The two types of issues we’re seeing most are cracks in the screen and a completely dead computer on delivery. What’s most plausible is that the packaging just wasn’t designed to handle the size and weight of the giant 27-inch iMac as it gets tossed around the cab of a FedEx truck. Apple has so far been extremely responsive and effective in making repairs and exchanges, but it’s still a discomfiting sign – if you’re about to buy a new iMac, you might want to wait and see if Apple announces a fix for whatever’s going on before you take the plunge. [Apple Forums via Engadget]

And I’m not sure that the solution is just a refresh away.

The Mac Pro was once the only viable option for an OS X lover in need of serious horsepower for tasks like editing media. Now, with the new iMac? I think it’s straight up stupid to buy a Mac Pro.

The $4499 Mac Pro, desperately in need of a refresh, gives you a 2.66GHz Quad-Core (i7), 3GB of RAM (triple channel, but seriously?), 640GB hard drive (again, seriously?) and a nominal graphics card. Spend $1400 more and you’ll get a another processor and 3GB more RAM.

The $2599, 27-inch iMac obviously includes a screen, plus you get a 2.66GHz Quad-Core (i7), 1TB drive, 4GB of RAM and a nominal graphics card.

But beyond those clock speeds, the Mac Pro’s i7 processor is the more premium Bloomfield edition, while the iMac uses the Lynnfield. (More on those differences here.)

Still, the bottom line is that the iMac’s Lynnfield processor is newer, and it shows in performance.

Macworld benched the new iMacs against the latest Mac Pros. And, you know what? The i7 iMac more than held its own. It basically defeated the quad-core Mac Pro across the board.

And other than a few specific tasks in which the most expensive Mac Pro’s eight cores proved beneficial (Handbrake, Cinebench, etc), the iMac outperformed the competition or kept things close enough not to be relevant, plus it straight-up won in the eyes of Speedmark 6.

Performance-wise, the base Mac Pro makes no sense at all. The eight-core Mac Pro offers a touch more power, sometimes, and other times (in many day to day tasks) even it is outgunned.

Of course, any Mac Pro still allows multiple internal hard drives, three PCI slots, more FireWire ports (four vs one) and more room for RAM expansion (32GB vs 16GB). But once again, even in the worlds of professional media creation, that’s a pretty questionable upsell, especially with external storage solutions and the fact that most high, high end media pros (like special effects artists) turn to dedicated render farms to do their heavy number crunching anyway.

With the new iMac, Apple has shrunk the Mac-Pro-needing niche even smaller. And I can’t tell anyone with a straight face that a handful of expandability is worth $US300-$1100 with no monitor, no matter how deep their pockets are.

Apple needs to re-examine their pricing model. Even with an inevitable processor refresh (i9, anyone?), it’s time for a price drop and/or some free with purchase displays. Just because you’re a pro doesn’t mean you’re a sucker.

The Basic Differences in Chips

First off, I should note that the Core i7 chip has what Intel calls a “turbo mode”. That is, when it’s not utilising all of its cores, it can dynamically overclock itself up to 3.4GHz on whatever single cores are in use. It can, as shown in this video, work in steps. So you get turbo benefits from partial use of the four cores in this iMac’s chip, but also, you get turbo benefits when each core is only being partially used. For example, if four cores are running but only at a fraction of their total capacity (less then 100 per cent), the cores can still run a little faster. This should theoretically make up for the difference between the two-core 3.06GHz chip and the hyper-threaded quad core chip at a base of 2.8GHz.

The other thing to realise about these newer Core i7 chips are that they have no northbridge — or bus — between the memory and CPU. The memory controller is built right into the processor, and there’s a new tech called Quickpoint interconnect which connects the cores in a point-to-point architecture. Core i7 supports triple channel memory (which would use three banks at once), but this iMac only came loaded with two banks of RAM filled. Like our other iMac, that’s a 2GB + 2GB arrangement.

Matt explains more about i7 here. (And yes, there are differences between i7 and i5, besides clock speed.)

*Note that this machine also had a faster ATI Radeon 4850 video card with 512MB of RAM (versus the 4670 card in the other iMac) which may have impacted performance in several apps. I have no idea which of these apps uses the GPU to accelerate its tasks under Snow Leopard. (For example, Preview may use it to help render JPGs faster, or it may not. Apple could not tell me. In Adobe After Effects, the Radeon series of cards apparently is not supported for OpenCL acceleration. )

Performance with Multithreaded Apps

In short, any task we tried that expressly was written to either a) take advantage of multiple cores, or b) take advantage of multiple cores through Snow Leopard’s multicore middleware, Grand Central Dispatch, were 2-3 times faster. (More on that here.) These results include:

• 64-bit versions of Geekbench, which focus on CPU and memory tests.
• Adobe After Effects benchmarks
• Opening 20 images of Tokyo Tower that are 2000×2000 pixels and 35MB each.

Impressive stuff, but honestly, those tests were kind of uninteresting to me. I mean, those tests don’t really have any correlation to my daily computing use. So on a whim, after benchmarking, I tested handbrake, the DVD ripping software I love. It, too, was freaking fast.

