After a few weeks of waiting for MacBook Pro, I decided to cancel the order and go with the new iMac instead. I will still use the PowerBook G4 on the road but iMac is becoming my primary computer now. Intel iMac is my first desktop in 5 years and the first impressions are positive so far:
- Fantastic, very bright 20” monitor
- Comfortable full-size keyboard
- 4-button Mighty Mouse
The pre-installed software now includes Comic Life and Big Bang Board Games. Unfortunately, my favorite PowerBook G4 applications Art Directors Toolkit and OmniGraffle are not included.
Kids had fun with the built-in camera and the Photo Booth. I liked Apple Remote and Front Row.
The overall performance is OK. At times iMac just stalls for a second or two and it is annoying. I am not sure if it is lack of memory (512K is not enough for all the applications you tend to open on the bigger screen) or a couple of PPC programs running under Rosetta emulator (Skype, Firefox). I replaced Firefox 1.5 with the universal alpha build and Skype should have an updated version soon.
It was easy to get up and running with Ruby on Rails thanks to Dan Benjamin’s instructions. One little thing—make sure you get the latest version of lighttpd (not 1.4.8).
Most of Cocoa freeware and shareware applications I installed are now universal:
- Alarm Clock 2 http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/
- Adium http://www.adiumx.com/
- Firefox 2.0 alpha (DeerPark) http://homepage.mac.com/thenonsuch/firefox/firefox-intel-030306.dmg
- GmailStatus (Not Universal) http://www.uebercoders.net/gms/
- TextMate http://macromates.com/
I also built the universal binaries of SSHKeychain 7.2 from the trunk:
