IMAC G5 Computer Review

Computer Review: iMac G5 (17” 512/160 gb) M9844LL/A

At the end of August, we finally replaced (supplemented actually) our family computer. We had been using a five-year-old Compaq Presario, a Windows ME machine that has become about as obedient as any five-year-old.

After much consideration, I decided to go back to my (now silver) roots and go Macintosh. My first Mac was a 512ke model that I got second hand in 1986. That started an unbroken succession of Macs that ran through 1997. I ran my law office on Macs from 1991 through 1998, mostly using Clarisworks, but also Filemaker, Quicken, Microsoft Word, Writenow, and a great little PIM called inTouch. I’m going into detail to suggest that I DID have quite a bit of familiarity with Apple computers, but in the late 1990s, I drifted away, and yes, I bought a Windows PC.

Windows is okay. I use it at work, and it does fine, at least as long as you are running three or four levels of spyware/adware/virus protection. People have been telling me though that Mac OS-X, the current operating system, is the real deal. It’s a generation ahead of Windows. Spyware – a non-issue. Viruses – a non-issue. And the iLife Suite – it supposedly turns mundane household chores like organizing your photos into an artistic endeavor. Plus, Macs look cool.

The Buying Experience

So I visited my local Apple store. In the store I got the feeling that I was visiting the 21st century version of a hipster coffeehouse (ok, a coffee house for nerds.) I was leaning towards buying an iBook notebook, but I walked out of the store with a IMac G5, the version with the 17” widescreen LCD and the Superdrive DVD burner. The List price for this model was (and still is) $1499. We bought ours during a back-to-school promotion aimed at teachers. We got the standard $100 off the machine, with an iPod mini thrown in for good measure. We also got $100 rebate on a printer and $50.00 off Microsoft Office. Being married to a teacher has its advantages.

The pre-rebate cost of all this mess ended up being around $2,000. This is a little hard to swallow when you are used to looking at $399 windows packages in the newspaper. On the other hand, $1499 is actually the second cheapest price that I ever paid for any Mac. In 1986, my Mac 512ke had an 8 megahertz processor. This one has two gigahertz, 250 times faster – and that’s not even considering that the new Mac crunches 64 bits at a time rather than 16. The 512ke had 512 kilobytes of RAM. This one has 512 megabytes, a full 1,000 times greater.

Yet, all of these numbers are beside the point. The bottom line is that if you spend your time using a computer you should either enjoy it, get stuff done, or both. The computer has to be worth your time. You have to ask yourself if you buy a bottom-of-the-line basic computer if you aren’t implicitly putting a bottom-of-the-line value on your time. Over the next five years, I bet the members of my family will spend on average two hours a day using the computer. 365 x 2 x 5 = 3650 hours. So amortized over the life of the computer, the computer will cost us less than $.50 per hour.

iMAC G5 – The User Experience

Much has been said about the iMac’s slimline all-in-one styling. Yep, it’s all that. The iMac comes in a cardboard box the not much bigger than its 17 inch monitor. Here’s what you do to set it up. Plug in the power cord. Plug in the keyboard. Plug in the mouse. In my case, I also plugged in the DSL line. (Some models have a cordless mouse and keyboard. We elected to get the cord. Per my wife: “We have to chase the television remote all over the house, why look for the mouse too?” Good point.) After the plug-in, I turned on the power. There was a remarkably short start-up period. The computer recognized the DSL line and connected us automatically (not so with our Windows machine), and after answering a few questions – we’re set up and ready to go. Not only did it recognize our DSL line, it also recognized several wireless networks with its builtin wi-fi (“airport”) card. Too bad I don’t have permission to use any of those networks.

I plugged in my Kodak camera. Boom, it was recognized right away, ready to dump all the photos into iPhoto. I put in an audio CD, Boom, ready to import music into iTunes. I even put in a PAL format DVD loaned to us by a friend from England. The computer asked me if I wanted to change my Zone for DVD playback, and it warned me that I could only do so two more times. (Or what? I don’t know.)

