Switching Back
wow. That was fast. I was the semi-proud owner of a new Intel iMac Core Duo for less than 24 hours. The manager at the Apple store was holding firm on the 10% fee for a return. Not wanting to leave the store empty-handed and negative on the cash flow, I convinced him to trade me straight across for a good ol’ PowerPC version.
Oh G5, I could never stay mad at you! What was I thinking tossing you aside to chase after the hype of supposed 2x speed improvements? And after all you’ve done for me! I promise I won’t do that again. At least not until they release the Intel version of the PowerMac this summer…
Why the change of heart?
Look, I was right on the edge of my risk tolerance buying that thing last night. I was already hesitant about the performance of Rosetta. Losing Subversion, TextPander, and TimeLog didn’t help (I didn’t get to confirm if SuperDuper worked, but I wouldn’t bet on it). Seeing the Flash player turn text blue (in the “native” Safari) and time out twice (in Rosetta’d Firefox) didn’t either. But it was all the little things (as if those aren’t already little enough) that did me in- like trying to hit COMMAND-TAB to switch apps and not see the menu for 2 seconds.
Yeah, I know- more RAM might have made all the difference. But you can’t buy any more right now except through the Apple store online and they wanted $300 for each 1 GB chip (Crucial let’s you get all the way to checkout before telling you it’s not in stock). And what if that still didn’t solve it? And yeah, I know- maybe all these problem apps will have Universal Binary versions released within a few days. But what if they don’t?
Not enough pain
Part of my problem is that I obviously just don’t need it bad enough. My friend John-o is going to be in heaven with his machine, because he’s upgrading from a 15-inch G4 iMac that has a busted optical drive and about 16 MB of RAM. His iPhoto library probably has 4.2 million photos. He surfs the web, uses Mail, iTunes, Preview, iChat, and maybe iMovie now and then. He hated his old machine. It took a lot of persuasive talk to convince him to wait until MacWorld before buying a new machine. He’s the perfect candidate for these MacTels.
But me? I’m pretty darn happy with my current machine. Screen Spanning Doctor let’s me hook up an external monitor and have an extended desktop. 2 GB of RAM seems to be put to good use. Who knows, maybe SOX is doing more than I think? I saw the big “2x faster” plastered all over the Apple site, did the quick calculations to justify the cost, and figured why not? Too bad I ignored all the concerns I had.
The Upgrades
So I’m still coming out with some decent little upgrades in this new G5 iMac compared to the one I’ve been using (which will soon find its way onto eBay)- at least enough to tide me over until this summer.
- My old iMac didn’t have bluetooth built-in, so my BT headset never worked right with the USB adapter I was using. Now it does.
- 128 MB video card instead of 64 MB
- Faster RAM
- iSight camera (built-in)
- iLife ’06
- Front Row and the cool little remote
- Speed bump in processor speed
So my final advice: you should buy a MacTel if you fall into one of these 3 categories:
- You really only use the basic native Apple apps
- You’re switching from a PC (in which case you’re not going to bring your software with you anyway)
- This will not be your primary computer, but rather a little tor for your spouse, kids, and home-theater experiments
Too all of you that have already paid for a MacBook Pro- I wish you less buyer’s remorse than I had.