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iMac 27" Core i5 first impressions

A

alywa

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 6, 2004
350
7
I know this has been discussed to death, but I wanted to add my first impressions of this great machine.

Picked up the iMac at the Birmingham, AL Apple store on Friday. Due to previous engagements and family duties, I wasn't able to set it up until Saturday afternoon.

Packaging... perfect and simple as always. One cord for power plugged in, and we were ready to go. Having the mouse and keyboard pre-synced is a nice touch.

Backed up from my old G5 iMac Time Machine. 180 GB of info. USB 2. This took around 2 hours. Wish I had a FW 800 drive, but oh well... no big deal.

Time Machine backup was seamless. It was just like my old machine, only much, much bigger, brighter, and faster.

iPhoto imported and organized my pictures perfectly. Such a huge improvement from my old iPhoto (2006). Scrolling, cropping, saving... all lightning fast now.

iTunes had a hiccup... needed to download and reinstall it from apple.com. (It said it was corrupt)... once I activated the account, it was perfect. Again, such a huge speed increase from the old G5. iPhone sync was perfect (again, after activation).

I currently have Office, iWork, and PS Elements 8 on order (upgrading to take advantage of the intel chips... old versions that I had depend on Rosetta)... will post more impressions as I get them installed over the next week.

From a hardware side, this machine is very impressive. Heavy, but not overly so (doesn't feel that much heavier than my old 20" G5). New magic mouse is wonderful, as is the keyboard (though I'd love a wireless KB with numerical pad option). The screen is incredible... so much more detail available from DSLR photos. Oh, and the computer is basically silent. Much quieter than my G5.

This is a great piece of hardware... I feel it is worth every penny. I debated an i7, but I just don't do anything that would appreciate the performance gain. I'll spend the extra $ on RAM and software.
 
Aloha alywa,

I also picked up my new 27" iMac i5 last night - man, is it a difference over my 3-year old (white) 2.0GB Core Duo iMac!!! The only snag I experienced is that, while my iTunes library is on an external drive and I've not had issues before, when I plugged in my iPhone I was unable to sync it with iTunes. When I checked iTunes preferences, I saw no iPhone backups. I guess I'll have to "nuke and burn" tonight, something I wanted to avoid, but not a life-ending event hehehe :D

I really enjoy the extra screen space and the Magic Mouse rocks !!! Now it will be REALLY hard to go from my new iMac to my MacBook Pro :D

HawaiiMacAddict
 
HawaiiMacAddict said:
Aloha alywa,

I also picked up my new 27" iMac i5 last night - man, is it a difference over my 3-year old (white) 2.0GB Core Duo iMac!!!
Click to expand...

I hear ya... Imagine the difference from my nearly 5 year old G5 2.0! Are you going to upgrade your RAM? I"m looking at getting 4GB more from crucial... not that I likely really need it, but I'd rather get it and be good to go for the next 4-5 years again.

(In fairness, my G5 was a great machine... actually still is as it will become my office computer (word processing, web surfing, very light photo work). That's the thing about macs, they last so long.

Enjoy your new rig!
 
I too did similar upgrade from my old white iMac to a core i7 model this weekend. Also had the corrupt Itunes error which I fixed as you did. I did a restore of files from Time Machine and here I ran into an unexpected problem.

Although the Time Machine back up was up to date from the white iMac, it failed to back up some of my iPhotos. So when I opened iPhotos on my new mac, it had the thumbnails, but gave me a big ? mark when I tried to blow it up... Some (may be few hundred out of 15K plus pictures) original file was gone when I looked through the photos folder..

So I had to go back to my white iMac to manually copy these files. I am now wondering what else it failed to copy? I think next time, I may want to restore directly from my white iMac on target mode. I don't think Time Machine reliably backs up ALL files....

So the moral of the story I think is don't think that your Time Machine back ups are fool proof back up of all your files on your old computer....
 
chp5592 said:
So the moral of the story I think is don't think that your Time Machine back ups are fool proof back up of all your files on your old computer....
Click to expand...

Interesting... I guess I won't really know until I run across something that isn't right. Did manually bring over the photos fix the problem? Were they corrupted? (I've had some photos get corrupted from editing in an external editor with iPhoto in the past)
 
alywa said:
Interesting... I guess I won't really know until I run across something that isn't right. Did manually bring over the photos fix the problem? Were they corrupted? (I've had some photos get corrupted from editing in an external editor with iPhoto in the past)
Click to expand...

Yes, manual copy and re-import fixed the problem. I did delete the old thumbnails. Also rebuilt the library/permissions on iPhoto just in case. Just also noticed that some of my movies (dvd's ripped to mp4) did not transfer also.. Curious. Looking at the last TM backup of my old Mac, it is truly missing these files.
 
chp5592 said:
I too did similar upgrade from my old white iMac to a core i7 model this weekend. Also had the corrupt Itunes error which I fixed as you did. I did a restore of files from Time Machine and here I ran into an unexpected problem.

Although the Time Machine back up was up to date from the white iMac, it failed to back up some of my iPhotos. So when I opened iPhotos on my new mac, it had the thumbnails, but gave me a big ? mark when I tried to blow it up... Some (may be few hundred out of 15K plus pictures) original file was gone when I looked through the photos folder..

So I had to go back to my white iMac to manually copy these files. I am now wondering what else it failed to copy? I think next time, I may want to restore directly from my white iMac on target mode. I don't think Time Machine reliably backs up ALL files....

