Apple iMac 27in review

Rating Mismatch

Why does the Apple 27" iMac only score 4 stars for performance when it scores higher than the Sony VAIO VPC-L11S1E in 6 out of 7 of the performance tests but the Sony gets 5 stars for performance?

By Animal on 27 Oct 2009

I really wished they had released a wireless keyboard with a multi touch trackpad.

Would have certainly beat the more limited Magic Mouse.

By CSprout on 28 Oct 2009

Animal

Maybe PC Pro hates Apple? Or maybe the Sony has a multitouch screen and received an extra star for its stellar performance of the way the user can interact with the machine, as opposed to Apple's god-awful wireless keyboard and ropey Magic Mouse?

Performance can be graded on more than just benchmarks, you know...

By bioreit on 28 Oct 2009

Performance

Bioreit is right - on tests alone they probably would both have scored 4 for performance, particularly as neither has any major gaming ability. But that touchscreen boosted the Sony's score slightly as we felt it really does alter the performance you get out of the device on a daily basis.

By DavidBayon on 28 Oct 2009

Usability = Performance? I thought Performance = Speed. I'll have to take these star ratings less seriously in future, as they seem to mean what you think they mean, rather than what I think they mean. Alice would be proud.

By c6ten on 28 Oct 2009

Star ratings

Ok, for performance you're combining a wide array of 2D and 3D benchmarks, sometimes battery life, sometimes specific tasks such as decoding video or transferring files. Putting all that into a single score out of 6 gives a guide, dependant also on the type of product it is and the performance we'd expect - it should always be taken in conjunction with the review text.

Same goes for Features & Design - with the huge array of components in every PC, plus the pros and cons of the chassis, screen, build quality etc, the single star rating needs to rely heavily on the context given by the review.

In this case I think you make valid points, the iMac could easily have been given a 5 to match the Sony, but we just didn't feel it deserved it. If anything perhaps we were too generous to the Sony in regards to its Performance rating, and that could have been 4 - but the increased productivity afforded by the touch interface does make a huge difference.

The iMac could also have scored 4 for features given its impracticality in daily use, but weighing that against the brilliant styling and that 27in screen led to a consensus of 5.

With so many products being tested and only three separate ratings to give, discrepancies inevitably sometimes crop up, but there's always been a thorough discussion here behind it which we try to convey in the text. We're only human!

By DavidBayon on 28 Oct 2009

"a more consumer-friendly 16:9 aspect ratio" - please qualify this statement - how is that more consumer friendly? I know that in this I am a luddite - I was quite happy with 4:3, but I still feel that for working purposes a squarer aspect ratio is more useful.

By Penguat on 29 Oct 2009

Fundraised

I know this is a PC magazine, but please remember PC stands for Personal Computer NOT WINDOWS COMPUTER.

So why on earth cant you review this PC as its manufacturer intended it to be used as a machine running Mac OS x (10.61 I believe). The ability to boot into an alternative operating system is very much a secondary function and is only there as a convenience for people who can't find a Mac version of software that is essential to them & must therefore have access to a Windows capable computer.

To view PC as you do through very tunnelled vision, you could so easily dismiss every Windows PC you have ever review as absolute rubish because it can not run the Mac operating system.

Now that would be a very stupid attitude, but it seems to be one you are happy to take when the boot is on the other foot.

Broaden your horizons guys or change the name of the magazine to Windows Pro!

By fundraised on 29 Oct 2009

I fully agree with Fundraised, if you intend to be a PC ( encompassing all forms of PC ) magazine then test/reviews should reflect how the machine performs using its designed OS.
This magazine originally had ' Windows ' in its title but changed to PC to appeal to a wider audience, at least that is what I thought the idea was !

By Ajacks1 on 29 Oct 2009

Bluray? Hello?

With a screen of that quality, would it have killed them to put a bluray drive in there? Dropped ball!

