My new iMac Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz
I finally pulled the trigger on a new iMac. I’ve been wanting one since I heard Apple’s future OS’s will stop supporting non-Intel Macs. I still have my old PowerMac G5 (dual 2.0GHz, 2.5GB ram). It still works flawlessly but was concerned of its support in the future. So now with my new iMac, I just have my G5 do video conversions and soon I’ll update the OS to Leopard server.
Some things that caught me by surprise after I using it for a couple of days.
- No magnetic remote rest for remote control (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306284) – I was bummed out about not having this. I have this feature on my iMac at work.
- With my G5 (since it uses a separate monitor), I was able to leave the computer on overnight and just turn of the monitor. With the iMac, you have to set up the screen saver timer and the display sleep option. Not a big deal but I have to keep changing it if I plan to leave the iMac on overnight. I change the settings to the lowest minutes possible but can’t have this option while I’m using it regularly.
- The 2.66GHz model came with 320GB. I thought this would be enough but after transferring my data over from my G5, I’m left with 130GB. I guess I miscalculated how much data I had. I was thinking I had a little over 100GB of data only. No worries, I have over 2TB of external hard drives.
- Upgrading the memory is a little different from the previous iMac models (non Aluminum). After removing the screw for the memory area, there now tabs instead of the levers. You have to pull the tabs in order to remove the memory. The first one was somewhat easy to pull, but the second was a little harder.http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1760
- The ATI Radeon HD 2600 (256MB PCIe) is a great upgrade from my G5’s ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (64MB AGP) video card. My frame rate on WoW has at least doubled and in some areas it tripled.
- The startup of my iMac is a little faster than my G5 but would’ve thought it would be faster.
I haven’t really got too much into it to feel the difference. But if you are still running a non-Intel Mac, I would suggest getting a new one with an Intel CPU. Not only will Apple stop support on non-Intel CPU’s in the future but programs like Parallels and VMWare run great on the new hardware (requires Intel CPU).
