Monday, January 23, 2006

The extraordinary thing about Apple's new iMac is how ordinary it is to operate. It looks, sounds and works almost exactly like the version it replaces, to the point where many Mac users probably couldn't pick it out of a lineup.

The Intel iMac Apple loaned last week ... played high-definition movie trailers available on Apple's Web site without pauses or stutters, even when I rapidly dragged the movie's window around the desktop. An iMac G5 from last summer stumbled, sometimes badly, at the same assignment, as did a Dell Optiplex desktop.

Then I tried copying a DVD movie to the hard drive and compressing its footage to play on a video iPod. An Intel-compatible release of the program I used, a free download called HandBrake, finished everything in an hour and 19 minutes; a PowerPC version needed over two hours on the fastest iMac G5 sold.

The same snappy performance showed up in many other Intel-ready applications, such as the iLife '06 multimedia suite bundled with the iMac.

Don't even think of using an Intel-based Mac without a gigabyte of memory on board, not the 512 MB that would suffice on other models.