Product Reviews

Patronising Mac nerds have long enjoyed sneering at owners of 'Wintel' computers - Windows PCs with Intel processors. We hope their hats taste nice - the latest Apple iMac uses an Intel processor and may soon be able to run Windows.

A power PC

This iMac runs on one of Intel's new Core Duo processors. The Core Duo is a dual-core processor - basically two chips in one package. Our normal benchmarks are designed for Windows and won't run under the Mac operating system, so to get an idea of performance, we compared this new iMac to one of its predecessors - the G5. We encoded a 23-minute video on both computers; the Core Duo system powered through the job in just 30 minutes, while the G5 took two hours. Whatever software you want to run, the new iMac is more than up to the job.

But there's a catch

Just looking at the new iMac, you'd be forgiven for thinking that very little had changed. It looks just like a Mac and when you boot it up, the operating system is the same on other Macs too. But don't be fooled. The Mac operating system had to be completely rewritten to run on an Intel processor. As a result, only programs specifically written for this computer will run on it in native mode.

Older programs will work on the new iMac, but you have to run them in an emulation program called Rosetta, which mimics the old Mac operating system. As you'd expect, this slows the iMac down a little.

The good news

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is that you may be able to run Windows on the iMac at some point in the future, but it won't run Windows XP. Apple decided not to use a BIOS to control the iMac's hardware and instead used something called the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), with which Windows XP is not compatible. Windows Vista, however, will be compatible with the EFI - so in future you may be able to configure your iMac as a dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows Vista PC.

All in one

As with all iMacs, the whole PC is built into a single package - here it's the same housing as the screen (so it doesn't look like an overgrown table lamp).

The 20in display supports a resolution of 1680 x 1050 with a widescreen aspect ratio. It's an exceptionally good monitor - bright, clean and capable of displaying even fast-action DVDs. And a good thing too, as there's no way to replace it.

There's an ample 250GB hard drive to store all your images, music and documents. The iMac is supplied with 512MB of RAM as standard, which is enough to run most software smoothly, though we'd recommend upgrading this to 1GB at the time of purchase. Graphics are handled by an ATI Radeon X1600 - a powerful graphics card that will do justice to even demanding 3D software.

As you'd expect, the peripherals are well made, though the white keyboard will discolour with time. The iMac comes with three USB2 ports, two FireWire connections and an Ethernet port for wired networking. There's also built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi for wireless networking. All the connection points are easy to find, though we feel Apple could have put a USB port on the front. Adding new components to the iMac is almost impossible - the only thing you can get to is the memory.

Finally, the iMac comes with an impressive software bundle which includes iMovie for editing home movies, GarageBand for composing music, iPhoto to organise and edit pictures, and iDVD to turn iMovie creations into professional-looking DVDs. The iMac also comes with Apple's Media Center-like application, Front Row.