SF Chronicle Gives Intel iMac a Positive Review

by , 1:10 PM EST, January 30th, 2006

"Years from now, the Macintosh faithful will look back on January 2006 as a pivotal time for Apple Computer Inc.," San Francisco Chronicle staffer Matthew Yi wrote in his Monday review of the new Intel iMac. He took a 20-inch iMac loaded with 1GB of RAM for a test drive and found that it "seemed to benefit" from having a Core Duo processor, which he likened to having two engines in one car.

As a test, Mr. Yi played World of Warcraft (a Universal Binary isn't available yet, so he did so through Rosetta) while surfing the Internet "without much of a hitch, while importing video clips from my digital video camera into iMovie HD." However, he did see hiccups in the game's performance when he used Elgato's EyeTV Wonder to watch TV on the computer.

He also put iLife '06 through its paces, appreciating the performance of the software, which has been updated to run on Intel processors. Mr. Yi noted, however that "the biggest downside to buying an Intel-based iMac right now is that there are still a lot of third-party software programs that need to be rewritten for the Intel chip." He found Rosetta performance acceptable in Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Photoshop, and said they should run even better once Universal Binaries are available.