June 25th, 2006
Refurb 20” Intel iMac? Or should I just sit on my hands?
Right, here’s the thing. I bought my G5 iMac nearly two years ago now and I’ve been overall very happy with it, but lately there’s one thing which has been really beginning to bother me. The damn fan. It’s a revision A iMac (the one’s with the dodgy fans), so it’s a well documented problem which can’t be fixed. The problem is, it’s been getting much worse over this past year—it’s screaming loud right now—and to be honest, it’s getting to point when it’s even audible over music at full volume.
Well, I’ve gone and done it. Ordered my new 20″ Intel iMac yesterday. After the heat of last week, coupled with the fact I needed to do quite a lot of intensive processor work on the machine, the fan noise was pretty much unbearable. Called Apple, they said it was ‘within accepted limits’. I guess if you’re only surfing the web and reading email, this might be the case. The new machine should be here on Wednesday. Can’t wait.
So, I’ve been giving the idea of upgrading to an Intel machine. Currently, there some available in the Apple Refurb Store for about ?900 (a saving of 26%). I’d of course have to chuck some extra RAM in there though. I’d probably get about ?500 for this machine on eBay, which makes a ?400 outlay for a brand new machine, with a whisper-quiet fan, very tempting.
The only thing which is currently stopping me is the Adobe Apps thing. Adobe will be releasing them in about a years time, which in itself isn’t too much of a problem I guess. I’d rather put up with a slightly slower Photoshop than a loud fan every day, all day. There are also the added benefits of a machine that could dual boot in XP for testing purposes (and also for Emma’s work). I’ve got a couple of questions though:
- What’s the Refurb Store like? Anyone had good or bad experiences with them?
- Should I go for an Intel machine, or just wait for the Universal apps?
The fan is just too much though. It’s like having someone sat next to you blow-drying their hair all day long.
The refurb stores great mark, more or less no different to the main store. The only thing that disappointed me was the brown box my powerbook was delivered in, no famous apple flare on the packaging :(. I don’t think all the products are covered by the same warranty however, so I’d check the terms on the item you’re buying.
Hope this helps.
I would splash out on the intel iMac, since that Parallel Desktops ‘XP in a window’ looks really useful and even better than dual booting.
Also, the intel macs are supposed to be a lot faster, so wouldn’t that make up for some of the speed lost to the Rosetta interpreter — may work out around the same speed as you’re getting now?
We have a 2ghz, 1gb macbook pro you’re welcome to try your software on if that helps you decide?
We had a bad experience with a refurb mac, but that wasn’t from apple it was from cancom. So don’t know if the apple store is reliable or not. I am still happy with my powerbook 17” but I am thinking myself of the end of year looking at a macbook pro for portability — moving a 17” around is not the easiest option. My husband has a last gen g5 imac before the isight integration — about 3 versions ago now think with intel. That is quiet as a mouse and definetly a grand machine. It knocks the stuffing out of my zooped up 17” powerbook.
The thing I would think about is this: Does the refurb store resell the computers that customers have returned because of problems with the computer? If not then go for it!
Don’t let the speed of Adobe apps running under Rosetta worry you. I’ve been using a 20” Intel iMac since the beginning of March and I have not run into any speed bottlenecks at all. Both apps take a moment or two to load up, but once they’re loaded, performance is great.
Jeff Smith kind of beat me to it. If it’s the Adobe app speed that is holding up, don’t wait any longer. I also have been using a 20” Intel iMac since the moment they came out, and the Adobe apps all work great. I have no complaints about the speed. I’m not exactly sure how they would compare to an iMac G5, but they’re definitely faster than my old Powerbook G4, even under Rosetta.
I’m looking forward to Universal Adobe apps, because I’m sure they’ll scream on this thing, but in the meantime, Rosetta works more than well enough.
Just to echo what the Jeffs have said — I’ve never regreted getting my 20” Intel iMac either (although I was upgrading from a lowly Mac Mini). Also, Parallels is fantastic (and still cheap for a while too).
What will you be doing with your “old” G5? If you’re keeping it, you could always do any mammoth Photoshop work you need to do on that until the Univeral apps are released — not that I think you’ll need to.
This all sounds really promising — both in terms of Rosetta performance and the Refurb store.
