To Each His Own

It only took me four hours of using my wife’s old iMac and switching back to my Mac Pro with its 23 inch ACD to decide that I was going back to how I’ve been operating, i.e., with my quad-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro and its 23 inch Apple Cinema Display as my main machine. Even with the iMac’s screen turned up to full brightness, my eyes were feeling tired after working on it for several hours and refreshed when back on the Mac Pro. That plus the Mac Pro’s speed and smoothness won me back over, and I also really don’t like managing multiple data sets anymore. That’s too bad for me, because I really do love iMacs.

Much to my surprise, my stepson (from my first marriage) did not want to swap one of his current systems for the iMac. So, I’m going to put the iMac up for sale using an online swap sheet at work. If I can sell it for $500 (and I believe I can move it for that price), I can offset just about all my costs of the upgrade, except for the money I had already saved up and don’t mind sacrificing. I would have the new iMac completely paid for within a month.

I’ve been playing with my wife’s new iMac, and, despite all the rhetoric on the web about that model’s screen quality (mainly about its uneven lighting and color which one can easily see), it’s screen does appear brighter than the old iMac’s. If I had the money, I could easily be talked into buying a 24 inch iMac (with its even better screen), but I don’t. Besides, even if I don’t want to admit it to myself, an iMac really doesn’t match my mission anymore. In addition to something I can use for desktop publishing, graphics work, video editing, writing, and a flight simulator platform, I need something that can act as a media server for the Apple TV in our living room. An iMac can do all that; but, at some point, its lack of storage expandability does it in. A Mac Pro really does do me better, even if it is not as elegant as an iMac.

I’ve also been playing on the other side of the Mac performance scale as I helped a friend join the Mac community by setting up an old 457 MHz G4 Digital Audio Power Mac running Panther. Most of her set-up problems were due to miscommunication between her and her daughter (who set up their internet account on Yahoo! AT&T) and not understanding for a while that mail server settings for att.net and yahoo.att.net are different. We got it all sorted out and up and running. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the machine ran Panther, its web applications (Safari, Firefox) and Office 2004. It had 1GB of RAM, a 128 GB hard drive, and a Rage Pro video card hooked to a 17 inch Dell VGA monitor. (I really think this is a 466 MHz G4 and that its clock speed is being mis-reported by the operating system.) I swapped out her CD-RW with a Pioneer DVR-105 I had sitting around and gave her a copy of Toast 7 to use with it. It works for her, and that’s all that matters.