I think, therefore iMac
For the past few years I’ve been commuting to university from my Parent’s home two hours away. Officially this is because overall it’s cheaper to do so than to stay in halls or rent a room. Unofficially this is because I am succeptible to emotional blackmail. One of the numerous downsides is that I’m stuck in a box room that is inadequate for my needs and has been since we first moved here when I was thirteen.
In addition to the lack of space, the house has a damp problem that gets worse in the winter. In summer because of the room’s size, and the large south-facing window which takes up one wall, it often becomes unbearably hot. This is exacerbated by my large, hot and noisy PC. For these reasons I decided to replace the desk and PC in my room to try to fix the heat and space issues.
Although I get more use out of my laptop than my desktop I’ve decided to buy a new desktop. I rarely use my laptop on the move as a laptop, and more often I use it while I’m sat at home. In addition I’m hoping to do a PhD later this year, and so I wanted a desktop that I could more easily move to a room in halls.
On Monday Apple updated their iMac computers. The update wasn’t groundbreaking, more of a speed bump, however the top-end iMac gained a half decent GPU - a Geforce 8800 GS 512mb. Although there are better cards available, the upgrade was sufficient for me to consider the iMac sufficient for my needs for the next few years. I’d been been considering the systems for a while now. The thought of having an integrated system with a large high quality screen, only one wire (for power), and a pretty spiffy looking case appealed to me. With the upgrades the system should be powerful enough for my computational needs and allow me to play some games at a decent speed.
So on Monday I ordered the top-end iMac, a 3.06GHz C2D 2GB machine with 8800GS 512MB graphics. This will be my first Mac. My days of OS Zealotry are over, I once used only Linux, but now I tend to go with whatever allows me to get the most work done. I can achieve what I want to on most OSes, but I have a slight preference for Windows. I even like Vista.
I’m interested in seeing what level of productivity I achieve with a Mac. My last real experience with a Mac was on a G5 iMac (running Tiger?) in labs at university late 2006. I got on ok with it, though as I only had a regular user account on the system I didn’t feel I could give it a proper review. On the other hand, I had spent most of the day in and out of pubs, and still managed to find my way around OS X.
I will post about my experiences when my iMac arrives. Here I’ve encountered my first problem with the Apple experience. I ordered my system on Monday from the Apple online store, for £toomuchmoney. Initially I was given a shipping estimate of 1st May and a delivery estimate of 9-12 May. The 1st came, and the order moved to “Prepared for shipment”. However, it took until the 3rd for the order to actually be shipped. The delivery estimate then changed from 14th of May to the 15th.
Although I got free delivery, given the amount I paid for the system, over two weeks for delivery is simply unacceptable. A long wait for shipping I can understand, especially as the system had just been released, but a long wait for delivery? How are they sending this thing? For the best part of one-and-a-half grand, I expect the thing to be flown over sat next to Steve Jobs on his private jet.
Pffft.