For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in a very different world with the new 24″ iMac. I just don’t want to tear myself away from it. The experience is just that good.
For my purposes, I can’t imagine ever needing a Mac Pro, either. The 3.06 GHz iMac with the standard Nvidia GT 130 graphics processor and 4 GB of memory is plenty capable of graphics work and the low-rent video & audio editing I throw at it. I’ve always described Dreamweaver as running like it’s been dipped in tar, but on this thing, it gets up and scoots! So does Photoshop. In fact, some operations are completed so quickly in comparison to the same task on my MacBook, I’m sometimes fooled into thinking that nothing happened. (Very few spinning beachball sightings on the Silver Bullet.) I know the trend is for miniaturization and laptops, but working with photos on a 24″ screen is heavenly compared to the same thing on the MacBook.
I’ve also discovered that the iMac is useful for overcoming a television deficit. We don’t have a TV or DVD player in the household, but I’ve been able to find a large number of movies and TV shows online that look more than decent viewed at full-screen on the computer. I also have a pair of M-Audio AV-40 powered desktop speakers hooked up to this thing, and I no longer miss my old stereo. Yup: about four years without a stereo now… the old one died, and I never got around to buying a new one after I discovered I could run computer audio into my Fender Twin Reverb guitar amplifier — mono, sure, but what a mighty roar, has to be heard to be believed. The AV-40s are almost as loud and deliver stereo sound, so that’s what I use now. The irony of all this is that by doing without for a number of years and then getting the iMac, I’ve vaulted into the “digital lifestyle” realm I used to sneer at. Interesting times…
The new iMac is such a step up for me, the magnitude of the change is hard to describe. Basically, I just sit here and grin like an idiot. (You could do worse!) In the near future, I hope to have saner comments to share. For now, though, I’ll leave you other 24″ iMac owners with a great tip: the best desktop pictures in the universe are available from this NASA images site, featuring unbelievable images from the Hubbel space telescope.
Download a few of those babies and stand back: on the glossy 24″ screen, it’s simply not to be believed how good they look!
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