“Here’s the best thing I can say after trying out Apple’s new iMac computer with an Intel processor: I didn’t notice much difference from Apple’s previous iMacs with PowerPC processors from IBM,” Mike Langberg reports for The San Jose Mercury News. “I borrowed a 20-inch Intel iMac from Apple last week, and found it responded very quickly. But then again so did the previous iMac that I reviewed, a G5 model, in September 2004.”
“Switching from the G5 processor to Intel chips is a huge step forward in the long run. IBM couldn’t or wouldn’t design processors for personal computers that keep pace with those from Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices. Apple will get elbow room to continue creating innovative hardware and software by leaving the PowerPC behind,” Langberg reports. “The new iMac reliably runs Apple’s elegant and easy to use Mac operating system and related software, including the outstanding new iLife ’06 suite for managing photos, music, video and Web pages. Ordinary users would have no reason to suspect there’s a new chip under the hood.”
“One small disappointment: Apple doesn’t include its AppleWorks program — an unexciting but useful word processor, spreadsheet and desktop publishing package aimed at home users — on the new iMac, unlike previous models where it was included free,” Langberg writes. “Apple now wants Mac users to spend $79 to unlock a copy of iWorks ’06, a combination of the Pages program for word-processing and the Keynote program for making presentations, that’s included on the new iMac. Or pay anywhere from $149 to $499 to unlock Microsoft Office, also included. AppleWorks remains available for purchase separately from Apple, also for $79.”
“On the other hand, Apple deserves applause for iLife ’06. I had a lot of fun trying out new features that make it drop-dead easy to share pictures online, write blog entries and create podcasts — provided you’re willing to spend $99 a year for Apple’s .mac online service. iLife ’06 is also available at $79 for older Macs running the 10.3 Panther or 10.4 Tiger versions of the Mac OS X operating system,” Langberg writes.
“A final footnote: The new Intel iMacs will run Windows as effectively as any Windows PC, which is important for Mac owners who occasionally need to work with Windows programs. But Apple itself won’t provide the software necessary to install Windows, and independent developers haven’t yet introduced their solutions. So if you need to run Windows on a Mac, hold off a few months,” Langberg writes. “For everyone else, the new iMac is safe to buy right now. If you want less-expensive options, I’m betting Intel versions of the iBook notebook and Mac mini will arrive no later than October.”
Full article with more about Rosetta for running PowerPC-only non-Universal Binary applications here.
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Related MacDailyNews article:
PC Magazine review gives Apple iMac Intel Core Duo 4.5 out of 5 stars – January 20, 2006
For crying out loud Apple!!!
You can’t expect us to use iWork when Appleworks does the job so well at a great price.
I sense a little greed here.
Appleworks should be improved to a more profesional version and forget trying to sell us on this Pages/iWork buisness.
It $ucks, ok?
Apple should give away iWork with the new Macs. I realize that they have money invested in creating the program. However, I think in the long run, this strategy would sell more macs (they could flaunt iWork as a feature of new Macs) and more software when upgrades become available.
Providing A 30 day trial isn’t enough for the average person to know if the program is worth the investment.
I think it is important to remember that if you are upgrading from an Apple supported PPC Mac to a new Intel Mac, and choose to transfer your old apps with the setup assistant, Appleworks will be available and work great under Rosetta.
I bet anyone complaining here already owns a valid copy of Appleworks and can continue to use it.
Appleworks, the old Clarisworks, has been a great little program. Is Apple trying to push us to Office?
I really can’t see why anyone would use Appleworks instead of Office unless they are just being deliberately and unreasonably anti-microsoft.
In my experience, the word processor isn’t nearly as good as word, the spreadsheet is laughable compared to excel, and the drawing/painting is purely basic. And of course, it doesn’t have a powerpoint equivalent at all.
This is not to say that Appleworks wasn’t a decent program, especially in its day. But I don’t think it is something Apple is currently developing any more.
