The Latest Intel-based iMacs, long delays for the holidays…

The Helicopter is aloft again! Sorry for the long pause.I’ve been on a trip back to the US to visit family and attend a wedding. My friends that got married just purchased a new 17-inch Intel iMac (Core 2 Duo), and boy is it a charmer. The price is astounding. Some would say it’s too high, but the nice big, bright screen and all the other features make it more than worth what they paid. The Intel switch is a good thing. Really.

With my aging 14-inch G4 iBook, I had always had trouble getting iDVD to burn a movie to disc at all. But I not only succeeded easily and comfortably with that iMac, but while doing other things at the same time. It transcodes to Mpeg-2 for DVD very quickly, at almost 1:1 speed. I tried it with a video about 50 minutes long. Chapter markers from iMovie went in smoothly. I used the Airport cards of the iMac and the iBook to do file sharing and even to drop photos from the iBook into iDVD on the iMac as well as import a Garageband file from the iBook to the iDVD project on the iMac. ( I didn’t have a 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable handy )

The slot-loading superdrive isn’t as fast as it’s larger cousins found in the Mac Pro. But still quite capable. Results were good. Video quality could have been better had I used a dual-layer DVD-R, but those things are still far too pricey and burn far too slow to be bothered with.

The built-in iSight camera is pretty cool and convenient too. Photobooth had me giggling and laughing out loud by myself making goofy pictures.

All the iLife apps were snappy as can be, and things launched quickly! MS Office, under Rosetta was also snappy and I didn’t even notice that it wasn’t a native or universal app. Heck it was more responsive than on my iBook G4!

The Core 2 Duo iMac is a steal of a deal. A great computer that is more than capable of real multi-tasking with processor intensive apps, even better than the G5 ones.

The only pooh-pooh is on DELL for selling printers without drivers. My friends had a Widows notebook and a DELL printer prior to their iMac. As everyone knows, most DELL printers are Lexmark printers with a different name. Still, they don’t provide the corresponding driver with the capability of recognizing the hardware, so my friends must now go out and purchase another printer. How stupid is that? I mean, cheap printers are all about ink sales anyway…