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Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Core Duo

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 30, 2006 11:26 PM EST
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iSight and Front Row, Standard

The other major change with this generation of iMac is the integrated iSight camera and mic, located in the top side of the monitor bezel. I was actually very impressed by the image quality of the integrated 640 x 480 camera. Also to make sure that you don't get caught off guard, a green LED lights up when the camera is actually active and recording.


The iSight Camera

The integrated iSight makes video conferencing over IM through applications such as Apple's iChat AV extremely easy. Apple also ships the iSight equipped iMacs with an application called Photo Booth that does exactly what you'd expect it to do. It's a quick and easy way to take pictures of yourself, or whoever is in front of the camera, much like in a photo booth. You can then take those pictures and email them, save them, print them or set them as your buddy icon. It's a little gimmicky, but if you've ever had anyone ask you for a picture of yourself, it's a real quick way of getting it done.


Apple's IR remote will magnetically mount to the lower right of the iMac.

The other new piece of software that's shipping on these new Macs is Apple's Front Row. Front Row is Apple's first remote controlled 10-ft UI. The interface gives you quick access to your music, photos, videos and any DVD movie that you have inserted in the drive. It's a far cry from Microsoft's Media Center Edition, but at the same time, it doesn't really try to be another MCE. It seems more like a semi-serious attempt at introducing Mac users to the concept of a 10-ft UI on their computer, as well as offering a good way to quickly share entertainment content with those around you.


The main screen of Front Row

The interface is accessed and driven by the bundled IR remote; just hit menu to bring up the Front Row interface, and hit it again to hide it. The interface works fine and is very iPod-like; it generally accomplishes its goal of giving you access to all local content, as well as some content that is streamed off of the web.


The Videos sub-menu

One thing that Apple has done very well is integrated Apple's Quicktime movie trailer library into Front Row. By going to the Videos option on the Front Row main menu, you can select Movie Trailers, which will give you a listing of some of the movie trailers available on www.apple.com/trailers/. The trailers appear to be all in SD format, which isn't too big of a problem, since you can't tell the difference between HD and SD from several feet away on a 17" iMac screen. The benefit to only offering SD content is that the file sizes are nice and small, making streaming fairly noneventful, although there were a number of times when I was greeted with "the movie trailer server is not responding" message. Luckily, in all of those cases, after a few seconds, the message went away and my trailer started playing immediately.


Movie Trailers available in Front Row

I was also fairly impressed with how quickly you were able to skip ahead in a trailer; rewinding and fast forwarding was quite seamless, almost CE-like, although it still had a slight lag to it which reminded you that you were still doing all of this on a computer.

The rest of the menus in Front Row were also just a little on the slow slide for me, definitely lacking the snappiness of Media Center Edition's UI. Despite the slowness, like the rest of the OS X interface, Front Row was very pleasant to use.

One thing that actually surprised me was how usable the interface was, even on a 17" screen from 6 or 7 feet away. The size of the icons and menu items made the experience quite pleasant, although if you get too far away you are going to need a bigger screen. The new iMacs do offer DVI/VGA/S-Video/Composite output, however you'll need an external dongle that isn't supplied with the system in order for that to work.

At the end of the day, I will say that Front Row did impress me a lot more than I expected it to. There are countless occaisions where I'm showing something on my computer to my wife, my family or friends, and it'd be a lot easier to do it, especially when there are a lot of people, from several feet away and with a remote - Front Row accomplishes just that. There is no doubt that Apple will eventually have to look at doing something a little more Media Center-like, but it'll take a lot more than Front Row for that to happen. My guess would be that it would make a lot of sense for Apple to enter the Media Center market around the time that ATI begins shipping their OCUR device.

The new iMac The Intel iMac
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  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    Turning off one core leaves the full 2MB of cache for the other core to use since it is a shared L2.

    Take care,
    Anand

  • Eug - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    quote:
    Turning off one core leaves the full 2MB of cache for the other core to use since it is a shared L2.

    Take care,
    Anand

    Cool thanks.

    P.S. I have read elsewhere that the new iMac Core Duo uses less than half of the CPU's processing power to play back H.264 Hi-Def 1920x1080 video at a full 24 fps. If true, that's great, because my iMac 2.0 chokes on that. It plays back relatively smoothly, but only at about 12-15 fps.

    That bodes well for a future single-core Yonah Mac mini.

    Then again, probably not, considering that I suspect the iMac Core Duo does so well on H.264 playback because of its Radeon X1600. I'd doubt the Mac mini would get anything close to that any time soon.

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    Max CPU utilization (across both CPUs) when playing a 1080p stream scaled to fit the screen is about 60%, but it usually hovers below 50%. I am not sure whether or not the X1600's H.264 decode acceleration is taken advantage of (I doubt it), I'm trying to find out now. Also remember that on the PC side, the X1600 will only accelerate up to 720p.

    Take care,
    Anand

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    I just confirmed with ATI, the X1600's H.264 decode acceleration is currently not supported under OS X. ATI is working with Apple on trying to get the support built in, but currently it isn't there.

    Take care,
    Anand

  • Eug - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    quote:
    I just confirmed with ATI, the X1600's H.264 decode acceleration is currently not supported under OS X. ATI is working with Apple on trying to get the support built in, but currently it isn't there.

    Thanks again for the info. That's actually good news in a way. Things are looking up for that single-core Yonah Mac mini HTPC.

  • andrep74 - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    Isn't performance/Watt a function of the CPU, not the platform?

  • Kyteland - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    That picture of Jobs doesn't say "PC vs Intel" it says "PowerPC vs Intel". Jobs is just standing in the way. He's comparing the old mac to the new mac.

  • Calin - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    You could think about it that way - but in the end, the buyer is interested on the total energy consumption/heat production (as this is what he pays for, and what he must get rid of).
    Have you heard of the Toyota D4D engine? It has a record of 2.4 liter (less than a gallon) diesel fuel used per a hundred kilometers (60 miles). However, the same engine on a Land Cruiser 4x4 all options will get you much less (four times less maybe).
    It doesn't worths talking about performance per watt at the processor level, it is better at the platform level.

  • BUBKA - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    Were these benches done with a USB 2.0 device plugged in?

  • Furen - Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - link

    I was under the impression that Intel was blaming Microsoft for that, so that would not apply to OSX, though if the driver works perfectly for every platform except Napa I'd guess its a hardware problem that MS will fix in software (which is well enough as long as it works). The power consumption difference is probably less than 10W anyway. It matters on a notebook but hardly matters with a desktop.

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