I would not be surprised to see it completely replaced in the next couple years by an expanded iWork suite that would presumably contain a spreadsheet/database program and/or a basic image manipulation/paint/drawing program (think MS Paint except better). Of course, I could be wrong, but Apple certainly hasn’t come up with a new version of Appleworks in an awfully long time.
Charging 79.99 for Appleworks is absurd. It is so old!
“And of course, it doesn’t have a powerpoint equivalent at all.”
Ummm….. how about Keynote!
guy,
Joe the Farmer was referring to Appleworks, not to iWork. Appleworks does not inclide Keynote.
I totally agree with Joe the Farmer. I can create sophisticated documents and spreadsheets in Word and Excel that just can’t be done in Appleworks. I also think that ClarisWorks, prior to the OS X version, was better. It had a much better user interface and there was real potential to do something great with the integration between the drawing, word processing and spreadsheeting (like dropping a spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing doc).
Sadly, Apple has not updated the program in any meaningful way in 6 years. It’s a ripoff to start charging for it now when all the development costs have long since been paid down. It should be free.
Appleworks Free? Hell, how about a $50 discount on the computer if you take Appleworks as an option?
Of course this was the part of the new 5-year deal with Microsoft to keep providing Microsoft Office.
Apple charges for Appleworks – Microsoft keeps providing Office for the next 5 years.
For most people, using Office for their word processing and spreadsheet needs is like using a sledge hammer to pound a nail into the wall. I’ll wholeheartedly agree that Apple destroyed the AppleWorks interface when they went OS X native (from 5 to 6) but the program is still an amazing piece of work. I’m a full-time FileMaker designer and my wife’s a high school teacher and I have yet to find anything I’ve needed to do that AppleWorks wouldn’t handle. And whoever said there’s not a presentation program in it is dead wrong — the Slide Show… option under the Window menu will turn any document type (even a spreadsheet!) into a presentation, and even play embedded QuickTime content if you want it to. Claris Corp.’s old slogan was: Simply Powerful Software. IMHO AppleWorks still lives up to that description.
What the reviewer neglected to mention or ignored was that any software that has to use Rosetta to operate on the new Mactels takes a tremendous hit in speed. Slows things down by at least half.
This all reminds me of the switch to the PowerPC. I was fool enough to be one of the early adopters – not this time. I am waiting until I buy a Mactel.
OSX 10.5 and all the big programs switched over correctly (or the Windows version runs as fast on the Mactel).
Personally I think Apple should bundle Appleworks in with iWork. Keynote is great and improving, Pages is good for what it is and has improved from version 1.0 but at best is for home use for short documents and single page flyers etc.
For those who use it iWork is probably worth the money for Keynote alone (Steve Jobs does pretty well using it) but a combined iWork/Appleworks package for $79 would be pretty sweet. It would provide at least some sort of option for those who don’t want/can’t afford Office and would plug some of the holes not filled by iWork alone.
A free 30 day trial is of no use, most home users don’t use a word processor that often, unless they need it for work (in which case they’ll sadly probably need office) and therefore by the time they have a need to use it their 30 day trial will have expired. It’s all well and good playing around with an app but until you actually produce something for an actual reason then you can’t judge it.
My theory is that Apple wanted (and has ready) a killer spreadsheet app for iWork, but they had to leave it out of iWork ’06 in order to secure the recently announced “guaranteed 5 more years of Office development for the Mac platform”. I think they realize having Office for the Mac platform is one of the greatest “comforts” for those looking to leave their dull little Windoze boxes.
Oh well…..maybe iWork ’07.
Also, Keynote is WAY better than PowerPoint and will be for YEARS to come.
iWork is more than enough for most people’s needs. But like iLife, it should be unlocked on a new machine. What it does need is a decent spreadsheet program. Too bad that iWork is not yet ready to fully succeed AppleWorks. I was also an earlyPPC adopter. Our small office replaced all machines with 6100 boxes. Overall, went fairly smooth, and this Intel transition is going amazingly smoothly especially when you consider when it publicly began.
