Today the new Intel based iMac’s went on sale in London, I happened to be working about 5 minutes walk from the Apple Shop in Regent Street so I popped in and picked one up. I tried to call but the phone was never answered not even after 10 minutes of ringing.
The shop staff were busy setting up the new iMacs on the floor but the 20″ was already sold out, I got a 17″ model. Apple Store London does not yet have RAM for the machines but I guess I can just pick up some DDR2 SDRAM from a PC dealer.
So far I’m very impressed with the machine, the screen is absolutely stunning, the build quality and packaging is excellent and the everything is certainly a lot faster than on my old 800Mhz G4 machines ๐
The big question is of course software compatibility, below my experiences with 3rd party applications so far.
It seems anything that installs a preference pane and requires that to work will be out of luck, so far that’s SynergyKM and Growl.
Firefox works great, Safari (a universal binary) outperforms is in all respects but it works and its a lot faster than my iBook or G4 Powermac runs it so thats a good thing.
Thunderbird works great, like Firefox I’m keen to see a universal binary though.
AdiumX works perfectly, slight delay here and there which will no doubt be fixed with a universal build.
You Control: Desktops works OK, sometimes screen flipping is a bit slow and sometimes it doesn’t change active desktop to the application when selected using alt-tab.
Quicksilver being a universal binary works flawless.
Eclipse does not work, but I didn’t try to hard to get it going so who knows.
GLTerm does not work at all, I guess it’s screen card dependant.
Office:Mac works ok, it’s not screeming fast but its usable.
NetNewsWire works perfectly through rosetta.
UPDATED:
Adium X 0.88 is a universal binary and it works great, it also includes a universal binary of Growl complete with working pref pane ๐
Mozilla has some unofficial binaries as part of their “Deer Park” program, Camino, Thunderbird and Firefox are available. They work great, quite a bit faster than the power pc versions.
SynergyKM has been updated to be a universal binary, it works a charm.