Pete: I’ll probably be selling it on eBay. The fan is just doing my head in. It’s ok in winter, when the ambient temperature is that bit lower, but now, in 27 degree heat, it’s cranked up to full pelt and I’m only using Safari!
you could get yourself a set of harman kardon soundsticks for about ?130 and blast your ears with sweet music. That will save you quite a few pounds and you will not hear the fan anymore.
Or Shure earphones they are probably better for this situation ;)
I’m guessing that Photoshop on the new machine would be at least as fast as it was on the Rev A iMac. I’ve got a (non-refurb) 20” intel iMac, and it’s really good. The fan is pretty much silent.
The built-in speakers are my biggest complaint, but buy a $50 external speaker pair and you should be fine.
I had an older iMac that was refurbished, and I never had a problem with it.
I bought a refurb G3 from Apple. That was six years ago and I haven’t bought a refurb since.. It went back to the shop twice before they finally replaced the motherboard.
Chances are you’ll be fine, but there is a reason the machine went back to Apple in the first place.
I just got a new Macbook and find no problems with it running Adobe. Unless you are doing hi-end print work it should be fine. Even then you shouldn’t notice that much difference between a new iMac a two year old one.
If you need to save some money consider getting a 17in model and adding a second monitor. The new Intel Macs run dual monitors natively. Works great with my Macbook.
Hi Mark,
I’ve learnt the hard way that first generation machines of any nature aren’t to be trusted mate.
If I was you I’d carry on using your iMac (you may have to invest in some ear plugs) and wait until Apple bring out the second or even third generation of Intel iMac. By then all the bugs that on the surface aren’t appearing will have been remedied by the guinea pigs using them at the moment.
As for a refurb that could be a good idea as a stop gap but another alternative is to ring the nice people at Jigsaw and enquire about a model that’s been used for presentation purposes:
http://www.jigsaw24.com
0870 730 6868
By the way I would NEVER recommend buying anything from Apple directly online as I had a nightmare with not only Appe Call Centre idiots in Ireland who disptach them for the UK but also the useless TNT couriers in Llantrisant. It took over 2 months for me to receive my iMac and it turned out they had lost it twice in dispatch grrrrrr?
Nah, blow all your recently hard-earned on a brand new MacBook Pro like I just did — sweet!
I bought a PowerMac G5 from the UK refurb store and I can’t complain at all. If I didn’t know I’d bought it from the refurb store you wouldn’t know. I’ve had zero problems with it and it arrived in it’s “proper” G5 packaging. If I recall, the warranty was slightly different from the normal store but you could still purchase an AppleCare warranty for it anyway.
Have you looked into applejack?
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596
Graham: That’s a very good point. Maybe I should learn from this ‘Revision A’ problem I have, rather than potentially jumping into another.
Gabs: Yeah, I use AppleJack, and it’s generally really good, but the fan problem is a well documented hardware issue with the fans used on the revision A machines, not a software problem. The processor fan runs slightly faster and causes a vibration. Not much can be done about it. Apple of course acknowledge it — in that they changed the fan configuration on subsequent models. However, they won’t do a thing about the existing ones.
It’s hard to resist ‘Rev A’ things when they’re so appealing ;)
Hi there,
I’m not sure if this necessarily applies to you (or your needs), but if the speed is an issue, wouldn’t it be possible to just install bootcamp with a limited partition size and then run a Windows version of Photoshop which would eliminate the need for Rosetta and the speed decrease? I haven’t heard of anyone doing this, but it seems logical.
Grahame: I’m liking the waiting advice. Any excuse to buy new Apple products and Mark has his card out before you can say ‘Granny Smith’. See you at the party ;0)
I bought a 20” Intel iMac a few months ago, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s nearly silent, fast as can be, and runs the Creative Suite just fine. Faster, in fact, than my G4 PowerBook. Granted, I’m mostly using it for web design and four-megapixel digital photo editing, but speed has never been a problem. Make sure you get the full 2GB of RAM, though, as Photoshop will eat as much as you can throw at it.
I bought a refurbished eMac several years ago, and it did develop a problem after a few months (a well-documented screen shake), but a trip to the Apple store fixed that, and I haven’t had any problems since. I’d definitely recommend AppleCare, though.
I have purchased a new Intel MacBook Pro and I am very happy with the performance of the machine running Adobe apps. I did receive some advice from a programming collegue in choosing which version of Adobe to run. He suggested that I use my older versions (pre CS) until the Universal apps are available. The programming choices made for CS and CS2 were because of the G5 chipset. The older versions are closer to running natively on an Intel processor. I have heard of others running CS and CS2 with extra RAM and still having Rosetta slow things down a bit. I have not encountered the same problems with only 512 RAM and the older versions.
