious. After not being able to use Firewire to migrate, I made a Time Machine backup of my disk. I then plugged it into my new machine, selected it as the source for the migration and went away. I came back sometime later, saw it had finished successfully and rebooted my machine. As a little paranoia check I then looked in my documents folder to find that only a few of my files had been migrated. Confused I re-ran the migration assistant and watched it. What I saw was a surprise.

At some point in the migration the drive with my Time Machine backup on just disappeared from the system. The light on my external drive dimmed down to indicate it wasn’t in use and the migration assistant just sat there. After a while it popped up a dialog saying it had finished successfully! I then ran Disk Utility and the external drive wasn’t even appearing. It wasn’t as though it had just been dismounted, it was gone completely. I had to turn the power off and on on the enclosure to get it to be recognised again. I repeated the test to make sure and it did it 2 more times at seemingly random places. I will also say at this point that the enclosure had worked flawlessly for me on my old mac.

At this time it was very late at night (Early morning in fact) and I wanted to get this working so it could migrate while I slept, so I turned off all powersaving options that looked dodgy, moved the drive to another USB port on the machine and tried again with a partial migration. This worked so I migrated the rest of my content and the machine was finally up and running. I have yet to go back and diagnose the problem accurately, but a quick search on the Apple forums revealed that this problem is happening to a few others. Most of which run Snow Leopard but some that don’t, and some with machines a couple of years old.

Apart from these two issues, all the hardware detection worked well and everything was up and running in the end.

Screen (A)

The screen on an iMac is no laughing matter seeing as it’s integrated into the computer. I was pretty happy with my old one, but this one blows it away. It’s large, very bright and of course sexy. I have not noticed any dead or hot pixels either which is nice. With a screen that big I almost expected some.

The screen is true 16:9 which is nice compared to older iMacs which have 16:10 screens. It’s LED backlight and probably the only thing I can fault it on is that it’s not perfectly evenly lit. The corners are brighter than the rest of the display but it’s not something you tend to notice, and I bet you’d find your LCD TV has the same issue (Mine does).

Oh yes, it does have another problem. It gets dirty quick. Thankfully Apple supplied a screen cleaning cloth in the box- nice.

Performance (A+?, A++?,AAAAA?)

Performance is a hard one for me to quantify with comparative numbers simply because I dont’ have a raft of other machines to run benchmarks against. This has thankfully been done by a number of other people and I’d suggest you go looking at those sites for raw figures. I can however give an indication about how it feels to use the machine and some general speed comparisons.

In short, the i7 Quad Core iMac is blisteringly fast. Due in a small part to the 4GB DDR3 RAM vs my old 2.5GB DDR2 RAM and due in a BIG part to the 4 cores at higher clock speeds, this thing blows my old Core 2 Duo out of the water. Firing up applications is very fast although the decrease in load times is not as much as the raw processing speed increase; after all, hard drives are still the slow, lumbering behemoths they were a couple of years ago. When the applications are running though, things are sublime. In fact this is the first Mac I’ve owned where I feel it’s “Fast enough”. By that I mean when I tell it to do something, it does it before my patience wears out.

Of course the physical theorem that patience is inversely proportional to length of ownership of a fast computer, means that I’ll think this thing is as slow as a ZX81 within a week.

The main pieces of software I tend to run at the moment are Handbrake (For encoding my entire DVD collection), Lightroom for my photography and general use software like Mail, Chromium and iTunes. I also run The Gimp from time to time as well.

Handbrake encoding is now so fast on this machine that I can encode a full feature film faster than I can rip it from disc. Ripping takes about 30-40 minutes to rip a disk and now my movies are encoding in around the same time. My old machine used to take upwards of 2 hours to encode a movie. Basically, my new machine is 4x faster than my old one at encoding movies in H264 at the settings I use (level=40:ref=2:mixed-refs=1:bframes=3:weightb=1:subq=9:direct=auto:b-pyramid=1:me=umh:analyse=all:no-fast-pskip=1:merange=32:no-dct-decimate=1). This now affords me the option of using very high quality settings for my encodings which take my new machine 2 hours, but used to take 8 or so on my old one.

Lightroom not only starts a lot faster, but browsing my photo library in grid mode is now a pleasure; the wide screen allowing me to see 50-60 photos at once. Loading previews are a snap now too of course and general usage has improved a lot. It’s probably not quite as marked as encoding, but then Lightroom is rather disk intensive.

General usage is also where I see a massive improvement. Application start times, responsiveness of the UI and the ability to run more apps at once are all big plusses. I have also finally started using Spaces. I now put one application on it’s own space which keeps my desktop uncluttered and switching between is so fast and smooth that it’s practical to do so. I think the machine has finally caught up to the sluggish UI framework that Apple uses so it’s no longer as much of a burden. All they need to do now is rewrite that abysmal piece of rubbish – Finder – and the machine would be perfect.

All this performance does come a bit of a cost though. Heat. After using my iMac for a while I reached around the back to feel what it was like and was rather shocked at how hot the back of the machine gets. This of course is a good thing because it means the heat is not inside your computer burning it alive, but it was still surprising. There are also fans at the back which, when they aren’t on mean you machine is almost inaudible. When they do kick in (When I’m encoding video) it’s a moderate background noise that’s a little quieter than than my external Vantec RAID enclosure.

Connectors (B-)

The connectors that come on the iMac have been pretty common fare on macs for a while now. You get 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Firewire 800 port (I smell the death of Firewire looming unfortunately), Audio in and out and a mini Display Port. The one additional connector that intrigued  me was the addition of an SD card slot. This is a very consumer-oriented port and when I first heard about it being added I thought it seemed a little cheap to add it to such a nice machine. Nowadays though, almost every device you use for capturing still and moving images uses SD cards at the consumer level so I am sure lots of people will be happy the SD card slot is there.

The slot sits just below the Superdrive slot on the right side of the machine and there’s been a few complaints around the internet suggesting it’s too close. Some people have accidentally slid their SD card into the SuperDrive slot and I can see how that can happen if you don’t look or check very carefully.

Now I shoot with professional still cameras so I use CF card for those, which would have been nice to have in the machine, but my video camera is a simple SD card recording Panasonic HDC-SD9. I do have a card reader but I found the iMac SD card slot to be much faster and will definitely use it for my video capturing from now on.

Now I realise that the iMac is considered Apple’s “consumer” desktop but in reality the speed of this machine is far from consumer. It’s a machine that I think any professional photographer or videographer could happily use and this is why I wish they had have added a few other ports. First a legacy Firewire 400 port would have been nice, or at least include an adapter. Secondly I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of a CF card slot. CF cards are what the professional stills camera photographers use and the addition of one would have be a lovely cherry on top.

Setup	D
Screen	A
Performance	A+
Connectors	B-
Total (Not an average)	A+

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