By mario_miniaci on 29 Oct 2009

Almost

Im on the verge of buying my 1st Mac. When I saw the specs and screen for this I was almost sold. Almost. The lack of Blu-Ray to partner that magnificent screen doesnt make any sense to me. Add that to the no so accessible USB ports and the terrible keyboard and the £1300 looks better in my pocket. Maybe next time Apple.

By pveater on 29 Oct 2009

Re:Almost

I have just "jumped ship" to a Macbook which is the lowest spec machine and just been superseded.If you are quick you can still get one with Firewire, 2 USB (which is restrictive), and easily replaceable HDD and Battery, unlike other models of laptop. People I have spoken to about the iMac have raved about it. Why did I jump ship? Took forever to start up my Windows laptop and shut down, this Macbook took 40 secs to start up and 15 to shut down, no garish stickers all over the place telling me it has Intel inside, etc, etc. XP is good but far too many crashes and annoying times it would decide to do an update preventing my use of it. DVD is slot loader so no precarious bits of plastic protruding during loading/unloading. This machine is limited on memory and the HDD as bought was immediately upgraded but not at Apple prices. I can also run XP, legally, whenever I want to with a partition where the software I am familiar with can do the job quickly without having to learn new stuff (lazy!).

By icbosman on 29 Oct 2009

Re: Fundraised

I was brought up in the days when PC meant Personal Computer. Microsoft in their advertising seems to have hijacked the term to mean Windows. Well, I have used Acorn RISC, Windows and Apple OSX and if asked to rank them in friendliness terms I would place Apple first, followed by RISC and Windows very much last. All have their shortcomings but I have been impressed with the way the latest version of OSX fired up from new with no need to install printer drivers as they are built in for most printers around, internet was an absolute doddle and the thing came without loads of stickers which I would have peeled off anyway telling me about which OS it was built for. Do I need to be told that? I can always find out if I really need to know!

By icbosman on 29 Oct 2009

FAO pveater

Can't do anything about the lack of Blu-Ray but if you order the wired keyboard instead of the wireless you get two usb ports on either side of it.

By CSprout on 29 Oct 2009

Looking for Things to Carp At

Rather than adopt the same old PCPro mindset that rears it's head in this review, how about rather than having one of your crew trying a Windows PC for a month do a proper test and have three or four of your staff use Macs full time for 6 months. OK run Windows in virtualisation but only when you really have to. I bet you would change your tune then.

Typed on 20 inch iMac.

By kaneclem on 29 Oct 2009

Im a Mac and a PC too

I have always used Pcs and fought many battles with Apples fanboys but recently i jumped ship and bought an imac.
The Imac is far better to use in my opinion and Windows 7 is great the best thing to happen to pcs. What bugs me the most is that magazines seem biased and dont give accurate reviews. The statement about the usb ports placed on the rear is laughable as two ports are on the keyboard at the ends. The magic mouse can be used to scroll and also for browsing back to previous websites.

Please try using the products before writing a review.

By petergadget on 29 Oct 2009

David Bayon vs Sasha Muller

I've noticed that each reviewer seems to have a different bias. I was quite surprised by the positive review of the Macbook Pro 13" by Sasha http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/259498/appl
e-macbook-pro-13/2
after the negative one of the Alu-Macbook by David http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/232860/appl
e-macbook when the Pro was just a minor update of the macbook (at exactly the same price point).

Maybe it would be good to have Sasha review the 21 inch Imac or the i5/i7 27 inch Imac when that is out?

-CS

PS Also surprised that the review didn't mention that you can upgrade the RAM in this machine to 16GB, which should provide some future proofing

By CSprout on 29 Oct 2009

Fed up of anti mac

I'm so fed up with the anti mac bias I'm on the verge of not even looking at their web pages. I've given up listening to the podcasts. Face it, there is more than just windows out there, thank goodness, please review macs with mac OS.