I already have one iMac Intel sitting on my desk. And I have been very happy with it. I read MacCentral’s comparison thoroughly, and have since been able to compare it to an iMac G5, which I had not used before. For me, it would have been a bit of a problem if Office 2004 had slowed down noticeably under Rosetta. But it hasn’t. Whatever the percentage outcomes of certain tests, in real life, Office 2004 feels way faster than either my PB G4 1.67 or my G$ 733 desktop, and it seems no different than on the iMac G5 I was trying. I didn’t test any documents larger than 50 pages, and the iMac G5 had only 1gb of RAM, while my new Intel has 2gb. And perhaps complex spreadsheets or PowerPoints would feel more sluggish.
In fairness, I don’t use Photoshop but once a month maybe, and I don’t use Filemaker, so if you care about the speed hits those apps take, you might want to wait. But that’s no ding on the new machines. They are excellent. Especially, on the native stuff. The file system, DVD playback, Front Row control [much snappier than the G5], iLife, and Safari rendering are all noticeably improved. I have a 28gb iPhoto folder, and the combination of the new software and hardware is night and day different. I have some pretty big Keynote files, and they are just smooth as silk to work with, and they load up fast. That’s a good thing.
Ah, you don’t have to subscribe to .Mac to use iWeb. The program will export the site to a folder and you can upload it to any server.
Sure wish reporters were all dudes like Moss’.
That MS Office thing gives Apple 5 years to get iWork “right” and compleat. MAC+POD=$$$
Maybe by then Microsoft will need the Mac to make ends meet.
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.xls and .doc are MicroShafts bread and butter!
Stop saying Mactel.
Let me add again that Apple could really help a lot of Mac users out by taking the money they would spend on running a couple of their lame-ass mactel ads and giving it to Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin so they could turn Neooffice into more than a side project, and work on optimizing it.
I agree with bdb,
Appleworks does the job, it does it well and Office is just a bloated management as$kissing tool.
If you need great looking data, you turn to either illustrator or indesign.
Heck Powerpoint was directly responsible for the Shuttle crash, it makes you dumb.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A1FFE3D580C778DDDAB0994DB404482
Apple is snuffing Appleworks, not making a Mactel version? Rosetta will make it run like a pig?
Well I’m not buying a Mactel because it would require me buying about $10,000 in software/upgrades and reformating of data.
It’s cheaper to buy a Quad and sit on it for 10 years.
Stupid Apple. iWork sucks.
Something that occurred to me today. OSX on PowerPC is a 32/64-bit hybrid when run on a G5. 32-bit hardware drivers and environments run on the 64-bit core thanks entirely to the way a G5 processor works.
OSX on Intel is going to need to be fully 64-bit to run on whatever replaces the Power Macs. What happens then with all the related driver issues? Are Mac users going to have to put up with all that crap Windows 64 users have to? Are we going to see Apple release three different OSX flavours going forward (PPC, Intel32, Intel64)?
“Are we going to see Apple release three different OSX flavours going forward (PPC, Intel32, Intel64)?”
Maybe. As long as Apple does super-fat binaries with transparent installation & function (it all “just works” from the user’s perspective), everything should be OK.
One question is how far will Apple support PPC & Intel32 going forward. Will 10.5 support all the architectures? How ’bout 10.6? A clearer roadmap would be welcome.
“Heck Powerpoint was directly responsible for the Shuttle crash, it makes you dumb.” – MacDude
After they crashed the Shuttle, they probably immediately went into negotiations to try to buy NASA!
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“After they crashed the Shuttle, they probably immediately went into negotiations to try to buy NASA!”
MS should buy NASA. NASA is far more competent.
where we work we have phrase that gets used when someone who is not very good at training uses powerpoint and only powerpoint to ‘pass on his knowledge and experience’
it is ‘death by powerpoint’. sort of takes on a new meaning now
MW: light as in light the fires, kick the tyres, lets get airborne. oops
<AppleWorks program — an unexciting but useful word processor>
Since when was Microsoft Office exciting!? Somebody’s life must be terribly boring to ever think so.
Overall a very positive review however.
Cudos to Apple.