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'A little bit ahead of schedule' was Steve Jobs' way of introducing the new Apple Imac last month.
Back in June of 2005, Apple's head honcho announced his company would be abandoning IBM's PowerPC and instead start using Intel processors in its Macintosh computers.
He said it would take a year to get the first Intel Macs ready, but the new Imac is actually in the shops right now.
Out goes the PowerPC G5 processor and in comes the brand new Intel Core Duo processor.
Apple claims the Intel Core Duo, with its dual-core design, is twice as fast as the old G5 and the new Imac certainly feels nippy enough.
There are two models available. Our review system was the £1,229 model, which has a 20in flat-panel display, 2GHz Core Duo processor, 512MB of Ram and a 250GB hard disk.
The 512MB of Ram is a bit stingy in a machine at this price, but the Imac does compensate in other areas.
It's got a built-in webcam, wireless networking and Bluetooth as standard. There are two Firewire ports, three USB2, a DVD burner, Ethernet and digital audio output.
Thankfully, Apple has also finally decided to provide the Imac with a halfway decent graphics card – the Radeon X1600 with 128MB of video memory.
If you're on a bit of a budget, there's also a £929 model that has a 17in monitor, 1.8GHz processor and 160GB hard disk, which when compared to the specifications in today's PCs, is a bit weak, especially for the price.
Of course, now the Imac has got an Intel processor, it is tempting to suggest that it is just another PC-clone. However, the real difference between Macs and PCs has always been down to Apple's easy-to-use software.
See also:
Application updates and a new web design tool make this the best version of Apple's home creative suite yet 31 Jan 2006
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