We plumped for the machine you’re thinking of about 4 months ago and despite being very worried it’s running very well across the board. It’s faster than the previous iMac and some tasks actually beats the G5.
My not-very-scientific pre-purchase performance tests can be found here:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/imacintel/topic2074.html
Last week my MacBookPro arrived and I’m loving that too. Sure I’ll be over the moon when Adobe releases the new software and it runs even faster, but as we charge by the hour we win both ways :o)
I have been thinking, seriously thinking, of moving over to the intel iMac, I am at the moment using a AMD based PC, the only thing stopping me is the lack of finances.
I had that whole stupidly loud fans thing back at the start of the year, and I got it fixed by Apple with little quibbles.
Insisting that the tech guy listened to the noise alone for a few seconds led to him confirming it did indeed sound like a hairdryer. When I informed him the phone was a foot and a half away from the computer he decided to call it in.
This was outside of warranty too.
Might be worth a try, but if you’re after something shiny and new regardless, definitely go for the refurb store. If you don’t mind not getting a proper box and the risk of a few scuff marks and an ‘endearing’ history, the savings are well worth it.
I’ve only ever heard good things about that little corner of the Apple store, although I tend to get my savings via the NUS area.
?200 off MacBooks! Just for being a dirty student.
The intel Macs are really great. I just bought a 17” mac book pro and I love it. It’s very fast, and I’m not having much problem with Adobe apps in Rosetta, though I’m only using them for Web design and development not for manipulating 400MB files in Photoshop.
One other great benefit of the intel macs: you can run Windows on them. My Mac Book Pro is replacing both my G5 tower and my Pentium IV. I now have a completely integrated mac/windows environment. For Web designers it’s fantastic! I’ve got OS X and WIndows XP Pro running side by side for web design, development and testing. Here’s a video showing the two OSes running together: http://www.sawmac.com/tutorials/ultimate/
Just adding my voice to those heartily recommending the apple refurb store — I’ve had both an ibook and imac without any problems whatsoever. The only difference of note is that the ibook came in the utilitarian plain brown cardboard version of the standard packaging, the imac came in the usual box which I understand is unusual.
Only heard good things about the intel macs from the bods at work with minis and macbook pros…
Sit tight for the WWDC next week — you’ll be gutted if you fork out some hard cash on something that gets flattened by a new machine in two weeks like the rumoured newer, higher powered Powerbook (sorry MacBook pro) or new PowerMac (MacPro, whatever). Happens to me every time. I’m waiting til’ next year to upgrade my G4 PB as I don’t want to run either Adobe or Macromedia Studio under emulation and I figure by then the PB’s available will be well developed with much faster processors than the current first crop and I srtongly suspect the same for iMac.
Hi Mark,
Just to hop in on this and let you know that I just bought a 17” MacBook Pro not long ago. I got the dual 2.16GHZ machine with 2GB of RAM. The RAM was a free upgrade from the standard 1GB as the machine was the 6th I had been given due to problems with the screens on the other 5!!!
Apple said after the 3rd replacement that I just must have been unlucky although after 5 machines I don’t quite think that was true.
All Adobe programs run like the wind on the MacBook. Never seen anything faster in fact. The only problem I do have is that when using InDesign if I try and create a new A4 documentat 21 * 29.7 it comes out at something weird like 29.699696996969 or something!!
Not too sure why this is and no one has been able to offer any advice on this as of yet.
All that being said and done you can’t go wrong if you buy one of these machines as they are simply sublime!!
Best wishes,
Mark
I’ve got a 20” Intel iMac, and am very happy with it. Photoshop CS2 runs just fine, with only the occasional (and very slight) lag. And all of the other apps that I use on a regular basis are faster than fast. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I upgraded the RAM to 2GB, and I would definitely recommend upgrading RAM just to offset any potential issues with Rosetta.
All in all, it’s a fantastic machine.
I’m in roughly the same boat. I’ve been eyeing up the refurb store, but I think I’m gonna try and wait for WWDC, maybe even MacExpo Paris in September.
I’m very glad though to read the positive comments about CS2 being faster than on a PowerBook G4, removes one hurdle for me, now it’s just the matter of is it worth waiting for Core2 Duo/Merom or whatever it’s called.