For surfing the web, word processing, listening to music, watching dvds, the iMac is a wonderful computer. The 17” display is more screen real estate than I’m used to, and it’s space that is needed for a multi-tasking operating system like OS-X. Even though Windows XP is multi-tasking, it really doesn’t encourage the practice. OS-X says two tasks at once? No problem. Three? Ditto. Four? Go for it. For the nerdiest among us, how does the 2Ghz G5 compare to a 3.4 Ghz P4? I don’t know. I don’t care. The G5 so far has been fast enough to do anything I want to do, and often while doing several other things at the same time.

It’s the Software Morris

The applications that come with the iMac are nice. The “iLife Suite” includes Safari web browser, iTunes, iMovie, idvd, iPhoto and a cool music program called Garageband. (In addition to iLife, the G5 also includes Appleworks the direct descendent of Clarisworks, and some games.)

Most people will spend the most time with the web browser, so I’ll get that out of the way first. The Safari browser doesn’t really fit with the rest of the iLife suite. Safari is a good browser, but a browser is a browser. I quickly downloaded Mozilla Firefox. I use them both, and neither is clearly superior to the other.

iLife = iTimeSuck

The true “i” applications are supposed to make cumbersome creative tasks easy and fun. Here’s where the advertisements don’t entirely mesh with reality. Make no mistake, the Apple programs are powerful and comparatively easy to get around; however most of these tasks are inherently time-consuming, and this or any computer will only take a certain amount of the drudgery out of it. It is time-consuming to sort through hundreds of photos and put them into any kind of order no matter what program you use. Don’t think for a minute that if you don’t have time to look through your photos that you will automatically have time to turn them into well-ordered masterpieces with iPhoto. Ditto but more so for iMovie and iDVD. It takes at least an hour to look through an hour of video tape. To mark sections, put them together, take them apart, and put them together again takes time, period. I took a video production course in college. My first experience with video editing taught me that I did not want to do this for a living. Don’t kid yourself. if you have a job, and if you have a life, and maybe if you just have one or another, you probably won’t be making many custom DVDs. Nevertheless, you may find that one or more of the iLife applications really triggers a hidden talent or fills a need for creative outlet.

What about iTunes and the iPod? The iTunes program works seamlessly with the iPod. Personally, I don’t see myself as an iPod person. You don’t have thousands of songs for your iPod until you load thousands of songs into your computer, one way or another. I’m happy with my XM radio. I prefer to have someone else do the programming for me, and I can’t wait fro the next generation of XM2Go.

I saved the best for last – GarageBand. Garageband is the iLife application that flips my switch. GarageBand is a music making program that aims to let total amateurs make professional-sounding, or at least pleasing, musical compositions. It comes with loops that can be stretched, shrunk and pitch-corrected as you desire. It also allows you to record live audio tracks, and play virtual instruments via MIDI input. The program includes professional effects, like reverb, distortion, compression and even pitch-correction.

I’m a frustrated garage musician from way back. I experimented with a couple of real garage bands as a teenager, but I wasn’t talented or dedicated enough to make anything out of it. Well folks, if you’re 17 in 2005, the excuses are gone. You can make excellent music with Garageband. To see what others are doing with Garageband, check out this website, www.macjams.com.

My experimentation has only dented the surface of what Garageband can do. Even though this is an entry-level program, you could spend months or years learning new things daily. There is one glaring deficiency in this version (v.2.0) of Garageband, and that is General Midi (GM) support. Real garage bands usually learn their trade by learning cover songs. General Midi files of thousands of tunes are available on the web, but Garageband doesn’t make it easy to work with them. Garageband claims to have added General Midi import in this version, and that’s true to a point. You can import the sequences into the program, but since Garageband doesn’t come with a GM soundset, the individual parts are often mapped to instrument sounds that are quite different from the original source. Sometimes this creates an interesting change, and sometimes not. Sadly, Garageband does not export General Midi sequences at all.

