Manufacturer: Apple Computer
Price: $1299.00 base, $1476 as tested

For over a decade, there have been rumors that Apple would switch to Intel processors. When the PowerPC G5 Macs were released in June 2004, they were among the fastest desktop computers available from any manufacturer. Just one year later, Apple surprised many by formally announcing the transition from PowerPC to Intel.

The first of these Intel Macs were released in January 2006. Apple claims the new Intel Macs demonstrate significant performance improvements over earlier models, and that most PowerPC applications run well on the Intels... but do the new computers live up to the hype?

Overview

The Intel iMacs include an Apple Keyboard, the Apple Mighty Mouse, a built-in microphone and iSight video camera above the display, an infa-red remote control, and an 8x DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW optical drive. By default the 17" iMacs ship with 512 MB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive, both upgradeable at the time of purchase. We chose to upgrade the internal hard drive to 250 GB for an additional $100. Surprisingly, iMacs with upgraded drives are not available at the retail Apple Store locations and must be ordered online.

While the included 512 MB of RAM is acceptable for basic web browsing and word processing applications, more memory is recommended for video and photo editing. Apple offers a 512 MB upgrade for an additional $100, whereas an entire 1 GB RAM module from third party vendors can be purchased for less than $100. I decided to save money by purchasing RAM separately and installing it myself.

Memory is installed by removing a small panel at the bottom of the iMac using a philips head screwdriver. Two memory slots are available, offering a maximum of 2 GB by installing two 1 GB modules. The memory installed easily, I replaced the cover, and the iMac booted with no problems.

An Airport Extreme Wifi card (802.11g) and Bluetooth 2.0 are also built-in to the iMacs. Two FireWire 400 and three USB 2.0 ports are located on the back on the computer, along with Ethernet, mini-DVI video out, 1/8" audio in, 1/8" audio out, and one optical digital audio out. Dial-up users may be annoyed that an analog modem is not built-in, so a USB port will have to be used for an external modem.

Apple has offered video outputs on iMacs over the last several years, but these outputs were limited to video mirroring — meaning the external display device showed the exact same content as the built-in display. With the new iMacs, Apple also offers video spanning so that a second display can be used to extend the desktop workspace. This is a welcome improvement, making the iMacs more expandable than previous models and a great option for powering HD televisions and displays.

As part of the obvious trend to become a more integral part of our living rooms and entertainment experiences, the Apple Remote paired with Front Row offers an iPod-like experience for playing media. The remote is slightly larger than an iPod Shuffle with recognizable iPod controls, and magnetically attaches to the lower-right side of the iMac.

The built-in iSight video camera and microphone perform as expected, but the camera cannot be moved or aimed without moving the entire computer. That means image capture is limited to whatever is directly in front of the computer. While this is great for video conferencing, it does restrict other use.

As with all new Mac purchases, the iLife '06 suite of applications is included along with Big Bang Board Games, Comic Life (for creating comics and comic books), Omni Outliner, and Quicken '06. Trial versions of iWork and MS Office 2004 are also included.

The Un-Mighty Mouse

The Mighty Mouse is a one-button mouse with sensors to detect finger placement and a scroll-ball in the center, offering the functions of a multi-button mouse. When the Mighty Mouse was released last fall, it was Apple's first multi-function mouse offering.

The best part of the Mightly Mouse is the scroll-ball, a very small trackball located at the same place as a scroll-wheel on traditional multi-button devices. The scroll-ball works intuitively, allowing the user to scroll both vertically and horizontally in the open window. It is surprising this obvious improvement to the traditional scroll-wheel hasn't shown up earlier.

Unfortunately, the scroll-ball is where the Mighty Mouse's mightiness ends. Most people choose to use their mouse with two fingers on either side of the scrolling input. Because of the way the sensors are setup, leaving both fingers on the mouse means that left-clicking is often interpreted as right-clicking. To work correctly, the right finger must be lifted when left-clicking... a cumbersome and unnatural task to repeat several hundred times a day. Even when using this technique, the mouse still interprets a right-click at least 5-10% of the time.

The Mighty Mouse also offers a third clicking option, where the user squeezes the two gray semi-circles on either side of the mouse. This requires that the hand be shifted so that the thumb and fingers can correctly squeeze the correct areas. This is a cute concept, but extremely impractical for applications that actually require frequent third button input.

For users with no need for multi-button inputs, the Mouse Settings in System Preferences can solve all of these problems. Set all mouse clicking to only act as a one-button mouse (left-clicking). For users who use software that demands multiple mouse inputs, a third-party multi-button input device is recommended.

We aren't the only people who have found the Mighty Mouse needing improvement. Our informal poll showed others who have owned the device found it lacking, and many replaced it within weeks of their purchase. Hopefully Apple will soon make improvements.

Compatibility

For all practical purposes, until now Mac software has never been made to run on Intel processors. For PowerPC software to run on an Intel processor, the PPC software must be emulated. Emulation is the process of actively translating software created for one type of computer so that it can run on a different type of computer. Rosetta is Apple's emulator that allows the Intel Macs to run the older PPC software. Universal software includes code for both types of processors, eliminating the need for Rosetta's PowerPC emulation.

With the exception of MS Office and Quicken 2006, all of the software included with the Intel iMac is Universal. The included Universal applications were snappy and stable during testing.

Apple claims that Rosetta makes the Intel Macs run most PPC applications with few problems. During my testing, I found that the more simple the PPC application, the better it runs on the Intel. Some of the more complicated applications do not fare so well. MS Office was slow to launch, not particularly fast, buggy, and would occasionally quit during normal use — whereas Quicken 2006 performed well.

