Apple iMac

Apple has given its illustrious mid-range desktop Mac range a long-overdue remodelling and a few modest speed bumps. The new machine, like the last one, is a great all-rounder that in our tests performed faster than the latest 15-inch 2.2GHz MacBook Pro and only a whisker behind a 2 x 2.66GHz Mac Pro in everything apart from the heaviest of workloads.

Four iMacs are available. The two screen sizes are now 20-inch and 24- inch. Chip speeds are competitive with the rest of the market at 2.0GHz for the lower-spec 20-inch model, rising up to 2.4GHz for the higher-spec 20 inch. Above this is a 2.4GHz 24-inch iMac, then a top-end 2.8GHz 24-inch model. Prices have either stayed the same or come down slightly. All use Intel Core 2 Duo processors, like many other desktops and laptops out there, and have generous hard-drive sizes available from 250GB up to 1TB, and the option of 4GB of RAM (1GB comes as standard, or 2GB on the top-spec model). If you want to upgrade the RAM, buy it separately and install it yourself – it’s a two-minute job that will save a chunk of change.

It’s the exterior skin and new glossy screens of the iMacs that have caused the most buzz, not all of which is positive. Apple has done away with the white plastic design and brought in an anodised aluminium shell and glass-fronted glossy display. There is no matte option like on the laptops; it’s a glossy display or nothing. The aluminium and glass combo is being vaunted by Apple as greener material than the plastic used before. That’s open to debate. What’s unarguable is that the new iMac looks closer to Apple’s brushed-metal professional Mac line-up than ever before. The aluminium has also done away with the sleep light that used to glow through the plastic, and the magnetic clamp for sticking the remote to the side of the screen.

The glass is highly reflective and that has been the most common complaint. When the display colour is uniform, the glass can act like a mirror. We found that our eyes adjusted quickly and that the display is bright enough to largely counteract the mirroring effect.

Another complaint is the narrow viewing angle. If you look at the iMac from an angle other than dead-on, the colours can appear distorted. We found that changing the iMac’s colour profile in System Preferences from ‘iMac’ to ’Wide Gamut RGB’ did a lot to deal with this problem, while also ridding the iMac of a third display complaint, that colour can appear washed out.

Apple has updated the Apple Keyboard too. It’s also aluminium and looks and feels almost exactly like a MacBook’s keyboard. The keys are nearly flush with the board, which in turn is nearly flush with the desktop. It’s thinner than the remote control that comes with the iMac. We found it very comfortable, particularly as the finger pressure needed to type is much less than on the keyboard it replaces.

Under the hood some more interesting changes have happened. This is the first iMac to include Intel’s new Santa Rosa platform. With it the front-side bus – the pipes that feed data to the cores – has widened from 667MHz to 800MHz to speed up the computer. This new board also allows for more efficient balancing of loads between cores and powering up and down depending on the workload and type of application in use. We ran Xbench, Cinebench and LCDtest in addition to basic iLife encoding tests. Overall we measured the new 2.4GHz 20-inch iMac to be an 18 per cent faster machine than a 2.0GHz 24-inch iMac Intel Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM.

The graphics cards have been updated too. The new cards bring DirectX 10 support to the iMacs, which should appeal to any Windows graphics workers or gamers looking for this Vista graphics support. Generally the cards proved perfectly capable of dealing with the graphics tests we threw at them.

Aside from the technical specs, the iMac feels very fluid to use. As an all-in-one it represents decent value for money, though no-one would call it cheap. If you are want one, it might be an idea to hold off for a month or two. Apple is about to launch its next operating system, Leopard, and if you wait you will get it included with all its core animation and core image goodies.