Niklas Saers' blog

Some of you might have thought that I’m perhaps a bit too happy about the iMac, and of course too cheap to get a Mac Pro. (Yes, I’m just as excited as anyone to see what the new Pro will be like now that Thunderbolt is a great bus-alternative, but that’s for another topic) Let me dedicate this post to the minus points for the iMac.

To be clear, my complaints are with the top-of-the-line 27″ i7 3.4 Ghz iMac with 16GB of RAM and SSD disk. Yes, my delivery agent messed up and it’s “only” 1GB of VRAM instead of two, but if you wanted to know what’s the trouble with the top-of-the-line iMac, this is it:

Heat, heat, heat…. yes, every computer I’ve had has been pushed to its limits, and this one will be no exception. But heat isn’t bad while running doing some crazy 8-virtual-core video-encoding with Handbrake, heat is a problem when the monitor is turned on! Try holding your hand on top of it after having used it for a couple of hours: I dare you! It’ll be scorched in no time!

The top of the monitor is where the heat vents are, and it gets crazy hot. My office is on the first floor, so it’s the hottest place in our house to start with, having a couple of other hot-running macs there to begin with doesn’t help, and my 24″ Dell really knows how to warm up a room. But this iMac has really added a couple of centigrades to the room temperature. To make it short: I’m adding some vents to the room!

Next up: reflections, reflections, reflections…. man do I look good! I get to look at myself the entire day if I want to!! If I don’t want to, I need to look away, because the iMac is a 27″ mirror! I’ve always gone with the matte / anti-glare options, except for the iPhone and iPad where it wasn’t available. I love using my iPad, and it doesn’t reflect THAT much, so I didn’t think much about it, until I packed the iMac out and turned it on! Crazy! I need to go shave!!!! A quick shave later, what I see on the screen looks way better, but it’s still me. I’ve got my Dell 24″ matte display next to the iMac, and it takes the full blow of the window and the window-lit me, but still I see no reflection. On the iMac, though, did I mention I use it as a mirror, without turning the camera on?

But these, and the lack of a thunderbolt/USB KVM, are really the only objections I have. Throw in a 24″ Dell in 90 degrees rotation, one of the upcoming MacBook Airs for using XCode on the road and a Mini and one of those nice HP airprint printers, and you have yourself a great both home and office setup!

So expecting the upcoming Mini and Air soon, and already knowing Lion and iOS 5, there is really no reason not to work with this and enjoy its benefits full time. This is an awesome setup for developers, media producers and probably your average Mac gamer alike.

Back when the new iMacs were released in may 2011 I ordered one with 4GB RAM, expecting to replace them with 32GB. However, getting four 8GB blocks turned out to be incredibly hard, and very expensive, so I settled for 4x4GB blocks for a total of 16GB RAM 1333Mhz SO-DIMM RAM. Two sets of 2x4GB from Crucial was very inexpensive (about 800 DKK plus tax), and they arrived a couple of days before the iMac.

While almost all servicing of parts for the iMac starts with having to remove the display and risk getting dust stuck under the glass, replacing the memory was very easy. Remove three screws on the bottom of the screen (surprisingly not Philips 1 screws, something a bit wider), take out some easy-to-use handles and pull. I was surprised at how hard I had to pull, I was afraid I’d break the handles, but no problem there, they didn’t even seem the least bit strained when the old memory came out with a pop. Gently take out the old memory, replace it with the new memory (again, push a bit harder than what I expected), screw it together again and voila, one memory maxed iMac. Very easy, and very cheap.

So what is performance like with this memory? Well, I’m not a good case for comparing with as I run too much early-stage pre-release software, too much software at all and generally abuse my computer. And since I transferred my MacBook Pro setup to the iMac (after first deactivating Adobe’s CS5 suite) it’s just as messy as my setup always is. But it works beautifully. No lock-ups, and all the memory is in use! Perhaps a bit surprisingly, but I had 14GB of inactive memory before I started writing this post. That is, it’s loaded and ready to go, but not in use as I’ve quit whatever was using it. So a waste perhaps? No way…

Using the computer like this has been a breeze so far, but let’s see. Custom is that I’ll max out the memory within three months of using the computer. Yes, 16MB RAM in a 486DX was great, can’t remember what my Pentium 90 had, nor many of the AMD machines. The “lamp” iMac was also filled as much as it could (that was good fun servicing), as were my Powerbooks and subsequent MacBooks and Minis. That’s why I always wanted a Pro, but always opted for something else. Cheapskate me

So today they released the new iMac. Still no reviews so I have no clue whether I was right or wrong about the chipset. So I’ve started looking into another pet topic of mine: RAM. I really would like these machines to take a bucket-load of RAM, but Apple still limits themselves to 16GB.

OWC shipped 32GB kits for the last version, and in this blog comment they confirm they expect it to work well on the current iMac as well. In fact, they already sell 32GB kits for the 27″ iMacs, but at almost $3000!

So far I haven’t seen people report on the previous generation iMac any brand of RAM that would supposedly work but didn’t, and Amazon has a kit for $817 that I would expect to work. But no reports yet, so this’ll have to be investigated.

Update: Disregard the amazon-link, the iMacs need 204-pin SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM running at 1333 Mhz. The Amazon link was 240-pin

Fair warning: This is speculation on my part

Fact 1: The Intel desktop chipset Z68 will be released in a week or two to the general public.
Fact 2: Apple cares about user experience
Fact 3: Intel has given Apple preferred access to its components before

The iMac, Apple’s Desktop offering, is long overdue. I had my bets for a refresh in February, that never happened. In March it would be logical to release an update with Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt. That in itself would he a huge gain.

The Intel Z68 chipset will allow Apple to let the user have a small SSD drive for caching, so that all frequently run program data will be there. That’s not that different from what Samsung (and I’m sure others) already do on regular hard drives: keep a small bit of SSD for caching so that data that is frequently accessed is faster available than it would be reading from a drive. Except for this: the SSD drives used with the Z68 would typically be 64GB or around there.

Toms Hardware has a nice benchmark of using this chipset with SSD drives and whether larger drives make a substantial difference: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z68-express-lucidlogix-virtu-ssd-caching,2888-4.html

Adding this would make the iMac the fastest Mac there is, at least when it comes to user experience, another blow to the Mac Pro for sure. It should also have a refresh, poor thing.

So while this is just speculation on my part, I think it makes sence, timing wise and logically. And, I really need a new Mac, so with the speculation about a special happening on May 3rd, with Apple Store employees being required to be present there, an iMac happening after “let’s get back to the Mac” makes very much sense to me.

PS, Apple, please allow me to add 64GB of RAM this time

Update: Yes, I was right on this one!