The 24 Inch iMac Experience
2006-11-18
On Monday I ordered a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac from the online Apple Store with some extras: better graphics, big hard drive, 2G RAM. I'll be busy over Thanksgiving I thought, moving over all my stuff from my 20" PowerPC G5 iMac and fixing problems.
It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.
Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.
Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.
No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.
It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.
Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.
Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.
No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.
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