Mhackintosh blog

I wrote that the new Core i5 27″ iMac offers same *GENERAL* level of performance than *STANDARD* Mac Pro configuration. It means that out-of-the-box, both will provide same average performance level on a bench suite, with an advantage for the iMac. And I disagree with Gizmo’s conclusions about Mac Pro.

The fact is your work with your Mac is *NOT* the average benchmark, and you may need faster graphics, faster CPU or bigger RAM to achieve your task. There you may go for the iMac for it’s quality or choose the MacPro that is more balanced and more expandable.

Where  the Mac Pro shines, even with same quad-core/8-thread processor as 27″ iMac, Core i7/Nehalem, is where you need as much memory as possible (big Photoshop work for printing, many Virtual Machines, Big Lightroom database, …) or where you need faster hard-drive or SSD, because in any of our actual Mac the hard-drives are just a bottleneck. Naturally you may want to use 3D software or OpenCL software and install 2 or 3 GPU/Graphic card.

Buying an entry-level Mac Pro, that is not faster than an iMac is not a bad choice, if you could afford it and plan to expand it to your needs.

For myself, I plan to buy one, entry-level system or even 4×2.93Ghz, with the idea to upgrade memory at 12GB for big development (iMac could cope!), multiple video card, Radeon 4870 (gaming and OpenCL) and GeForce GT120 and GT130 (CUDA and OpenCL), and from start installing 4×1TB hard-drive with software RAID-0 to be able to exploit the incredible level of performance of the CPU without being limited by hard-drive slowliness!

No iMac will enable me to develop on different graphic card at once, for CUDA and OpenCL, no iMac will enable me to have 400MB/s bandwidth from hard-drive (will be around 100MB/s instead), no iMac will enable me to have external hard-drive connected in eSATA or in USB3 in the future, so Mac Pro is the way to go for me!

It is more expensive. You have less features or equipment for the same price. You don’t have the choice between so many brands (with so many clones!). You don’t ever have many choices of antivirus or firewalls! lol!

I am an IT guy, and a mac “fan boy”, so my advices may be biased…

Instead of my advices, let’s start talking about my mother. She’s 70 now, and someone that aechived many things in her life. I love her as anyone should love it’s parent. But with time, she’s not the same person I knew when she was young. She’s still active, and need web access, email, Skype, printing service, and so on…

I ask her to buy a Mac, 4 years ago. A PowerBook 12″ that she might take on her travels (she’s traveling anywhere in the world, she’s a kinda globetrotter!), you know with this limited PowerPC 1.5Ghz chip, 2GB RAM, 60GB hard-drive… This kinda junk laptop by today.

Today, this laptop is connected wirelessly, print on a Epson printer/scanner/fax, traveling the world, having a great autonomy after 4 years of usage, and look mint with it’s aluminium design. Everything is great, she even use Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger instead 10.5 Leopard. She doesn’t worry about viruses or hacking. she’s just using it. This is a simple as that.

And if you think about a 4 years old PC, throwing it to a senior, and expecting it to work flawlessly for years, without any remote management (I do setup one naturally, but didn’t use it), and have the people happy about it, even when it’s an old computer, it’s unusual.

It’s just value. This is where Mac are obvious choices. When you expect the work to be done, the computer to stay fresh after years of travelling and usage, and the user to be focus on their work, instead of worrying about viruses, updates, firewalls, …

As I expected, even with Core i5, the new 27″ iMac is faster than quad-core Mac Pro, and even 8-core Mac Pro, as benched by MacWorld. Moreover, the Core i7 version adds a mere 8% to the overall performance!

If you don’t need fast hard-drive in RAID, ability to put more than 16GB RAM (that is plenty of RAM even by today’s standards) or ability to have fastest graphic card (OpenCL oriented, like GeForce 8800, GT120 or GT130), the new 27″ iMac Core i5 is a fantastic performer with the right price tag!

I knew for sure the iMac Core i5 will beat the quad-core Mac Pro, and I am not deceived this time

There’s a patch to install 10.6.2 on Atom processors here.

Most users report that they are successful with it on their netbooks

I just upgraded my MacBook Pro 17″ to 10.6.2 and I would like to check if all the annoying interface bugs are finally fixed, or if I will have to wait for 10.6.3 or whatever…

Finally Preview seems to work correctly when you select multiples files to open, this is something so obvious I didn’t understand it was buggy on 10.6 and 10.6.1 !

Software quality is actually low on Apple side, and even if overall stability is still there, OS or software are launched to respect date instead being finished, feature-full and debugged correctly!