Ten thoughts on the new Intel iMac

Appearance
This is one striking machine. As for the Intel iMac, there is little to distinguish it from its predecessor. Indeed, the one physical characteristic that is different in an iMac with built-in iSight is a mini-DVI port on the back, which allows a second display to extend the desktop rather than simply mirror it. By the way, the built-in display is beautiful: crisp letters, not a dead pixel that I could find, and bright enough to make you reach for the SPF30.

Memory
The Intel iMacs ship with 512MB of memory, which is enough to use the machine right out of the box, but probably not enough to judge the iMac's performance fairly.Of course, upgrading RAM is practically a requirement for any new PC. The problem here is that the Intel iMac RAM is hard to find and more expensive than memory for PowerPC iMacs. Apple's own Web sells 1GB of Intel iMac memory (PC2-5300 SO-DIMM) for $300, which is $100 more than the same amount for the non-Intel iMac (PC2-4200 DIMM). Many Web sites sell the memory for less, but most listed it as unavailable.

Cracking the case
Before Apple upgraded the flat-panel iMacs to include items like a built-in iSight camera, the company was praised for allowing people to easily open the case to do things like swap out the hard drive.

Not so with the new Intel and PowerPC iMacs: Apple has made opening the case much more of a hassle. That's worth noting if you are considering whether to get the 17-inch model, which has a 160GB hard drive, or the 20-inch, with 250GB. (Memory is easily added through an access door on the bottom that requires only a screwdriver to open.)

Noise
This iMac is remarkably quiet. I don't know how it stacks up against the PowerPC version, but it's significantly quieter than the G4 iMac it replaced or my Cube before it (which sounded like a biplane whenever I left a disc in the drive).

Sound
The speakers are small, but they sound quite good. They are not sufficient if you want room or house-filling tunes--that's what the "digital audio out" plug is for. But for listening to some music while working or cruising the Web, they sound great. Because they are located at the bottom of the case, facing down, it could be the way the sound bounces off the desk on the way to the ear.

Front Row
If you haven't used this remote control and multimedia feature yet, go to an Apple store and check it out. It is the future. You can see somewhere down the road that an Apple computer will be able to send all sorts of digital content throughout your home using an interface/software/hardware mashup that only Apple seems capable of getting right. The addition of a high-definition digital video recorder would be a big step in making this happen sooner, and of course the Mac rumor sites have been predicting such capability will be added. The sooner the better.

(Apple added an interesting design note to the iMac by allowing the Front Row remote to attach magnetically to the side of the machine.)

Migration
When starting up the iMac for the first time, you are asked if you want to import data, applications and settings from your old machine. After connecting the FireWire cord and starting up the old machine in "target" mode, the process went flawlessly. The old machine was essentially replicated on the new iMac--e-mail, photo galleries, music playlists, applications, desktop pictures, and so on. Certain items such as VPN set-up information did not transfer, possibly for security reasons. The process took a couple hours but was painless and startlingly effective

Parental controls
They work very well for limiting what children can do with a computer. Again, the process was very simple and it seems foolproof, at least for a while.

Applications
The iLife '06 applications that are now shipping with new Macs were written to be "universal," meaning they run on the PowerPC and Intel processors without the need for the Rosetta translation software. And that means they run faster on the Intel iMac than software that has does not have universal code

Does it do Windows?
There's been a lot of speculation about the ability to load Microsoft Windows on the Intel-powered Macs. The salesman at my local Apple store said XP would not run but Vista, the new Windows version due this year, "might." It's comes down to differences in BIOS and EFI

Bottom line: $1,700 for a PC is not cheap. But considering the size and beauty of the display, the included software (which likely will account for 80 percent or more of the usage on the machine) and extra hardware doodads like the video/audio outputs, remote and built-in Web cam, and the clearly superior GUI, it almost feels like a bargain

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