Apple has shown that it intends to upgrade and supplement Garageband. Apple has already come out with several “Jampacks” of add-on loops and instruments. The Jampacks go for $99 each. At that price, if you are interested in recording your own instrumental tracks rather than using loops, I suggest you check out a product called Key Rig by M-Audio. For about the price of one JamPack, Key Rig is a set of four virtual instruments that can be used in GarageBand and other music programs that use “audio units”, the OS-X standard for audio. The first instrument is dedicated to piano, electric piano and clavinet. The second is a modeled tonewheel organ (ala Hammond B-3). The third is a polysynth. The fourth is a General Midi module. Early reviews of Key Rig have been very positive.

Glitches?

I haven’t had many glitches to report. Those that I have experienced have almost all come from two sources. The first is the HP 1610 printer that I got with the computer. The computer didn’t recognize the printer until I loaded the driver. After I loaded the driver, it worked for a while, then it didn’t. Then after I restarted the computer, it started working again. This type of behavior is acceptable in Windows but it stands out like a sore thumb in the Macintosh world.

The second glitch relates to the virtual OS-9 “Classic” that comes with, but is not pre-installed on, the iMac G5. For those who don’t know Mac history, this takes a brief history lesson. When OS-X debuted in 2001, it amounted to a clean break from the 9 major versions of the Macintosh operating system. Each of the previous nine versions had been built upon its predecessor. OS-X, on the other hand was based upon a version of UNIX called “Mach” as customized by NeXT Computer, a company that Steve Jobs founded and Apple bought. Because OS-X was a completely new operating system, Apple could only keep its faithful users if it came up with a way to transition them from their current OS to the new one without buying all new programs. At first that meant making computers that could “boot” in either operating system. As OS-X native programs proliferated, the preferred solution became to emulate OS-9 as an application running under OS-X. Just like the Windows of its day, OS-9 was not rock-stable. It could and did crash. And that brings me to my glitch experience. I have experienced several crashes, but every single one of them was a crash of an OS-9 application running in classic mode, and the crashes did not bring down my system or require a reboot.


Conclusions

The iMac G5 has delivered on my lofty expectations. OS-X is about as close to a crash-free operating system as you can get and is a refreshing change to the “blue screen of death” known as Windows. Whereas my previous computer was constantly reminding me that there was some form of virus or adware or pop-up trying to hop on my system, while working on the Mac, I don’t have to worry about such things. (Yes, I do run a firewall, the one built-in to the operating system.)

The built-in applications encourage one to work creatively and to try out new things. There are plenty of programs available for the Mac. The only area where the PC has a real world advantage is in the broad array of games available for the PC, but those same games cause a lot of the stability problems that PC users encounter.

If I were to suggest any changes to Apple, I’d suggest adding a television tuner, or at least a video input (other than the Firewire and USB 2.0 connectors which it has). In fact, there are television tuners that you can attach to the iMac, so maybe one day I’ll splurge. For would-be iMac buyers, I suggest that you consider the model with the 20” display if your budget will stretch that far. If yours won’t, the 17” is nice as is.

The Future

As I write this, in early October 2005, the rumor mill is rife with predictions for Apple’s new product announcements scheduled for October 12. The best guess is that this round will focus on the Professional lines, the PowerMacs and PowerBooks. Maybe the iMac will get a speed bump. If so: great. If not, you might want to consider the iMac anyway. Usually, when Apple goes 6 months without bumping a product, they’ll drop the price a bit, or introduce a rebate. This version came out in May 2005, so by November an upgrade or price drop should be expected.

You may have read that Apple plans to shift from the PowerPC processor to Intel chips in 2006. Maybe next year’s Macs will be a lot more powerful and significantly cheaper. Maybe the transition will be glitch-free. Maybe it won’t. This year’s models are pretty stable and useful. In the computer world, that’s no small achievement.

(Review Copyright October 2005, S. Hofer “Hof’s Blog”)