My New iMac: The Five Year Plan

After a lot of deliberation and research, I purchased a new Apple iMac for my home computer. The deliberation was because of the cost - I needed to rationalize the expense and suitability against the need.

I have been using an iBook G4 since late 2005 as my home machine, and now, a little more than 4 years later, the poor little laptop does not cut it. For comparison purposes, my old machine was a 1.33GHz PPC, with 512MB of RAM, a 12" screen, and a 40GB HDD. According to the iBook Wikipedia entry, it was the last PPC model iBook. It didn't even have the capability to write DVDs, and at the time I purchased it, I was downgrading from a beast of a desktop PC to the convenience and elegance of an Apple laptop.

It was time for an upgrade, and so I bought a top-of-the-line Apple all-in-one desktop machine: the 27" iMac. I purcahsed it pre-upgraded with a 2.8Ghz quad-core Intel Core i7 and an extra 4GB RAM, totalling 8GB. I chose the 64-bit Intel Core i7 based on the comparative performance to the Core i5 and Core 2 Duo in the benchmarks (1, 2, 3), primarily because of the so-called Turbo Boost dynamic performance that pushes the cores up to 3.46GHz and Hyper-Threading which results in up to eight virtual cores. Other specifications include the bluetooth keyboard and magic mouse, 1TB HDD, a DVDR/CDR, ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a gorgeous LED-backlit 27-inch TFT active-matrix liquid crystal display with IPS technology.

The machine looks beautiful and is a computational beast. Needless to say, I'm happy with the purchase. I've been working on it a lot over the last week, re-building my development environments and testing compilation and execution times, and have been very pleased. I've had none of the alleged problems that have been reported about this model iMac.

I'm in it for the long haul. I've purchased Apples extended warranty (Apple Care) to cover me for three years and expect it to be useful until 2014 or 2015, perhaps with a supplementary laptop purchase between now and then.