20-inch 2GHz iMac Core Duo

Apple’s iMac has never really been aimed at creatives. Despite the studio-friendly looks, it’s always been more of a consumer machine, leaving the Power Mac to take care of the pros. But in January, Apple took the wrappers off the iMac Core Duo, the first Mac to get one of the new Intel dual-core chips.

Apple claims its new iMac is twice as fast as the old iMac G5. So does this massive performance gain make the iMac, at around two-thirds the cost of a Power Mac, a viable choice for design professionals?

In a word, no. It’s true that under some circumstances Apple’s iMac Core Duo is twice as fast as the previous iMac. Apple’s package of bundled applications, iTunes for example, runs twice as fast. But there is some way to go before this speed will become available for graphics apps, too.

Design applications originally written to run on G5 systems, including all the industry-standard titles, will need to be rewritten to run on Intel chips. You can still run the current version of Photoshop on the Core Duo, but only through an emulation app called Rosetta, and, as you can imagine, the emulation process slows things right down.

We ran benchmarks to see just how much of a performance hit Core Duo owners could expect. Side-by-side with a similarly-specced G5 iMac, the first thing we noticed was the speed of the native Apple apps. But in non-native pro applications things slowed right down.

Photoshop start-up times were four times slower. Nearly every command we benchmarked was slower against the iMac G5, except for applying a Radial Blur to a JPEG. It was the same with InDesign. Outputting a page layout to a 6.6MB PDF was 2.0 times slower on the Core Duo than it was on the iMac G5.

It will be interesting to see how Quark takes advantage of this. QuarkXPress 7 is a Universal Binary, meaning it will run natively on either the IBM or Intel chips, and will be available, we guesstimate, this summer. But unless Adobe speeds up its normal production cycle, Photoshop is unlikely to see a native Intel release until mid-2007.

Aside from the processor, everything else is much the same as the November 2005 iMac. Essentially this is the same curved-shell design, with remote control, built-in iSight webcam and Front Row software. The only new features worth a mention are an updated iLife ’06, which is a very friendly, if not pro-level, bundle for publishing sites, editing movies and storing photos; and the Mini-DVI out port, which allows users to extend the desktop to a second monitor, whereas the G5 would only mirror it.

Nice as these features are, the lack of native applications that can take advantage of the Intel chip means that those unable to afford a Power Mac are probably better off with an older iMac G5 and should wait till the native apps become available before upgrading.