Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME [OT] Anyone got their new Mac yet?

I fooled around with a 20" Intel iMac at the local Apple store for 30 minutes this week. As excited as I am for Intel machines I was really disappointed at how it worked. It was slow. The spinning beach ball popped up so many times and once it stayed on the screen for about 30 seconds. I was actually getting frustrated with it, it was running so sluggish...compared to my ancient upgraded sawtooth G4/1Ghz. I'm sure it was because there was only 512 ram in it because I can't believe a new machine like that is so darn slow. I was also miffed they didn't have photoshop on it. I wanted to compare it to my system.

User reviews seem good so I'm sure it was a ram issue.

I ordered the same configuration the day after they came out.

I'm still waiting

Ah Carbon, you should know by now that Europeans are treated as second class citizens by Crapple. We pay 20% more for our hardware before tax and get it later. Yet, for some reason, we put up with it...

Martin, my apologies i was in the process of installing VPC and i got excited and commented before hand. Your correct it will not work yet under rosetta. I was basing my prejudgment from my ibook running VPC and comparing it to the new specs. As to it running better than my windows machine, hell anything would run better than that POS. Also what will not work is dual booting windows xp or any previous OS. There is speak of windows vista being able to dual boot because it and OS X (intel) will use EFI instead of bios. So it may be possible. I have seen OSX dual boot on an IBM think pad via a video.

Foxglove, I never go by what a mac can do by judging them with in store base models. I have come to find out there always slow. Now the question of photoshop, as of today it is not universal and i have a copy of Photoshop elements running and it is not bad for lite weight functions. I repaired some old photos and enhanced a few others. works well

Carbon thats sucks to hear your still waiting, I ordered mine the day they were anounced also and it took about 2 weeks for my order to be fulfilled. I also went for the 2-3 day shipping option for my order seeing that they are comming directly from their manufacturing plant in Shanghi. I would call Apple or check your order status to see why you have to wait so long.

Oneagle: That is good news - thank you! I don't care for dual boot anyway so that doesn't interest me. I wander why Microsoft is insisting on saying that VPC won't work?

I intend going for the fully upgraded model just like you (although maybe not the 500GB HDD since 250 is enough for me) so maybe the extra memory gives enough of a boost for it to be okay - it's far from quick on my Mac at the moment as it is!

Cheers,
Martin.

I've got a 17" iMac core duo 1.83GHz with 512MB RAM at work, and it's been fine so far. No instability problems, and it doesn't feel sluggish. I've been using it to compile and test software, so the heaviest applications I've run on it are gcc and javac. It stands up quite well - definitely faster at compiling than my poor PowerBook G4.

I was recently at the Apple store and played around with the Intel iMacs. Specifically two of them. One was a 20" and the other was a 17". The 20" seemed sprightly. The 17" was very sluggish. However, I'm fairly sure this is because somebody went and hosed the 17" up royally. When I tried to run Pages and create a new page with a template, it complained about missing fonts. This was a stock template. So obviously at the very least there were fonts missing. Anyway, my point is just that, foxglove, you may have been playing with a seriously messed up Intel iMac. The 20" iMac I used was quite fast.

I can now answer my own question

The 20" with 2GB of Ram (and 256MB graphics) was VERY quick compared to my 1.42Ghz mac mini with 1GB ram.

Office under Rosetta doesn't give any clues that's it's running under Rosetta at all (again compared to my mini of course).

MacMame works a treat under Rosetta for old games. Auto frame skip kicks in like a good 'un for newer stuff - so playable, but looking forward to intel libraries for compilation.

DreamWeaver seemed a little sluggish, but pefectly useable.

Umm, couldn't find any universal games that i wanted to play to try. The supplied board games ran fine, but then, they ought to! The demo of X2 - The Threat was unplayably stuttery. Verdict is probably that even with 256mb graphics games are probably a no go under rosetta but i'd definately have to try more to really pass jusdgement on that.

A word of warning. The screen's are a horrible grainy mess. Mine's on it's way back with an RMA number due to pixel problems, so i kind of reserve judgement on that too, but i have my doubts that the two would be even remotely related.

The extra screen real estate oof the 20" was fantastic. Had a bunch of windows open while compiling mac mame and still had more room!

All in all, the screen is a dissapointment, but i really can't wait to get my replacement and start again

Martin.
PS: Oneagle: I got your message about the PSP trick, and i hear ya. Normally i'd be up for having a go but for £1500 Apple can sort it, not me. I think it's wholely reasonable to have one that's 100% from the start - LOL!

"...We pay 20% more for our hardware before tax and get it later. Yet, for some reason, we put up with it..."

That's not cool. Maybe it's the Euro vs. US Dollar conversion. (The last time I checked, Euro is worth quite a bit more than the Dollar)

XE.com show's it's pretty close right now. Not sure what to tell you... :what:

It's not. Run the currency conversion then compare the before tax price. On the European stores almost all the hardware is 15-25% more expensive than the US prices.