By Mayburys on 29 Oct 2009

call that a review?

Seriously guys, your first instinct was to load Windows and try Crysis?

By daquinn1 on 30 Oct 2009

Reviews process

Thanks for all the comments, let me clarify a few things.

Our first instinct was certainly not to load Windows 7 and run Crysis. The paragraph about benchmarks is just that - our standard benchmarking procedure which we run on every PC. It requires Windows. There's little mention of Windows 7 in the rest of the review; in fact the review clearly mentions extensive testing in OS X.

The point that needs to be made is that we're not reviewing OS X. We're reviewing the hardware. Testing that hardware involved using both the installed OS and one we opted to install ourselves. Anything that needed OS X to work properly - like the disappointing Magic Mouse - was used for long periods in that environment.

@CSprout, that's a fair point, I should have mentioned the upgradeable RAM, which was a nice touch. And the way it's done - a little hatch on the underside - cleverly stops you getting anywhere near any of the other components ;-)

@petergadget, there are no USB ports on the wireless keyboard - yes, I know you can order the wired version for that. The Magic Mouse simply doesn't do much that any other mouse hasn't done for years - touching rather than scrolling a wheel might excite people but it makes no fundamental difference to the way you use the thing. And it's just not a comfortable mouse to hold.

Guys, I really do like this iMac. It's a beautiful piece of kit. But criticisms I've made of it have nothing to do with the operating system being used. We're a PC magazine, so we quite rightly test both OS X and Windows on Apple hardware. That doesn't make the review biased against Apple.

By DavidBayon on 30 Oct 2009

Anti-Mac bias?

The reviewer gave this 4 out of 6 stars and the Mac users complain about bias. Clearly anything less than 5 stars is not good enough for their beloved kitchen appliances.

Not everybody worships at the cult of Jobs and we don't all think OSX is some sort of holy operating system come to save the computing world.

I have 2 Macs, and between them they have given me more headaches than any of the PCs I have ever repaired. Both have failing logic boards, and to replace the logic boards would cost almost as much as I paid for the Macs themselves initially.

The reviewer stated his opinion, and he is entitled to it. His review was a great deal fairer than most of the opinions I see from Mac users towards Windows or PCs.

By windywoo on 2 Nov 2009

Feeling guilty, but...

David, thank you for taking the time to reply. It makes me feel a little guilty for my somewhat snippy comment.

However, I still have to say that the original review is very disappointing. And before I explain why, I should say that I am not mac nut; I bought a Powerbook for my wife a few years ago to save myself some Windows support!

And then I had to buy another Mac for me because I liked hers and she wouldn't let me use it.

I should also put my cards on the table and say that as a photographer/web designer, my Macbook Pro has been great, but I'm constrained by the screen size, and I cannot get the Samsung monitor I bought to go with it to calibrate accurately, which means it is useless for photo editing. Also with 2Gb of RAM my machine's performance starts to suffer if I run Photoshop, Lightroom, Firefox and Dreamweaver at the same time, so I am in the market for an upgrade of some sort. Which is probably why my eyes lit up when I first saw the new iMacs - massive screen and 4Gb RAM as standard: all my prayers answered! But which one to choose...

Well that brought me to your 'hardware review' but it didn't really help very much did it?

You didn't mention the different hardware options available at all. No mention of the quad core options, or whether the i5 or i7 would be best for 2D/3D applications. No mention of whether the ATI Radeon 4850 HD would make my life easier than the 4670 in your review machine. Nothing was said about power consumption, fan noise or its basic green credentials either…

To be fair, you did devote two paragraphs to the keyboard and mouse, but in the scheme of things they are inconsequential. I had already spotted that they keyboard was wrist-breakingly tiny and that mouse may or may not be wonderful; if it isn't I have a draw full of usb replacements.

So no, I don't think you can really defend this as a hardware review either. It is just too tarnished by prejudice to be useful.

