I purchased the new 27” quad-core iMac a couple days ago and wanted to post some of my first impressions about it.
Picked it up at the Cherry Creek Apple Store rather than ordering online because I’m very impatient when it comes to getting a new Mac. The specialist that got the computer for me was a little disoriented when I walked up to him and rattled off to him exactly what I wanted, including accessories like the mini display port to DVI adapter and Applecare. He stared at me for a second, mentally fast-forwarding through his normal sales pitch to the part where he goes and gets the computer and checks me out. One nice thing the Apple Store apparently has now is a runner system where the specialists can go to any computer and fill out a form for a runner to bring a computer out from the back. Seems handy so they don’t have to leave the sales floor. Only problem is the runner brought out a Core 2 Duo model instead of the quad-core, what a noob!
They finally got the right box out and it was rather large. It was a long walk to the car lugging the box with me, but it was 50 pounds of glorious iMac, so it was ok.
The unboxing experience is great as always. The wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse were both smaller than I expected, and of course the skimpy manual and restored discs are also included in the box. It also comes with a nice polishing cloth for the display, which I’m sure I’ll be using frequently.
Of course the next thing to be noticed is how monstrous this display is. It is fantastically big. My previous machine was a Mac Pro with a 20” cinema Display (now for sale!) and a 24” Dell monitor. I thought the 24” was big, but the 27” makes it look rather wimpy. The full glory of the display isn’t appreciated until you turn it on though. it is like looking into the sun if the sun were running OS X. SO bright and crisp. This new display makes my $700 Dell monitor that I used to love look like a piece of absolute junk. What I thought used to be white is actually a dirty yellow color and what I thought used to be a high resolution, crisp display now looks rather blurry. I haven’t decided yet if I even want another monitor hooked up to the iMac anymore, not only because the built-in one is so big already, but because having them side-by-side just makes the non-iMac display look so awful. I already find myself moving windows that I normally had on the secondary display to the primary one because I just don’t like looking at it on that dim, fuzzy display. The display is of course covered in glass, which does indeed reflect a great deal of light from behind me unfortunately. The display is so bright that it makes it more bearable, but I still have to close the shades behind me if I want to play a game or something and need to be able to see the whole display really clearly with no reflections. I’ll also be putting that polishing cloth to good use, as just touching the display around the edges a few times to plug things in the back puts very obvious fingerprints all over it.
After plugging it in the first time I went right to restoring it from my Time Machine backup, so I had to sit and watch a progress bar for about an hour while that happened. At least it was a super bright, crisp progress bar. Upon finally booting into the OS proper, everything was of course exactly how I had left it on my Mac Pro. Migration Assistant and/or restoring from a Time Machine backup actually makes getting a new machine a little less exciting I think. Part of the joy of getting a new machine used to be seeing the clean dock and getting to download all of the applications I wanted and to use it as a way to start over with a clean slate. Restoring from a backup and booting up is just business as usual, with everything exactly as you left it on your last machine. Of course what it lacks in excitement it makes up for in less headaches and less time wasted setting things up again, so it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.
It is noticeably faster than my three year old Mac Pro, applications that used to take a few seconds to launch now pop up almost instantaneously. Game performance is great. World of Warcraft is super smooth even in places that used to bog it down like the main city of Dalaran. I installed Modern Warfare 2 on a Windows 7 partition and it runs noticeably better than on the Mac Pro, even at the higher resolution. I can run the game at the full 2560 x 1440 resolution on the 27” with all the settings maxed out and 2x anti-aliasing with no jitters or pauses at all. I don’t know the exact frames per second it puts out, but I can easily say “enough”.
The Windows 7 install is still a little tricky for some people apparently, as at some point in the installation process it decides that the video out port is the primary display, so if you don’t have a second monitor plugged into the iMac all you see is a black screen at some point in the installation process and you can’t go any further without rebooting from the install disc and manually deleting some display driver. Apple is supposed to come out with 100% Windows 7 support later this year with Boot Camp so that should fix the problem. Luckily I have the extra display already so it just switched to that display at some point in the process and after updating the video drivers it used both of them correctly again.
Unfortunately my digital camera uses an xD memory card, so I won’t be using the SD slot built-in to the computer without an adapter I guess. So I’ll probably just stick to plugging in the camera with USB. It is handy to have it though, for people that use that type of memory.
I like the little wireless keyboard, it’s nice to just grab it and put it in your lap so you can lean back and compute, but I do miss the number pad. I’m still using my wired keyboard right now, not sure if I’ll switch completely to the wireless one. It would be nice for controlling my Mac Mini media center, except I already have a nice iPhone app that does that so it’s not really needed unless I were to start playing games on it or something.
The Magic Mouse, I am not such a fan of. I guess I am just not the target audience for any of Apple’s mice. I’ve never liked any of them they’ve made from the puck on the original iMac to the Mighty Mouse and now this thing. The gesture support seems hit or miss, and requires weird contorting of your hand to hold on to the mouse at the same time you swipe two fingers around on the top of it. There is no feedback that your gesture has actually been interpreted correctly. For instance going forwards and backwards in the browser by swiping two fingers left and right, there is no way to tell it actually took until you see the page change. Because of a short delay in loading the page, sometimes it’ll take a second to come up and by then I’ve already swiped repeatedly, thinking that it didn’t accept the gesture and then it jumps back several pages. Give me a clicky button any day. It also feels unbalanced and a bit too heavy because of the batteries, but I’m used to a corded mouse that is pretty light so that may just be a preference. I also find it highly frustrating to have to lift my left finger up off the mouse in order for it to interpret a right click. Not to mention it makes it impossible to click both the left and right mouse buttons at the same time, which is necessary in all of the games I play. I’ll keep my Logitech MX518 thank you very much.
Overall I think it’s a great machine so far and a good upgrade from my Mac Pro. It’s faster than even current generation Mac Pros (the quad-core one anyway) and is considerably cheaper plus it includes a huge, amazing display. I’m really glad that it ships with 4gb of RAM with two slots left open, will make upgrading in the future much cheaper. Hooray to Apple for that.
If anyone wants to buy a super awesome Mac Pro and display let me know. ;-)
