Intel Macs: First Thoughts
Posted by stephen on Thursday, 23rd February, 2006 @ 02:57
It's certainly been a mixed experience upgrading to the iMac Core Duo. So I thought I'd fill you in on a few of the ups and downs of the first few hours with this beasty.
It's a beautiful machine, though of course the case design hasn't really changed since the iMac G5 (iSight). I'd read yesterday that it was surprisingly light, so I wasn't expecting it to be quite as heavy as it is! Perhaps they were discussing the 17" model, or perhaps the original G5 model was even heavier. Either way, it's certainly no bad thing, it's a very sturdy machine and floats perfectly on it's stand.
Front Row is very snappy compared to my experience of it on my PowerMac G5, which may not have been the optimal environment for it. The remote is very small and light and usable, though I can't help feeling it lacks the tactile qualities of my TiVo remote.
I've got my old 17" LCD plugged into the mini-DVI port courtesy of the adapter from my PowerBook. I'm not sure why they couldn't fit a full DVI header on the back. The only thing it does do is make all the ports looks small and neat. Perhaps that's good enough a reason. Extended desktop is working perfectly, so for the first time in a year or so I'm using two displays again. It's shocking how dull the picture is on my old screen compared to the iMac.
On to the software. Booting is incredibly fast as has been noted elsewhere. I think a big part of this perception though is that the screen on the iMac comes on instantly because the RAM check is so much faster. It takes both my PowerBook and PowerMac a long time to activate the display while OpenFireware counts out the bytes.
Once booted, everything's pretty darn snappy. Most programs seem to start WITHIN the first bounce of the dock icon. That is, if they're native programs. My experience of PPC programs isn't quite as stellar. They feel relatively 'sticky' and less responsive. Luckily the PPC apps I need aren't dependant on reacting quickly, so I'm not too worried.
Most of my life is spent in Terminal, Safari and TextMate, all of which are native, so my overall productivity hasn't taken a hit. I'm running beta builds of Camino and VLC until there are stable releases for x86. That's not to say the PPC stable builds don't run, they do, just within that layer of treacle.
Ironically, one program I haven't been able to make work is Azureus, the BitTorrent client. The reason it's ironic is that it's a Java program! So it should run anywhere. There's two versions, one with some actual Mac-specific code and one that's a pure .jar. Neither will even contemplate starting for me.
I should mention that I skipped the Migration Assistant. I don't like the idea of it on a PPC Mac, I prefer starting clean and filling in the gaps as I need. And on an Intel Mac I have a feeling it could be a very messy experience.
For example, any POSIX terminal program, such as Fink or MySQL doesn't get pumped through Rosetta, so simply fails to work. MySQL have a build for OSX x86, so that wasn't a problem and I'm using DarwinPorts now to get the rest of the Linuxy goodness.
My next issue is to do with plugins. There's a DivX beta available for QuickTime that currently has awful feedback, so I think I'm going to hold fire on that one for a little while. I'm not sure if the Flash plugin is native or not, but what I do know is my attempt to install Shockwave was fruitless. So those little bits of the web constructed in the aforementioned product will remain invisible to me for now, at least on this machine.
To conclude, this machine flies for native code. Now comes the patient waiting game of the early adopter as the applications slowly filter through to Universal format. Fortunately I tend to use nice little bits of $30 software by nice little companies. And these guys have got their act together. But then they've not got years of legacy code in their products, which I think is why the quality is usually somewhat higher in my experience when compared to the 'larger' applications from the 'traditional' vendors. If you're a non-graphical web developer, this machine rocks.
It's an odd situation really, but one that isn't exactly alien to Apple. In my experience Apple are great at providing a simple, seamless computing experience (as much as anyone can right now). And I can't help feeling this switch to Intel mars the experience somewhat, albeit due to lack of third party support rather than a problem in Apple's own products.
Furthermore the real problem here is that they've converted the consumer end first with the iMac. And I think it's fair to say that the average Apple consumer user has come on board at least partly because of the 'Apple experience'.
It's a tough one, and I guess they've done the best job they can. At least I can honestly say that in terms of the Apple components I'm still using a top quality product, in both hardware and software terms. And maybe that's all they can hope to reasonably achieve given such a major task.
Something rather funny appeared when I installed MenuMeters (which is native). I found the report on my CPU rather amusing:
Have Intel just been steadily overclocking the humble 486 all these years?
