Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Well, I don't know what happened ... We all knew I'd get another Mac sooner or later, but who knows why I took the step right now instead of in a few months, or a little earlier? In any case, on the evening of April 5th I suddenly ordered a 20-inch iMac with one gigabyte of RAM installed and 256 megabytes of graphics memory. It arrived before noon on April 12th. Between those times there was a lot of reloading of TNT's consignment tracking page to see if things hade moved on.
A lot.
I wish I was kidding.
Let's just move on, shall we?
Getting things up and running was exactly the kind of breeze the Mac experience is supposed to be. I took everything out of the box, installed an extra gigabyte of RAM (that I'd bought from a non-Apple source, lesson learned from last time) and plugged in the grand total of three cables. I thought I'd start off with just the power cable, using my wireless keyboard and mouse, just to be cool, but I decided to try out the Mighty mouse instead. Off I went, sitting down and hitting the power button.
The major step, time-wise, during initial startup was the transfer of files from Pomum. When prompted, I plugged in my recently purchased firewire cable and restarted Pomum while pressing the T key. I chose to transfer everything (from network settings to user files and programs) and waited for about an hour for the transfer to complete.
While neither computer is exactly a monster of noise, Pomum stood for the majority of what noise there was during installation.
I can't help but wonder how much faster that would have been if Pomum had been equipped with a faster hard drive ...
Anyway, with files transfered I breathlessly entered OS X again.
Lo and behold, everything was just where I left it!
And by that I mean exactly where I left it. Which made the great increase in screen real estate all the more noticeable. All applications dutifully placed their windows within the upper left 1024 by 768 pixels of the 1680 by 1050 pixel display.
The apps started act a bit differently though. Faster, to be more specific. Rosetta may cause emulated apps to run slower, but when comparing this beast to Pomum I will never know. And I won't cry because of that. And native stuff is of course even more wonderful with all the power.
I would say iPhoto indeed scrolls like butter, if only I had any idea what that meant ...
And the screen ... Oh, the screen! At highest brightness it's more or less too bright to use comfortably in a dark room, and the very lowest setting is more than bright enough. And of course there are all those sharp pixels to put windows all over.
So far I've found very few things to not work. The three main ones are two screensavers (oh Red Pill, I hope you get an upgrade soon ...) and the Flip4Mac package to play WMV files in Quicktime. Also my PowerMate was unhappy, first because I only had an old driver installed and then because I didn't uninstall the old drivers before installing the new. I'd call this minimal problems altogether.
There is, as they say, one more thing. Having USB devices connected causes very noticeable noise on the audio out. That is, if I wear headphones and use the Mighty mouse I will hear varying amounts of static as I move the mouse around. More annoying the more you think about it, especially on a shiny new computer from Apple. There are discussions going on about this in Apple's discussion forums, but I wouldn't be all that surprised if Apple decided to do nothing about it. And in any case, I'm not sure I'm bothered enough to have my iMac sent away for days to get it fixed ... We'll see after some more time has passed I guess.
July 11th, 2006
Today I bought a cheap USB audio device said to support only Windows, complete with drivers and user manual on a mini-CD that my slot-in-Macs can't read even if they'd like to, plugged it in and was rid of the noise! Bliss! The lowest possible volume is quite a bit higher than straight from the iMac's audio out, but maybe something can be done about that, somehow. Apple still should have fixed this issue before it even appeared, but for now I'm happy having found a cheap and non-invasive workaround. And it's never wrong to have an extra sound device around. Aura isn't exactly the only computer in the world with noisy audio output ...