“The extraordinary thing about Apple’s new iMac is how ordinary it is to operate… the iMac’s strikingly stylish contours hide an Intel Core Duo processor, not the usual PowerPC chip. It’s the first Mac ever to show up in stores with Intel inside,” Rob Pegoraro writes for The Washington Post. “With Intel-fluent Mac software– a small but growing contingent that includes the Mac OS X operating system and every Apple program on board– this computer barrels past the iMac G5 it replaces. But the new iMac can also run older, PowerPC software at a large fraction of its original speed, and with no sacrifice of features.”
Pegoraro writes, ” 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. But most Mac programs aren’t yet available as ‘universal’ Intel/PowerPC releases. In those cases, the iMac and such other Intel-based machines as the MacBook Pro laptop due next month rely on a layer of software called Rosetta to translate PowerPC code into Intel instructions. Much of the time, Rosetta is invisible. Microsoft Office launched only a little slower than normal, then acted exactly as it would on a G4 or G5 Mac. The same went for a long list of other Mac programs tested.”
“Rosetta could not, however, run demos of the games WWII Online and Doom 3 at any acceptable speed,” Pegoraro writes. “Even with those glitches, Rosetta (developed for Apple by Silicon Valley start-up Transitive Corp.) stands as one of the most amazing feats of emulation I’ve seen. Its only major cost seems to be a ravenous appetite for memory: Rosetta often wound up doubling PowerPC applications’ memory requirements, a trait that made the iMac unbearably sluggish with one of its two memory modules removed.”
Pegoraro writes, “Both the promise and the reality of the Intel iMac — especially the cheaper, $1,299 model, once upgraded to a gigabyte of memory — make it one of Apple’s most appealing releases ever. But it would still be wise to wait a month or so if you don’t need a new machine today… Waiting a little will give Apple time to find and fix… bugs, then work on taking better advantage of Intel processors. It will give the developers of Mac software time to rewrite more programs as universal releases — or at least make sure that their current releases function correctly under Rosetta. It’s barely been six months since Apple even announced that it would move to Intel processors. Waiting a little longer won’t hurt and could save you a lot of trouble.”
Full article here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple’s Intel-powered iMac provides a smooth transistion from PowerPC – January 21, 2006
PC Magazine review gives Apple iMac Intel Core Duo 4.5 out of 5 stars – January 20, 2006
Time names Apple iMac Core Duo ‘Gadget of the Week’ – January 20, 2006
Is this a joke?
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/01/next-generation-apple-will-use-windows.html
The clone war began has
YES it is. Biege designs nail it as a joke
Well-written article with some good advice towards the end.
Again. Rosetta is built into MacOSX. It’s software based. The reason to wait longer for a Macbook Pro is options and speed, not running native software. That’s the software developer’s job. Since Apple has not even released it, I really doubt there will be a new one until very late this year or even till MacWorld 2007.
Larry: Depends. If by “joke” you mean “not serious”, then yes, it’s a joke. If by “joke” you mean “something even vaguely funny”, well then, I’m afraid it doesn’t fit the bill.
Apple isn’t even shipping the Macbooks until February, nor the new PowerMacs, nor the new ibooks, nor the new Mac-mini and people already saying wait. How stupid. Do you really think Apple will be shipping another new Macbook Pro a few months later.
Is this a joke?
LMFASSOFF
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http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/iMovieTheater7.html
Larry…
check out the rest of their posts on “other apple news” link. They’ve even got an article about the next G5 doubling as a breakfast tray….
it’s a spoff site.
should read “spoof” site
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
I’ll smoke that little beetch Core Duo with my Dualie 2 G5, it ain’t all that great. I do it in under a hour easy.
Then I’ll call in big daddy Quad G5 buckets to beat any Intel price for performance wannabe.
It will smoke those DVD’s in about 20 minutes.
Pisssy little 32 bit Core Dual garbage.
Wait for what? Is Apple going to release a new powerbook again? I would like to see a new powermac first.
Wait a week maybe, or for the next model; but a month? Naah.
With all this waiting, just buy a DELL
Wait why? My iMac Dual core is already shipping and should be here by the end of this week. And no one including Apple ever said that the iMac was supposed to match or beat a G5 Tower. But no one can say that the new iMac is not faster than the previous G5 model either. Because it is faster. The applications will be updated so I’m not worried and if there are updates Apple will update it.
You can buy a Dell if you want but using Windblows certainly isn’t going to make your computing experience any fun at all.
More bugs if you wait
Larry
Is this a joke?
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/01/next-generation-apple-will-use-windows.html
Wow Larry… Did you even read the article? How could it be anything but a joke?
Pimp my mac!!
Just can’t wait, killah machines bro;
And what’s got dem Steve up ‘is sleeve?
Oh, da thrill of it all!!
Respect!
Larry – Been living under a rock for the last few years, huh? Yes, it’s a joke. EVERYTHING on BBSpot.com is a joke.
LordRobin – Shut your cake-hole, you pillock! It’s just a bit of fun!
This guy is a technology writer and he uses AOL….
Somehow he doesn’t have any credibility with me.
Always better to wait for Rev B with Apple. The writer makes sense.
There is no Rev A yet, The writer is stupid
Rosetta demonstrates another great partnership between the UK and the USA..
“An Intel-compatible release of the program I used, a free download called HandBrake, finished everything in an hour and 19 minutes”
On my Quad I re-compressed a 6.8GB DVD down to 4.33GB in 7 minutes 40 seconds using DVD2OneX…..
while at the same time,
Playing a movie at 720×480
Burning a DVD with Toast
Downloading 3 50-meg files from usenet
Downloading 1 6GB file from 100 peers on bittorrent
And a few other programs open but idle
Everything just as responsive as if nothing else was running. With the benchmarks I’m seeing for the Duo, a single core G5 can blow the doors off one of those Duo cores. And it does seem a bit unfair the way some writers are giving credit to Intel for having the faster architecture, when it is the fact that 2 cores are faster than 1 (and not by much).
So wake me when a quad Intel Mac can re-encode a DVD in under 15 minutes.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1379964#1379964
It seems to be pretty solid, practical advice. If you can wait on a buying a new computer, wait a month for more software to be universally complied, or you’ll take a performance hit using Rosetta, period.
I’ve always heard that it’s imprudent to buy the first new anything, whether it’s an apple computer, kitchen appliance, type of television or new car. To be honest, I want one of the new systems pretty bad. But I will let the brave and the imprudent be the guinea pigs and lab rats for the new system, thank you very much.