Switching iMacs: from G5 to Intel Core Duo
Tonight my friend John-o and I picked up a couple new iMacs from the Apple store on Michigan Ave. This post will be an updated log (both inline and in comments, to handle the different ways people are coming at this) of my experience: things that work, things that don’t.
[UPDATE] It’s all over [/UPDATE]
Apples to Apples?
Yeah, worn out pun- but I couldn’t resist. In fairness to this new little guy, I need to note here that some issues may be related to RAM. My G5 has 2 GB, and this one currently is plugging along with only 512 MB.
Lost in the shuffle
Looks like almost everything got pulled over by connecting to my G5 and using it as a Firewire drive. Preferences generally seem intact, and the Intel machine was smart enough to automatically use the new ’06 versions of the iLife apps. Little utilities like iMote and Quicksilver came through just fine. But there were a few big casualties:
Developer Tools
I could probably try just pulling the old folder over manually, but first I’m going to look into downloading a new suite (I’m assuming there is one?). At any rate, I’ll definitely need XCode, if nothing else.
Subversion
Ouch. That one hurt. I’m brand new to SVN, and spent several hours last week getting all set to have my G5 acting as a local SVN server (repository). Not sure how it’ll all work on on the new machine. I might not worry about it just yet, and stick with nightly backups to external drive via the trusty SuperDuper
Made it, but badly wounded
TextPander shows up in my prefs pane, but gives an error and won’t run. TimeLog crashed a few times, but seems to be okay now…
Flash
Probably my biggest questions surrounded the Adobe (Macromedia) Flash Player and IDE. Unfortunately, there are some issues. If I run it with Firefox (assuming “Rosetta” here), it’s dog slow. There’s an app I’m working on right now that has loads of v2 components that aren’t yet intelligently loading- they just all try at once, which makes for a good test. Though it hangs a bit on the G5, I don’t get any timeout messages, and in the Intel I’m getting at least 3! The good news is that in Safari on the Intel the performance seems as good and maybe just a tiny bit better than on the G5. But one major text problem is pretty easy to spot here (click for full view):
See all the blue text? That’s supposed to be black
[ UPDATE: ] For the heck of it I went to the Flash Player download site, and it told me it couldn’t find a player that matched my system. ouch. I’m not one to jump all over Macro.. sorry, Adobe- but c’mon guys. How long has Apple been providing info on creating Universal Binaries? The IDE is one thing I can understand, but the Flash Player? The thing that’s supposed to be more ubiquitous than any other downloadable software? I thought they would have had it covered. [ / UPDATE ].
As for the Flash 8 IDE, it’s quite a bit slower than on the G5. Fortunately, I do most of my work in XCode with the help of MTASC. I’m also hoping that more RAM will give me a boost here.
New fun stuff
My G5 was the model just previous to all the cool stuff being built-in, like iSight camera and Front Row. Even my bluetooth headset works with this new one, which makes iChatAV a little cooler. And I’m liking the Mighty Mouse. I have yet to play with iWeb or GarageBand 3.
Well that’s all for tonight. I’ll post updates as I have them.
January 14th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Your mapping project looks pretty cool and is fast too — Faster than some of the other apps I have seen. Care to post about it a little?
January 14th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
John: Oh, thanks. I’m planning on doing a full post on it after I clean a few things up. I started to dump a bunch of info here in this comment, but it got too long, so it’ll have to wait
I have a lot of stuff to post from a Flash developer’s point of view. I cut me teeth on the ARP framework with this project, became fully comitted to the v2 component framework, and solidified my love for AMFPHP. I’ll be sharing my thoughts about things that are and aren’t working well, how it’s comparing to Google and Yahoo maps, etc.
I’m happy to hear you think it’s fast- I have a fair bit of optimizing to do on it, such as using scrollRect, cacheAsBitmap (we just barely decided to publish to F8), and better initializing of all those v2 components.
For now, I’ll leave it at giving huge credit to the owner and co-designer of the site Bill Huber. It’s rare to have a client that collaborates on an iterative design process like this. It’s spoiled me compared to the usual fixed-cost bids that most clients demand, and we’ve always struck a good compromise on design decisions.
January 14th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Somebody at Apple must be lying about hardware specs. If the iMac is up to 200% faster and Rosetta runs at 60-70% of native speed, apps like the Flash IDE should in theory run at least as fast as on your older iMac.
Let’s hope the Intel Mac Flash Player obtains Intel PC speeds, as its translation to processor instructions should be based on the PC version?
January 14th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
[...] ad a chance yet to check one out in person, but Jed has. So far, it doesn’t seem too encouraging – he mentions that on his new iMa [...]
January 14th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Here is an interesting analysis of how much faster Macs with the traditional powerpc/altivec combination could be if developers took better advantage of the hardware. Unfortunately most developers didn’t, so it is better for Apple to make generic apps run faster than worry about providing high-end multimedia extensions that most people don’t use.
January 19th, 2006 at 1:13 am
I do my site development on an aging PC and am taking a very hard look at the new iMac. My question – do you guys use Dreamweaver or Fireworks? How is the speed of those apps? When will Macromedia/adobe update these apps that are widely used throughout the developer world?
BTW, I just went to their site on Safari using one of my kids’ macs, and their page won’t even fully load – Safari rejected the flash scripting. Sheesh.
Anyway, this is probably just as well for Apple. Most iMacs with CoreDuo will be bought by either enthusiasts who will forgive or consumers who just use iLife etc. Developers may choose to wait until native versions of apps are available. I’ll bet that Core Duo chips are still in short supply.
January 20th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Sorry for the delay… I probably missed you in Technorati due to the week’s rush, and I finally found you via Mike Schelifstein:
http://www.flashinsider.com/2006/01/19/adobe-on-mac-intel-and-why-flash-is-guiding-my-buying/#c949221
The reason the Macromedia site has no Player for Intel Macs is because there isn’t one. A port is in the schedule, now that the hardware is finalized — I’m hoping for a near-term release, but no group announcements yet. Cross-company exec-level discussions are occurring now or I’d say more… bottom line is that I feel your pain, and I expect the situation to be smoother soon.
For full applications, the info I have so far indicates that new hardware will be supported in new versions, rather than in mid-cycle patch/ports. I’m hoping for better guidance on potential schedules soon.
(I’ve seen a few sites doing independent benchmarking of existing apps under new emulation, but don’t have links handy, regrets… search terms like “rosetta apple” with particular applications would locate them.)
jd/adobe
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:06 pm
[...] ce, so I couldn’t tell if things like the text changing colors were happening. Anything that I had made seemed to run normally a [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:01 am
I just had the same experience at the Apple store with blue text appearing in a project I did. Specifically mine is html text pulled into a textfield and styled with external CSS. All of the htmlText was showing up as blue in MacBook Safari.
Weird
November 2nd, 2006 at 11:30 pm
After one night of working on the new, mighty, whizbang 24″ iMac, I am ready to box it up and send it back to the nerds who produced it.
I am running CS2… working in Photoshop & InDesign and the switch and lag time is ridiculous. This is my fourth Mac and is by far the most disappointing. The amount of time to open and process even small files in Photoshop (100-200mg or so) is pathetic.
At work, I have a G5 with a gig of ram and 240 on the hard drive.
That one is two years old and it moves things along quite nicely.
InDesign crashed a number if times… that must be one of the un-advertised, surprise benefits that comes with the new computer. I will probably add the additional ram this weekend to see if that helps the performance any. Right now, I feel like I have been had!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have until November 10th to return this box of rotten fruit or get it sufficiently domesticated… I think that’s all I can whine about for now…
Pat Osborne