iMac Core Duo: First Impressions

Friday night I visited my friendly neighborhood Apple Store to check out the new iMac Core Duo. That’s the new Intel powered iMac, just so we’re on the same page. Yes yes, I know, Friday night at the Apple Store. That’s my exciting life. As soon as I walked in, off to my left was a table full of new iMacs. I stepped up to the one on the end and started playing.

First I quit out of all of the open applications and checked out the specs. I really wanted to get a sense of how the new iMac compared to my current PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8 GHz machine with 2.5 GB of RAM, so had to get a sense of how they measured up. My chosen iMac featured a 2.0 GHz Core Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM.

I spent about 45 minutes at the store just doing different things with the iMac. My experience consisted mostly of opening different applications (both Universal Binary and apps that had to run under Rosetta) and doing different basic tasks that I do during my day. The Universal Binary apps ran beautifully and fast. They launched fast and completed tasks much faster than my PowerMac. The old Rosetta apps, such as Photoshop and Office, were a little slower, but not unusable. The only problem I had was that Photoshop crashed the first time I opened it. Besides that it behaved quite nicely and ran fast and smoothly.

My initial experience with the new iMac makes me very excited for whatever other Intel awesomeness Apple has in store. It also makes me even more excited for when my MacBook Pro gets here in the middle of February. If you get a chance, I would highly recommend you visit your local Apple Store and check out the new iMac.