So the moral of the story I think is don't think that your Time Machine back ups are fool proof back up of all your files on your old computer....
Click to expand...


I ran into this problem as well with just one photo. I didn't even bother manually correcting the issue since I don't know how many original photos have this problem. Now I've sold my old MBP with the originals on it (wiped clean, of course). I really hope it was just the one photo! :(:mad::(
 
sfmountainbiker said:
I ran into this problem as well with just one photo. I didn't even bother manually correcting the issue since I don't know how many original photos have this problem. Now I've sold my old MBP with the originals on it (wiped clean, of course). I really hope it was just the one photo! :(:mad::(
Click to expand...

Ive had this problem too and a few others on here have as well. What i have done now is put a separate partition on my external hard drive and i manually copy the iPhoto library over to it. So i have the time machine backup on one partition and the other my manual backup. It only seemed to happen with photos i imported after upgrading to Snow Leopard
 
what a waste though, a fantastic feature, to enable other system to use it awesome 2560x1400 screen, and now plug into a ****** LCD and wasted that incredible ingenious god like feature by apple engineer.

to plug a **** next to near perfection.
 
AAPLaday said:
Ive had this problem too and a few others on here have as well. What i have done now is put a separate partition on my external hard drive and i manually copy the iPhoto library over to it. So i have the time machine backup on one partition and the other my manual backup. It only seemed to happen with photos i imported after upgrading to Snow Leopard
Click to expand...

How often to you manually backup your iPhoto library now? This is exactly what I was trying to avoid by using Time Machine in the first place!
 
sfmountainbiker said:
How often to you manually backup your iPhoto library now? This is exactly what I was trying to avoid by using Time Machine in the first place!
Click to expand...

At the moment im not doing much photo editing as i dont trust time machine backups so im only manually backing up when i add new photos. But i dont know if its iPhoto 09 or Snow Leopard which is at fault as i updated to both at same time.
 
AAPLaday said:
At the moment im not doing much photo editing as i dont trust time machine backups so im only manually backing up when i add new photos. But i dont know if its iPhoto 09 or Snow Leopard which is at fault as i updated to both at same time.
Click to expand...

I updated to Snow Leopard first and did not notice the problem. I noticed the problem when I updated to iLife '09 and started going through my photos to organize them by events. In any case, I can't be sure if it was Snow Leopard or iLife '09 that caused the problem since I didn't really go through my photos until the iLife update.

The photo that I experienced the "?" on was actually an older photo...not one uploaded since upgrading. So you may not be correct about it only affecting newer pics.
 
sfmountainbiker said:
I updated to Snow Leopard first and did not notice the problem. I noticed the problem when I updated to iLife '09 and started going through my photos to organize them by events. In any case, I can't be sure if it was Snow Leopard or iLife '09 that caused the problem since I didn't really go through my photos until the iLife update.

The photo that I experienced the "?" on was actually an older photo...not one uploaded since upgrading. So you may not be correct about it only affecting newer pics.
Click to expand...

I guess i have been lucky then as i have checked all mine and for me it was only happening on the new ones. I had only imported a few since the upgrade and i still had them on my camera memory card so i was ok. Still this needs resolving by Apple as iPhoto is one of the few iLife apps i find really useful
 
alywa said:
I hear ya... Imagine the difference from my nearly 5 year old G5 2.0! Are you going to upgrade your RAM? I"m looking at getting 4GB more from crucial... not that I likely really need it, but I'd rather get it and be good to go for the next 4-5 years again.

(In fairness, my G5 was a great machine... actually still is as it will become my office computer (word processing, web surfing, very light photo work). That's the thing about macs, they last so long.

Enjoy your new rig!
Click to expand...

Aloha alywa,

I plan on upgrading the RAM, although I don't know just when I'll get around to it. As it is, this is twice the RAM in either my old iMac or my MacBook Pro, so it seems pretty snappy to me now.

As for my iTunes issue, I need a bit of help understanding what's going on. I was able to use an external drive to host both my iTunes library and my iPhoto library with both Macs. With my new iMac, however, even after downloading and installing the latest version of iTunes (over the already latest version of iTunes that came pre-installed), it still says that my iPhone can not by synced. I then ejected the external from my new iMac and mounted it on my MacBook Pro, fired up iTunes, connected my iPhone and voila! My iPhone was recognized and was able to be synced.

I am at a loss to explain this, as both Macs point to the same iTunes library for syncing. Can you shed any light on a possible solution?

HawaiiMacAddict
 
A naive question ... but... 32/64 bit?

Hi, I'm thinking of an i5 or i7 by the end of the week to replace my G5 imac. I too use TimeMachine and was interested in your comments re its ease but the loss of iphoto and itunes files.
I don't know my stuff here, but is SL already configured in 64 bit mode and, if so, does the import of all my old files - made under 32 bit mode- present any problems?

Does the new iMac come with SL as a new DVD or is it a 'restore' disc?

Thanks

BW

Rich
 
rtjstevens said:
I don't know my stuff here, but is SL already configured in 64 bit mode and, if so, does the import of all my old files - made under 32 bit mode- present any problems?
Click to expand...

There isn't really a "64 bit mode". There's running various parts of the system as 64 bit processes. You're probably thinking of K64, running the kernel 64 bit; it's turned off by default, and not really relevant for most people. Even when it is on by default, it won't impact file or app compatibility*.


*with the exception of the few apps that use kernel extensions, such as parallels and vmware.
 
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