i7 iMac: an odyssey of space

Written by Alex Kidman Friday, 27 November 2009 00:31

"Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery."

And there it remained, right up until I bought it last Tuesday. Now there's a black — well, black and silver — monolith staring me in the face, and a gaping chasm, not so much on the lunar surface, but where my bank balance used to be.

Yes, this week I took the plunge and got myself a new Core i7 27" iMac. Now, this isn't going to be a full review — three days isn't long enough to benchmark, test and evaluate much of anything properly. That'll come in time. Think of this more as a first impression, mixed in with some observations of how switching up from a 13", three-year old MacBook to a top-of-the-line-ginormous-screened iMac changes workflows and indeed my appreciation for OS X.

Naturally, the first observation is that it's freakishly huge. Thankfully, in contrast to some of the reports floating around online, it's not also freakishly broken or indeed DOA. Whether or not the issue with dud i7 iMacs is an isolated case or not, it is a bit of a black eye for Apple's usually decent quality control department. I did wonder when placing the order if I was going to fall victim to the old maxim about never buying the "1.0" product. So far, so good.

Anyway, back to the hugeness. I still don't get why Apple ships the 27" iMac with such a tiny keyboard — and I'm kicking myself I didn't remember to ask for the larger keyboard with the proper number pad — as the contrast in size isn't so much a visual counterpoint as it is downright ridiculous. Then again, I was pretty much always going to ditch the Magic Mouse (we never got along) and the keyboard in favour of my writing combo of choice. In case you care, it's a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 and a Logitech M705 mouse. Anyone want a Magic Mouse and Tiny Keyboard for a reasonable price?

The large screen has impacted my workflow in a rather unexpected way, and quite quickly.

I'd plugged the MacBook into an external screen quite a bit over its service life, but not quite a screen of these dimensions on a permanent basis. I’d expected to use OS X in the same way on the iMonolith, but I find that I'm not. Specifically, on the smaller screen of the MacBook (and even when it was plugged into a slightly larger 4:3 19" display) I'd tend to stack windows on top of each other with bits peeking out, so I could either command-tab between them or just click, as the mood took me.

For whatever reason, my brain doesn't like this as much on a much bigger screen. I suspect it's got to do with the nature of floating windows and their relationship to the menu bar. It's just that bit too ingrained into my head that the window's going to sit roughly underneath the menu bar, which on a much bigger screen it usually doesn't.

The solution for me, so far, has actually been to use additional features of OS X. How handy they were there. Specifically, I've started using Spaces to break up my apps across different workflows, depending on whether I need uninterrupted writing, social networking hilarity, music playback or product testing. It seems mildly counter-intuitive that the larger screen of the iMac is the one where I'd need to use Spaces whereas I was content with a single tiny screen on the MacBook, but there you go. At least the iMac has the grunt to handle it.

I wasn't actually expecting huge leaps and bounds in performance out of the Core i7, which might strike you as an odd statement to make. Why buy such an expensive machine if you're not going to race it? Well, there's two reasons behind my logic. First, while a new machine is, naturally enough, free of the mechanical cruft that builds up in older ones (note: I'm not a smoker and never would be, so this problem was never mine), it's still being used for the same kind of tasks. My articles aren't going to start writing themselves much faster, I don't want my music to play back at double speed, and my photos still look the same. It is nice to be able to run iPhoto, Photoshop Elements and Firefox with the trimmings and still have enough grunt left over for TweetDeck to crash as and when it feels like it, though. The second reason is simply one of time and code availability. There's still not a tonne of code out there optimised for four cores that I use on a regular basis. There should be in the future, even if it's only the same applications I'm using right now being more optimal in the use of resources. There's a certain amount of wisdom in buying at the top of the current tech tree when a purchase must be made, if only so that you can remain "current" for that bit longer.

That having been said, in the right here and right now, once I'd ditched the Magic Mouse, this monolith here plays a mean game of Bioshock.

So, so far, so good. You can expect a full and proper review sometime later, presuming that is that the monolith doesn't suck me in one end and spit me out the other end of a psychedelic tunnel as a baby at the other end.

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you."

Uh oh.

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