Recently in iMac Category

Well, the all-in-one iMac got launched last Tuesday. While Apple laptops are 2/3 of sales, I think these iMacs will cause lots of folks to buy. It is exactly what I need at home, a huge screen plus it has all the power features. For $2500, you can get a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory and 1TB of disk plus a gorgeous 24" screen.

In the old days, an all-in-one box like this would really tradeoff against the flexibility of have a system unit where you could plug things in and out, but this design really will last three years. The only really big tradeoff left is that it isn't a gamer machine, but for just about everyone else, it is ideal. Not to mention it makes an incredible TV as well with its remote control gizmo.

The coolest site is something called unboxing that is dedicated just to showing how the initial take it out of the box experience is for electronics.

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Apple has announced new iMacs and Mini models today, including a new 24-inch (1920×1200 resolution) iMac with up to 2.33GHz 64-bit Core 2 Duo "Merom" processors and a powerful nVIDIA 7300GT graphics accelerator. The Mini lineup has been enhanced with the removal of the single-core model, and a bump to 1.66GHz Duo in the entry-level as well as 1.83GHz Duo in the high-end model.

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Well, with this news about the Intel Core Duo out, Peter mentioned to me that he had just bought not one, but two of new iMacs. In looking at these bad boys, I can see why. For about $1600, you get a 20" LCD, the very fast Intel Core Duo, 512MB DDR2 memory, DVD read/write, built-in camera and a 250GB hard drive. Pricegrabber has these for just $1676.

The main drawbacks are the relatively slow graphics card. It is a X1600, so you won't use it for gaming and the relatively (in this world small 250GB hard drive). You can fix the later with the 500GB model and you can add another 512MB of DDR2 as well for about $50 more or about $1750. Of course, the big thing you get is a very nifty computer in a screen, the Mac OSX as well as soon Basecamp so you can run Windows applications.

So what would a do-it-yourself machine get you? What's the real tradeoff now. Well, here is the dream machine do-it-yourselfer:

This gives a total cost of the dream machine of $1436 and would leave you plenty to buy the lower power X1600/256MB at $147, Or another hard drive and 2GB of memory if you don't need gaming.

Net, net, right now for the average user, the Apple iMac looks quite competitive hardware wise. It still won't compare to a tweaked homebrew system, but that's kind of like comparing a stock Honda Civic with a customized open wheel racer. They aren't for the same people even if they cost the same.

AnandTech: Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Intel Duo. Well, it might seem like a no brainer to get the new iMac, but a couple of great points this article makes:

• The Intel Duo is an interim chip for the desktop Macs. There is a new chip "Merom which is the desktop version so putting them into iMacs is just to get them out. The chips are pin compatible, so presumably the MacBook is going to be longer term and shortly in 2H06, the desktops will get much faster.
• Apple has ported their core applications, but not their professional ones. Microsoft and Adobe have announced but haven't shipped their applications, so most of the time you are running in binary translation mode which means sloooooww.
• The industrial design of the iMac is amazing. it is only 1.5 inches thick and with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse looks incredible.
• If you buy one, then upgrade right away, it uses notebook Ram so there is another 200-pin DDR2 SO-DIMM slot (this is standard notebook memory), slam another 512MB right away to really improve performance.
• It uses a standard 3.5" drive, so you can upgrade that to anything you want. Comes with 160GB standard.
• Having dual core doesn't seem to improve responsiveness very much. This is unlike Windows which gets much better with a dual core system.
• Performance compared with a 1.9Ghz G5 vs. a 1.8GHz Intel Duo isn't a blow out. The 1.8GHz Duo is 30% faster on a few native tasks like video encoding, but for things like Keynote (their version of PowerPoint), it is more like 10%. So don't expect an amazingly 4x faster Macintosh as suggested by the hype. This just shows that the overall system is what matters and that since Apple has switched over to mainly PC parts (standard drives, memory, video) it is going to have similar performance.
• Running PowerPC applications is just terrible. Applications double in memory size and they get 50% slower if they don't crash.

As a final caveat, these applications aren't tuned and use the gcc compiler, not the Intel tuned compiler, so while the new Macintoshes are exciting, they aren't the true revolution. Longer term though, they are going to be more mainstream as they use a high volume chipset and then there are the ergonomics of the OSX. It puts things on a more level playing field.