Digital Trends

Apple iMac Core Duo 17-inch

July 11th, 2006 | by Jason Tomzak

Setup and Use

Setting up a new iMac easy.  The box contains the iMac, power cord, keyboard, mouse, Front Row remote and OS X restore DVDs.  From the moment I walked in the front door and saw my wife giving me the "You got another Mac?!" look, I had the computer set up and ready to go in under 2 minutes.  I then spent 4 minutes explaining another Mac to my wife.

With a stopwatch started and power button pressed, the iMac ran through initial setups quickly.  The 'select language' screen appeared in 53 seconds, as opposed to 1 minute 33 seconds with my iMac G5.  My full name, address and other registration information were entered by 2 minutes 40 seconds.  On the Intel-based iMac, OS X was set up and running by the time 5 minutes 10 seconds had passed. 

Comparatively, the same setup process took 11 minutes for the Intel Mac Mini with Core Duo, 6 minutes 05 seconds for the MacBook Pro and 4 minutes 20 seconds for my beloved MacBook.  

The basic pre-installed Universal applications like Address Book, iCal, Safari, Mail and iChat all opened in about 1 second.  Popular free-ware programs such as Firefox, Camino and Adium, opened just as quickly.  iWork's word processor application, Pages, opens in 5 seconds on a loaded G5 iMac, whereas it opens in about 3 seconds on the Intel iMac.

Many people know that I am an avid photographer.  The iPhoto/Adobe Bridge library on my G5 iMac has over 20,000 images from my Digital Rebel and Digital Rebel XT cameras.  The ability of a computer to handle photo importing and manipulation is very important to me.  Speed and absolute stability are critical.  To that end, on the Intel iMac, an empty-library iPhoto opened in 1.5 seconds - slightly better than the 1.7 seconds it took to open on the new 2GHz MacBook.  Importing 821 full-res 8 megapixel images into iPhoto took an excruciating 20 minutes 04 seconds.  That's an average of 41 pictures per minute.  Without comparable data, 41 pictures per minute seems pretty good.  On the Intel-based Mac Mini Core Duo, importing and default organization of 600 full-res 8 megapixel photos took only 7 minutes.  That's about 85 photos per minute!  I was disappointed to see the Intel iMac import and arrange photos at half the speed of an Intel Mac Mini.

Rosetta-dependent applications like Word, Acrobat Professional and Photoshop CS2 open much slower than Universal applications, but they open faster on the iMac than they do on a loaded 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook.