http://www.apple.com/imac/

It looks... interesting...

It has 3 "blowers" @ 25dB... from the pictures it's hard to see them, but I think I was able to spot all 3.

Apple does continue to amaze and astound society by their radical designs that PC manufactuerers have yet to catch up on... however they still lack in certain areas, i.e., High powered graphics (despite the 6800 Ultra they have for the HUGE Cinema Displays, you can't jam that in the 2 inch thick iMac =[ ), and their DVD burners, compared to PCs, are pretty slow =[.

However, if you want the silence, and got tons of dough, and don't mind using a Mac, the iMac G5 is for you

So interesting that it deserves a news post on the front page. 25 dB @ half a meter is quite a feat.

Though the specs seem low for something that costs well over a grand, one has to keep in mind the reduced form factor and gorgeous displays. Kudos to Apple for coming out with a PC with style, ergonomics, and functionality. Games are better on a PC IMHO (don't flame please), at least for the same price. But I'd much rather have this machine as my workhorse.

OOO look mom I'm on the front page *points at tiny text*



Well Apple pretty much has been that way. I mean, look at their designs for their past computers, which, in no way are similar to that of the PCs. We had a G4 in our tech bench @ Best Buy the other day, and it's interesting to see how their computers are designed. The G4, although old now, still has some interesting designs. First off, there is a MASSIVE heatsink, probably the size of the XP120. Secondly, the side panel that comes off actually has a small 80x15mm fan that sucks air in through vents on the actual PANEL (at the bottom). There is only 1 120mm fan, and it is placed smack in the middle on the bottom of the case, sucking air in through the bottom front vents, and cooling directly onto a vertically mounted Seagate hard drive.

The G4 Cube was also a nice design, although I have heard horror stories about the touch-sensitive power buttom, that it was too sensitive, and even a little bit of dust could turn it off -.-;;

As for the new G5s, I'm not too sure about those. The 3 bladed fans supposedly "designed by Apple themselves", to me, are rather noisy. And to have what, 4? or *gasp* 6? I dont remember exactly how many, but that is a %$#load of fans, even if running at super low speeds with "4 climate zones", probably is noisy.

Still, though, I do admit Apple has amazed and astounded the world with their designs. Now if only somone could match their ingenuity, add higher powered components, and remain quiet, and TURN IT INTO A PC!

EDIT: I wonder if the iMac uses cyclone blowers, or super small fans, because to me, if you look in the top center on the iMac's exposed picture, it looks something like a cyclone blower (there are 2 of them, although I'm not sure if they're both are fans, or maybe just components )

Who would flame you for saying games are better on PC? Everyone knows that!!!

I think it looks pretty rad, and hopefully there will be reviews up soon with the innards all over the place.

I would not want to work on one of these.

But cool looking nonetheless

LOL, good point.

-Ken

Here's a link for the inside:

http://www.tinkafoo.com/temp/inside_low.jpg

Curious on how hot the G5 will get. I remember reading somewhere that Apple needed to reduce the heat and power requirements in order to use the G5 in their powerbooks.

OMFG.......

I thought the Gateway Profile PCs were hard to work on...

Alas, one can only mess with RAM and a HDD. I guess that's the price you pay for being 'cool' (n' Quiet?????).

And nice cablegami

Ok, the site said 3 coolers. However, if you look at the thing carefully, with the "3" coolers in the bottom, and the giant one in the middle, and finally the tiny one near the HDD, that makes 5. wtf?

I am assuming the giant mesh thingy in the top left corner is the 5200, since you can't really stuff it anywhere else, and the angled black thing above the G5 probably is the vent for CPU exhaust. Now that I look at it, that's some seriously WEIRD airflow... because if it is sucking air in through the bottom, and you are using the giant cyclone blower in the middle, as well as the tiny one above it, how is the hot air coming out of the tiny slit in the back? I can understand the CPU exhaust, it's right there, but for the rest of the case air seems questionable... perhaps the exhaust is powerful enough to carry/guide the case air out the slits as well.

I've got to hand it to them... when the Gateway profiles first came out I asked why the heck they didn't contain all the wires via bluetooth and internal wi-fi.... Apple really did a beautiful job here. If it had TV-Wonder-like multimedia ability, and if iTunes had track-on-demand like Musicmatch does, I'd be making the switch (I'd want a remote, of course). That 20" widescreen is just gorgeous! Of course, I'd keep the Xbox...

never really been interested ina MAC but this thing is really neat

How does the 1.6 G5 and 1.8G5 compare to athlons and pentiums chips?

Also, how upgradable are these things? are MAC harddrives like uber small or something? uses the same RAM as PCs now right? 256mb in these little things seems kind of low.

TIa
~RaNDoM

Macs use the same HDDs. The G4s we had @ Best Buy used Seagate 'cudas. RAM is also the same.

macs all use standard components, except the mb/cpu (and presumably psu). i was going to say something like "just think of the new iMac like a laptop", but from the sounds of it it actually uses 3.5" drives and has two dimm slots too, so no problems there either.

also, remember this is an iMac, it's like the equivalent (well, so much better it's not even funny, but you get the point) of the $500 SFF PC or those little Sonata-sized things Dell has been selling, so 256mb RAM is pretty normal.

price is a tad steep, but the iMac originally started at $1300 or so years and years ago, and Apple has traditionally added features and continued innovating rather than slashing prices - just seems to give them more headroom since the regular G5s are pretty reasonably priced nowadays. would've been nice if they could have fit an X600 or so in there though, especially for the 20" (which is thicker than the 17" even though you'd think they'd have a bit more room), 5200 is laughable.

I've never been a big mac fan, mostly because I'm a gamer, but i have to hand it to them on the cool front. Lets face it, macs had style way before us PC lot ever considered doing something as simple as painting our beige box black, and in the style stakes that thing has it in shedloads.
Neat job cramming it all in too.