To our surprise, we found that our PPC versions of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Golive actually worked well in Rosetta. As with many other PPC applications, they were slow to launch but unlike Office they actually performed well and with no noticeable bugs.

An interesting incompatibility is NeoOffice, a native-PPC version of the OpenOffice productivity suite. The Intel Macs include the 1.4 and 1.5 versions of the Java Virtual Machine, but because NeoOffice requires the Java 1.3 VM it will not run correctly. The developers are working on a new version, and the best explanation comes from their support forums.

Most common consumer peripherals such as recent printers, digital cameras, and MP3 players already have drivers included within OS X... but many scanners and other imaging devices do not. Some but not all of these devices work after using older PPC software installers, and it's anyone's guess if and when the hardware manufacturers will release updated drivers and software.

A second area of lacking compatibility is media codecs. Common third-party video compression codecs like DivX and Xvid are not ready for mainstream use on Intels, often crashing whatever program is used to access the media. For example, we have many of our DVDs compressed in Xvid format for playback on our Macs. Trying to load one of these movies in Quicktime first results in a brief display of garbled video, then Quicktime unexpectedly quits.

Because Front Row uses Quicktime for video playback, it also crashes when trying to view these archived movies. This makes Front Row and the Apple Remote significantly less useful. At the time of this article, the beta and development versions of the codecs were still mostly unusable. Eventually most Quicktime-compatible codecs will become available for the Intel Macs, but for now open source applications like VLC and Mplayer are the only way to view DivX and XviD media.

With April's release of Boot Camp public beta (an optional download), Intel Macs can now dual boot into Windows XP Home Edition, Professional, or Service Pack 2. Apple doesn't support Windows, and you must have your own copy of Windows XP to install. Boot Camp includes Mac-specific Windows drivers to get all of the hardware and networking features working correctly.

Performance

Apple has made some impressive claims for speed increases for the Intel iMacs over the G5s. The figures posted are raw benchmarks for integer and floating point calculations... and in our experience, these do not represent real-world performance.

Anyone with emulation experience can testify that it should not be expected that PowerPC applications running in Rosetta will run as quickly as if they were native Intel applications. Because so many Mac applications are still PPC-only, the Intel iMac will not run these applications 2-3 times faster than an iMac G5 as Apple has implied.

Overall performance on the dual-core Intel is also affected by whether software can take advantage of multiple processors. Depending on how the software is written, a single task can be broken down into smaller pieces and sent to the processors as needed, or multiple entire jobs can be processed simultaneously. Software that is unable to take advantage of multiple processors may not perform much differently running on a multi-processor Mac compared to a single-processor Mac.

A comprehensive benchmark performance comparison between multiple Macs can be found at MacInTouch. Another comparison demonstrating some of the speed differences between the G5 and Intel iMacs is available at the MacSpeedZone.

Two of our most common processor-intensive applications are video encoding and 3D. There is already a Universal version of Handbrake for video encoding and an unofficial Intel-native development version of Blender 3D. For comparison to the Intel iMac, we had access to an iMac G5 2.0 GHz with 2.0 GB RAM and an iMac G4 1.25 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM. While the 2.0 GHz iMac is slightly slower than the last 2.1 GHz model offered by Apple, it is within a reasonable margin for performance comparisons.

The first comparison used Handbrake to convert a DVD to MPEG-4 with 2-pass higher quality video encoding. The DVD files were copied to the hard drives of each machine to eliminate speed differences between the DVD drives.

The Intel iMac was twice as fast as the iMac G4, but it was only 10% faster than the iMac G5.

Blender 3D rendering is processor intensive and can be tested in PPC, Rosetta, and native-Intel. This offers a good comparison between native and emulated performance, and Blender's threading features allow single versus multiple processor comparisons. The 3D model was rendered at 400 x 750 pixels using Blender's internal renderer with anti-aliasing, shadows, and raytracing active.

Notice the Intel iMac's surprisingly slow rendering time running in Rosetta with multi-processor threading off... it's actually slower than the G4 iMac! Rendering in Rosetta was improved by almost double when activating threads, but markedly still slower than the G5. The unofficial Intel-native development version of Blender showed a dramatic speed improvement, but it wasn't until threading was activated that the rendering performance was even somewhat close to Apple's claims.

Results: Good

As should be expected from any corporate marketing department, Apple's performance claims are a bit lopsided. While the new iMacs are faster in raw performance, that doesn't tell the whole story. It is only while running processor-intensive Intel-native applications that there is a noticeable performance increase. The speed is impressive when it shows up, but for now much of Apple's claimed performance improvements are eaten up by Rosetta's PPC emulation. A week of real-world testing and use currently places the Intel iMac's performance within +/- 10% of the iMac G5.

IMAGE: There is one sure way to make sure all of your PPC applications run after purchasing a new Intel Mac — keep your old Mac handy.

Even with compatibility issues, the move from PPC to Intel is impressively smooth. Many more applications work than we expected, enough that we can use the new iMac as a productive second workstation. Many of the larger and more complicated commercial productivity applications are only partially useful, with enough bugs to make them frustrating. If you rely on MS Office to earn a living, it isn't yet time to replace your PowerPC Macs.

Overall this computer is a great value with superior performance to its predecessors, even if the speed improvements are currently not as impressive as Apple claims. If most of your computer use fits within the included iLife suite of applications, there should be no problem using an Intel iMac as your primary computer. Photoshop and Golive have also performed well after two weeks of use. Those with additional software demands should wait until more applications are upgraded to Intel-compatible versions in upcoming months.