I wonder why I am letting this get to me, and I think it is because I genuinely like PCPro! I know you feel constrained by a lack of configurability you get in Windows, but the fact is that for many people the trade-off in greater reliability will easily be worth it, and you are doing these people an enormous disservice by letting your own views colour your reporting.

In the 4 or so years we have had them, neither of my Macs has gone wrong. I don't just mean that neither has had a virus or become riddled with malware - though they haven't, despite neither having any additional software protection installed - I mean that neither machine has had to have the operating system reinstalled, followed by all its applications and then all the user data recovered. I have had to do precisely that to my son's machines at least *three times* in the same period. Windows' wobbly platform of infinitely configurable hardware comes at a price, and I have to say that my life has become easier since I decided to stop paying it.

By daquinn1 on 3 Nov 2009

Feeling guilty, but...

David, thank you for taking the time to reply. It makes me feel a little guilty for my somewhat snippy comment.

However, I still have to say that the original review is very disappointing. And before I explain why, I should say that I am not mac nut; I bought a Powerbook for my wife a few years ago to save myself some Windows support!

And then I had to buy another Mac for me because I liked hers and she wouldn't let me use it.

I should also put my cards on the table and say that as a photographer/web designer, my Macbook Pro has been great, but I'm constrained by the screen size, and I cannot get the Samsung monitor I bought to go with it to calibrate accurately, which means it is useless for photo editing. Also with 2Gb of RAM my machine's performance starts to suffer if I run Photoshop, Lightroom, Firefox and Dreamweaver at the same time, so I am in the market for an upgrade of some sort. Which is probably why my eyes lit up when I first saw the new iMacs - massive screen and 4Gb RAM as standard: all my prayers answered! But which one to choose...

Well that brought me to your 'hardware review' but it didn't really help very much did it?

You didn't mention the different hardware options available at all. No mention of the quad core options, or whether the i5 or i7 would be best for 2D/3D applications. No mention of whether the ATI Radeon 4850 HD would make my life easier than the 4670 in your review machine. Nothing was said about power consumption, fan noise or its basic green credentials either…

To be fair, you did devote two paragraphs to the keyboard and mouse, but in the scheme of things they are inconsequential. I had already spotted that they keyboard was wrist-breakingly tiny and that mouse may or may not be wonderful; if it isn't I have a draw full of usb replacements.

So no, I don't think you can really defend this as a hardware review either. It is just too tarnished by prejudice to be useful.

I wonder why I am letting this get to me, and I think it is because I genuinely like PCPro! I know you feel constrained by a lack of configurability you get in Windows, but the fact is that for many people the trade-off in greater reliability will easily be worth it, and you are doing these people an enormous disservice by letting your own views colour your reporting.

In the 4 or so years we have had them, neither of my Macs has gone wrong. I don't just mean that neither has had a virus or become riddled with malware - though they haven't, despite neither having any additional software protection installed - I mean that neither machine has had to have the operating system reinstalled, followed by all its applications and then all the user data recovered. I have had to do precisely that to my son's machines at least *three times* in the same period. Windows' wobbly platform of infinitely configurable hardware comes at a price, and I have to say that my life has become easier since I decided to stop paying it.

By daquinn1 on 3 Nov 2009

What the Problem??!!

Really don't have a problem with this review. They driven home the merit & clearly indicated shortcomings .. sure there's a few. I'm a long time mac user & I love my mac's & this review highlighted a few legitimate issues. I love my imac, but I have to use a usb extension to plug in HD's, usb sticks,etc... and yeah I'm over it. Beautiful piece of mostly functional equip where in some ways aesthetics triumphed over function. (I still remember the circular putt mouse of the originals imacs..now that was a disaster). I sometimes time we're a little hyper sensitive to ANY criticism. All I read are reasonably balanced & fair opinion here. It certainly won't slow me form buying anotehr mac when I need to.

By simmpa on 5 Nov 2009