As to the questionable airflow, have you ever used a convection heater? I have one at home.
Its a fanless electric heater with a heating element at the bottom and an empty case that rises maybe half a meter above that, with airholes at the top.
Simple convection from the rising hot hair is enough to draw quite a wind up through the heating element and out of the holes at the top - this is probably the same principle apple are relying on here.

Just to clear some stuff up;

1. Slot loading DVD drive, most definately not going to be a user replacable/upgradable option, unless Apple decide to release one, which will cost mega $'s..

2. The DVD drive is the thing located at the top left, under all those holes.

3. The GPU will most likely be hiding under the large turbine like fan top-middle.

4. The big "G5" is where the CPU is, most likely just a large heatsink, no fan for it. However, it appears to have air vents directing in/out of it.

5. Shiny silver piece with 2 barcodes on it, just left of center, most definately a WiFi card, AirPort Extreme Card. Listed as an option, so assumedly user installable/upgradable.

6. Just below WiFi card, notice the black connector. Appears to be a right angle ATX plug.

7. RAM is standard DDR400 spec, as listed here; http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html

8. Drive doesn't appear to have any cables, and IS SATA, so could most definately be a hard plug for power/data. Similar to most SATA hot swap bays.

And just a note on the "cable-gami".. There would be VERY few cables in a setup like this. Most laptops have minimal cables due to most parts being onboard/direct connection.

All in all, it's a very impressive unit. Can't wait for someone to really dissect it. Won't be getting one though, hate Mac's and don't have the $'s. =)

Maybe this will shed some light:
http://www.chaosmint.com/benchmarks/pow ... -ps7bench/

If you compare the 1.6Ghz G5 and the Athlon XP 2700+ scores, you see they are pretty close for the most part. The G5 also manages to beat or match the P4 2.8Ghz in some areas.

Still I probably should note that the Photoshop bench is a good benchmark for the G5, because Photoshop has a lot of Mac users, they've spend some time optimizing it for the Mac. Also this test was run on a PowerMac with 1GB of RAM (huge impact for big images).

All in all the G5 *should* be a little faster clock for clock than an Athlon XP (maybe equally fast as an A64 ?). Naturally benchmarks only go so far, depending on used application/compiler/etc... results may differ.

(*drools*) the new mac is such a beautiful machine!

but i just realised, don't most widescreen displays have the ability to rotate 90 degrees these days?

Of course the mac wont be able to do that, considering the cooling design, but it'd be very annoying to read thru documents and do word processing on a widescreen =p

very impressive unit. it prehaps does fall a bit short in some area's, the video for one. but for most people that video card is 10 times more then what it needs.

considering OSx uses the 3d accelorator to move windows about, i wonder if a 9600 non pro would have been a better choice for proformance and heat manegment. the non pro on LowK uses somthing like 8 watts in 3d mode.

and the ram may also be questionable, but again, for the target audiance it should be more then enough. Mac OS is all modual based rather then DLL based like windows. so its capible of beeing very efficant when needed.

as for compairing a mac to a PC. its like compairing my datsun pickup to a corvette. the corvette will go muuuuuch faster, but the datsun will haul alot more luggage........

The mac I own feals competant in most tasks and seems to have pridictable speed. its not the same "click pop" speed as modern PC's however its also very reisstant to bogging down when running alot of applications. it runs OS 9.22 on 256 megs and seems to be way more then enough for what i use it for.

Does anyone know anything about this: http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/Desktop/ ... &Cate.id=1

It is a similar concept to the new iMac except in a PC. You can buy it barebones and outfit your own. You get better video than the iMac with buit in TV tuner. You can also put in a bigger hard drive, more memory, faster processor, and flexible DVD drive options for a lot less money than an iMac. Of course, what about build quality and noise?

not gonna argue over anything so petty but that's a very... interesting... comparison. always seen and heard it the other way around. otoh you did say "the mac i use" which sounds pretty ancient... i have a g3 333 powerbook for reading mail and stuff too.

heh. that "prices starting from $1180" doesn't include an OS or CPU or anything aside from the display, motherboard and video apparently.
$1800+ for anything comparable to the g5 imac, but even at $1200 i'd take the imac instead.

Thank you so much Apple. Now I have to decide between the new iMac or a Powerbook to round out my computer collection...

Worth every penny. Some people don't understand silent computing and being surrounded by beautiful things (like this comp) is all part of harmony with life. Why do people buy 800K homes, hire Feng Shui or interior designers for thousands? Not because they need them, because they want harmony. This comp like most all mac products is a piece of industrial art work.








Maybe some perfer high performance computing like this p4@4500Mhz??

links to iMac G5 internals:

1- http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=636

2- http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=638

Source: the everlasting www.macsurfer.com

Nice computer, I like Apple quite a lot but they have always been a bit too expensive than rest-of-the-world PCs. Still, the new G5s and Mac OS X are worth it right now. I'll jump in soon enough if they keep up the good work. I just bought an iPod and it rocks.


I bought my latest pc three monts ago: Chieftech case with Athlon xp 1800, psu is from BeQuiet! 450W, and this psu is not so quiet after all :( Wish I had known back then that Apple was releasing this pretty and quiet iMac G5.

Best regards to all, and congrats to MikeC for the great site and forum.

Since iMac G5's frontside bus is slower than PowerMac G5, and because of the 64-bit ability of G5 processors, I would say 1.6Ghz G5 is equivalant to Athlon 64 2500+ which does not actually exist.

It is still highly priced, but I love OS X although it has small glitches. What a lovely OS Apple has! I would buy a Mac if it came as a barebone.

Yeah, me too but I didn't bring it up because I didn't want to derail this thread of "Mac Luvin".