iMac with Intel Core Duo 2 GHz is great. It is very fast. It is indeed up to 5 to 6X faster than my PowerBook G4 12″ 1.5GHz when doing H.264 encoding (when using Universal binary). It is slower to run Microsoft Office, though. It plays World of Warcraft with ease, although you cannot turn all the effects to highest in the native resolution. And that is what they said: You can get about twice the FPS playing WOW under Windows when using iMac. One reason is that WOW is not OS X optimized, this is true.
But overall the experience with the new iMac is pleasant. Even so, I hesitate to buy an iMac for my home use. It is not so expensive, at least compared to my PowerBook. Actually I really want a new desktop because the G4 is really slow for CPU intensive tasks. SO, what is keeping me from buying an iMac?
Upgradability. With iMac, you can barely upgrade anything. Yes, it is compact, it looks neat, but what if your optical drive broke? What if you want to upgrade your CPU and video card? NO WAY! Yes, installing memery is easy, but that’s it. You will have to stuck with all the hardware, all the life time of this iMac. And for obvious reasons, Apple is trying to keep users from upgrading the hardware themselves.
There is no problem with PowerBooks or MacBook Pro, because people really don’t upgrade their laptop. And it is easy for users to upgrade their harddrive of PowerBook, iBook, so it is acutally much better than iMac and PowerMac G5. I really love Apple’s design, their OS. But if they won’t make upgrade easier, I just might not buy their desktops. Well, if this is true, I might have get a PC to install OSx86 project hacked Mac OS X. Macs are actually worth the money until you find out you cannot upgrade it.
I believe people remember the PowerMac G4, which is so inviting. You can pull off the side of the enclosure with ease. You can upgrade your G4 CPU. With PowerMac G5, you cannot even upgrade you CPU any more. It is very obvious that Apple is steering away from letting users upgrade their system, but… buy a new one!
There is less than a month from now that the new PowerMac or Mac Pro is going to be released. Although with Intel CPUs, people would suppose it is easier to upgrade your CPU than PowerPCs, analysists doubt Apple will make the CPU upgrade any easier. One reason is that Apple does not allow Mac OS X to be running on non-Apple hardwares, so they have Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in the CPUs. You buy one CPU from other sources, it is very likely that it won’t work.