Trip to the Apple Store

Friday night, my wife and I traveled across town to the Galleria and the Apple Store. She wanted to look for cases for her iPod Nano, and I wanted to see if they had any 17 inch model 2.0 GHz iMacs. The greeting on the Apple Store’s voicemail said that the new video iPod and the new iMacs would not be in until October 25th, but we found they had already arrived.

The new video-capable iPod is much thinner than the photo-capable iPod that preceded it. I watched some video on the video iPod’s wider 2.5 inch screen, and it had very good but not exceptional quality. I’m not seeing much discussion about the other benefit of the bigger screen, i.e., a better photo presentation. Indeed, for me that is as big a reason to upgrade as any other. The Apple Store had plenty of the new iPods available for sale. (I didn’t pick one up because I still wanted to upgrade my main desktop machine to a 2.0 GHz iMac and really need minimize my cash outlay. My wife’s making noises that she might get me a video iPod for Christmas.)

The new iSight-equipped iMacs were also in attendance as well. The iSight camera’s familiar round lens does not poke out of the top bezel. Instead, there is a small greenish black square in the middle that is the lens opening that has a tiny, round light on either side of it. When the iSight is working, the light on the right is on.

At the unveiling of these units, Steve Jobs said that the new iSight camera had better resolution than its previous incarnation. That may be; but I could not see any noticeable difference. Picture quality looked the same. I also had thought that the camera’s new mounting position would yield a more natural view of each person, but that didn’t appear to be the case, either. Using preview mode to judge what I would look like to another video conference attendee, I still appeared to be looking slightly down instead of directly at the camera. The difference in view was negligible.

Likewise, I had seen a review stating the new iMacs had brighter screens. I could see no difference in display screen quality between the new units and those of the previous generation.

Photo Booth was kind of fun. Apple developer documents are hinting at the possibility that Apple might release this application later as a standalone item, and I hope it does.

I came away from these experiences convinced that, if one owns an iSight, the previous generation of iMacs is a better value than the new one is. Performance will be almost identical, with the new ones having a slight edge due to the 0.1 GHz faster CPU speeds. Even though the newer versions also sport PCI-E, a little research will show you that the Radeon 9600 AGP and PCI-E versions yield almost identical performance. Likewise, the newer DDR500 memory in the new iSight iMac will probably yield little or no real performance gain due to the relatively slow bus speed the iMac uses. Feature-wise, once you get past the iSight and PCI-E, the two generations are similarly equipped.
The new iMac represents a step backwards in terms of user-replaceable parts. While you could replace the hard drive, the optical drive, the midplane assembly, and even the display screen of the previous generation iMacs, you can only replace memory in the new iMacs without blowing the warranty.

In the end, we didn’t buy anything from the store. I felt the new iMacs were not as good a buy as the previous generation, especially consider their lower prices. Because I want to move to one of those iMacs, I put off buying a video iPod. And my wife discovered that there are no cases available for the iPod Nano; the market is still playing catch-up there.