I know the app is multi-threaded, but I did not know what level of optimisation it was written for. I was blown away by a 3x speed multiplier with the i7. On the Core i7 iMac, it took 43 minutes to rip a DVD, Storm Riders, a surfing film from the ’70s featuring Gerry Lopez (my favourite) and others. On the Core2Duo machine, it took 147 minutes! I know this is basically a DVD read test coupled with decoding and video conversion, but the results have me excited because this is a real task that takes my computer a long time to do, performed by a program that hasn’t been revised in a year.

Performance With Single-Core Optimised Apps (Otherwise Known as Reality)

Unfortunately, there are still very few applications that take advantage of multiple cores directly or via Snow Leopard’s GCD, not even video-based, let alone general-purpose computing.

Photoshop CS4 on the Mac, which is not set up to handle multicore processors, showed almost less than a 3 per cent improvement using the Driver Heaven benchmark. Basic tasks, like booting and shutdown, saw virtually none. Playing the 1080p Quicktime trailer of Avatar consistently showed that the i7 was using 3 per cent less of its total CPU than the Core2Duo, but I wonder if that’s a result of the faster graphics card kicking in using CoreCL. Xbench, the old program that does a more comprehensive job of benchmarking a system from disks to processors, showed almost no difference.

I think Xbench, which hasn’t been updated in years, is a solid benchmark for that old program that you depend on but has been long abandoned or at least ignored by its developer.

These scores, again, are in relation to the top line 3.06GHz Core2Duo iMac we tested. Some benchmarks have come in from the web comparing the i7 to the i5. Here’s one that claims a 30 per cent jump using Geekbench. Now we know Geekbench likes and does well with more cores and is a synthetic CPU test. But if the i5 is 30 per cent slower, and the i7 pulls even with the 3.06 GHz Core2Duo chip in single threaded activity — most day-to-day activity — does that mean the i5 is slower than the cheaper Core2Duo? Maybe. Probably not 30 per cent, since Geekbench is strictly CPU/memory and likes more cores, and this stuff does not translate so literally in the real world. But we can assume the i5 will have 30 per cent less jump from the top tier Core2Duos, translating into a mere 1.3-2 times speed increase from last gen chips on programs that like cores.

Value

For the most part, in our review, I said that you should stick to the preconfigured options, upgrading to Apple’s next recommended config before considering upgrades to the lower tier models. How does that advice change now that we’ve seen the i7? I don’t know! I guess it depends if you’re a betting man. If you think programs for Snow Leopard using GCD are coming, paying $US200-$US500 bucks more from the top line Core2Duo chip for an i5 or i7 might make sense. The probability of you getting programs that can use those extra cores goes up if you are a graphics or video professional who expects to see support from Adobe, Apple, etc. (Apple already claims big jumps in Aperture that we weren’t able to test.) Or if you rip a lot of DVDs! The rest of you? The Core2Duo stuff could be fine for today and fine for tomorrow. But the Core i7 is not worse for today and will definitely be faster tomorrow. It just costs more.

Me personally? I’d opt for the Core i7. I just might wait ’til the new iMacs refresh a bump and the i7 is cheaper and part of a standard build. But I’m patient like that.

[iMac Review]

Specifically, using his charts and mine, it wasn’t hard to recognise the jump in the multi-threaded, 64-bit results from geek bench in the categories of integer, floating point and memory-streaming tests, as well as the threaded tests. (Memory tests were slightly faster; the others were drastically so.) Interesting, as the Core i5 chip is clocked at 2.66GHz and the Core2Duo iMac I tested runs at 3.06GHz.

(The turbo boost function, which overclocks the Core i5 chip to up to 3.2GHz when running non-multi-threaded apps, should be kicking in performance here, too.)

Interesting, but two things to remember: Core i7 chips are coming out for the iMac shortly and will run at 2.8GHz and have hyperthreading so the four cores emulate eight. And there are still not many (if any at all) major OS X apps that can take advantage of Snow Leopard’s multicore support. [Electronista's tests, Gizmodo's iMac Review]

The clip is pretty interesting, even if you’re not normally enamoured with Apple. Ive is the most prominent tech designer of the last two decades, and I like his philosophy on “getting design out of the way”. Hopefully the clip motivates you guys to go see the full movie, which is great, even if it doesn’t reach the heights of Hustwit’s previous effort Helvetica. [Brainstorm Tech]

The Macternet! OK, that doesn’t really curdle my blood, but I’m sure you will do better in the comments.

That’s according to the man who named it, Ken Segall, who talked to Leander at Cult of Mac. He worked at Apple’s agency TBWA\Chiat\Day and not only christened the iMac, but was the man behind Apple’s pitch-perfect “Think Different” campaign.

It’s ironic that Segall, who knew iMac was the perfect name and pitched it to Jobs over and over after being rejected again and again, thought that the computer itself was stupid: “We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, ‘Jesus, do they know what they are doing?’ It was so radical.” It strikingly highlights the difference between people who create things and the people who sell them: Apple could see they had a brilliant product, but a terrible way to sell it. TBWA saw a terrible product, but had a brilliant way to brand it.

Unfortunately, Segall won’t actually reveal Jobs’ terrible name, fearing it would open the ninth gate of hell and bring forth the apocalypse choo-choo.

Steve never actually told Segall he’d accepted the name — he just started silk-screening it on prototypes to see how it looked. Check out the full interview over at Cult of Mac, it’s definitely worth the read. [Cult of Mac]