I’m sure many of you have heard about the flash problems in the new iMac’s.  The first day I received my iMac, I did not experience any lag with flash.  The next day, however, was a different story.  I woke up my iMac from sleep, went to play a youtube video, and the video was stuttering as well as the sound.  I went to Apple’s support forums and found a possible fix.  I uninstalled the flash player plug-in, and then downloaded and re-installed the plug-in.  I am happy to report that I have not had the problem since, but I might be jinxing myself right now, as I have only had the iMac for a week.  Unfortunately, this fix does not seem to work for everybody.  Members of the forums are still reporting flash lag, after re-installing the plug-in.  Hopefully Apple will address this issue soon.

The new iMac’s come standard with a wireless keyboard, and the new magic mouse.  The wireless keyboard has been around for some time, but this was my first experience with it.  The battery seems to last a long time, one week and two days later, I still have 89% battery left.  The only thing I do not like about the wireless keyboard is the missing USB ports, which the wired keyboard provides.  I will most likely be ordering a wired keyboard, because it can sometimes be difficult getting to the back of my iMac to plug in USB devices.

The magic mouse definitely takes some getting use to.  At first I did not like the mouse.  It felt uncomfortable in my hand and the speed of the mouse seemed a little sluggish.  After a week of use, I do not even notice any of these problems.  The touch sensitive part of the mouse works great, but do not expect it to feel like a MacBook track pad.  The surfaces feel different; the magic mouse is a little more “sticky” than the smooth track pad on the MacBooks.  I hope apple adds more functionality to the touch sensors on the mouse, I would love to activate expose using the mouse.  Apple claims that the magic mouse gets four months of battery life.  I am skeptical, as of this review I have 77% battery left.  It is only natural for the mouse battery to drain quickly, because it is used all the time.  The mouse does have a switch to turn it off, but it takes 35 seconds to be discovered by the iMac once it is turned back on.  You can imagine how frustrating that can be, when you just want to get on and use your computer quickly.

The new iMac’s are great.  The only problem I ran into was the flash lag, but thankfully it was easily fixed (knock on wood).  I will have another update on the iMac in about a month.  If you want to see my unboxing, you can check that out at the end of this post.  I am also looking forward to reading some Quad Core iMac  reviews, hopefully they will ship soon.  Anyone order a quad core?  Or planning on picking one up?  Thanks for reading guys.

-Bill Savage

Unboxing:

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Rumors have it, that Apple could be supporting 6-core processing STANDARD with their new Mac Pro desktop releasing sometime in 2010. Intel, Apples CPU manufacture, has announced recently a new line of processors code named “Gulftown”. Intel’s 32nm chips have a reported 12mb L3 cache, and 12 threads per cpu(6). This is great news for anyone in the media bussiness, because when Apple comes out with single CPU machines, they come out with dual CPU machines. Could this mean a new 12-core processing beast?! We’re looking at a time frame of the first quarter of 2010. Exciting stuff if you ask me. Price points have not been released by Apple or even Intel… we’ll have to wait for those.

My thoughts:

Will this really be necessary? You think 8-core machines would be sufficient for most tasks for even the production companies, but this could be a good move for Apple. Personally, I think Apple will follow through with this one-hundred percent. Apple has always been known  stay on the right track with their hardware, operating system, design, and all their products. Keeping up with technology is what they’re best at, so I think their is a very good chance we could see an update to the Mac Pro, as it is needing some updating anyways.

Apple could also lose Mac Pro purchases if and when they release this “new” model. Some people, most people… don’t even need 4-cores, so why would they need 6 or 12-cores? This will be geared more toward you’re professional group of Mac users. Pricing shouldn’t be too bad at all for something like this. Everytime anything is upgraded internally with Mac’s, you see the price stay the same or even decrease when new technology is added. Not only has Apple made a good habit with that in general, but every time technology changes, the old stuff loses value.

What are your thoughts, let me know in the description!

-Colin Perschbacher

Sources: Digg.com,Apple Insider

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If you can’t wait to read this review, head on over to  this page to get your hands on it.

Well, I’ve had it loaded up on my iMac for about 48 hours now, and have already come to some conclusions.  First off, it’s fast.  Like a dress coming off on prom night fast.  This version hasn’t been officially tested yet, but my (very) unscientific testing showed it to be 10-15% faster than Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5.  As far as rendering content, I haven’t noticed any issues, and when I personally tested it using the Acid3 test, it scored a perfect 100/100.  So, bottom-line, as far as the nuts and bolts of internet browsing, a have to rank Chrome on par or better than the current Mac offerings.

Acid3 Test Results

Let’s move on to talk about interface and features.  The first thing you’ll notice is the “tabs on top” style layout.  This is unique among browsers in that instead of displaying the tabs below the bookmark bar, they appear where normally the title bar would be.  This would be a plus if it actually gave you more viewing area, but because they don’t push all the way up to be level with the “close-minimize-resize” button, it really isn’t adding that much.  One thing I do really like about the tabs though, is the ability to “drag out” a page.  This feature is already in Safari, but trying something similar in Firefox will result in a shortcut on your desktop.

Dragging out a tab

Something else borrowed from the Safari interface is the history based home screen that allows you to see a panorama of your most visited sites.  A nice improvement over the Safari version, though, is the ability to display the sites in a list style format.  Also on the Chrome home screen you can see recently closed tabs, which is a nice option to get back to a page you accidently closed.

On the “things like Firefox” list is the ability to apply themes to customize the look of your browser window, with a multitude of designs and colors available.

One thing conspicuously missing from the browser is a search field, located in the upper right corner in both Safari and Firefox.  Instead, in Chrome this feature is provided by typing non-urls into the address field.

Overall, I think that if you are 100% committed your current browser, I don’t see any “must have” feature in Chrome that will drive you to switch. However, if you are looking for a browser that offers a good mix of both Safari and Firefox, I recommend giving Chrome a try.  If nothing else, by downloading this non-official release version, you can say you were one of the first to use Chrome on a Mac.

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An NDP’s 2009 Household Penetration study states that about 12% of US computer households have at least one Mac, beating last years 9%. It also that close to 85% of those Mac users own a PC.

“Multiple computer ownership is a common thread in Apple computer households, with 66 percent of households owning three or more computers, compared to just 29 percent of Windows PC households. Apple owning households are decidedly more mobile as well, with 72 percent of them owning a notebook, whereas only 50 percent of households that have a Windows PC own a notebook.” – NDP

Another thing this study notes, is that Apple users tend to be more “tech friendly.” On average, Apple households seem to own more consumer electronics, compared to Windows users. In fact, it’s almost twice as much as a PC user owns.

Source: NDP 2009 Household Penetration Study

Looking at this study, I’d say that in the next couple years, about 50% of people in the US will own a Mac.

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