I popped along to Regent Street on the way home from work last week, initially just to have a look and a play with a new iMac. Malcolm, the Mac guru designer at work had been telling me how fast and lovely his 24-incher was all week and I needed to check one out for myself. Did I manage to get on one? No. Every Mac in the shiny shop was in use. The world's freeloading students, tourists and immigrants were checking their email. It was either queue up for half an hour or buy one - so I bought one (I still had to wait half an hour for one to be fetched from the store cupboard).
It's a beautiful machine and very fast compared to my old G4, even though it is (only) the 2GHz entry-level model. I say 'only' as if 'entry-level' is a dirty word. But I checked to specs and the difference in price and concluded that another £150 for another 0.4 of processor power, 100GB storage and 128MB of video RAM wasn't worth it. I'm not a gamer and I can always upgrade the HD later on. It's way fast enough for me. I can't wait to see what another GB of RAM will do to the CD ripping time. I will be moving my desk so the shiny screen doesn't face a window though. The increase in power has opened up a who new world of Mac OS that was impossible with the G4 - I can use widgets without having to wait minutes for them to load, CDs rip in a minutes rather than half an hour, PhotoBooth is a fun thing to do with kids (as well as the new 'auditions' in GarageBand), I can now upload web galleries, Handbrake can rip DVDs in hours rather than days and I can switch my iLike plug-in on iTunes again without it slowing everything down to a snails pace. I'm also very impressed with FrontRow, even though it's just a media player. All in all, everything works the way it should. I can waste the hours away more quickly than ever before! That must be a good thing, surely?
No comments:
Post a Comment