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iMac G5 Pros and Cons

Hi,

I have admired Apple computers since I was a child and even used the old Macs in high school (15 years ago). Finally, 2 years ago, I bought my first Apple system. I bought an iBook G4 12". I was smitten with Mac OS X. The power and tools from the Unix world married with the ease of use and attractiveness of the previous Mac OS versions. I now find Windows to be extremely inferior.

Unfortunately, my iBook had several quality issues that required it to be sent in for repair a few times. The genius bar system has been an extreme pleasure to use for support and repair. Apple even felt bad about all the repairs my iBook had to endure and they recently gave me a new iBook. (Very cool!!)

I now want to throw my Windows desktop in the trash and get an Apple desktop. Power Macs are a little too expensive for me right now. So, I am considering a 17" iMac G5. To avoid any issues with quality I would appreciate it if those who already have this system could share the pros and cons with me. I would be interested in Pros and Cons related to performance and quality. Has anyone had any issues that required repair? How is the performance compared to PCs and compared to the Power Macs?

Does anyone recommend a different Mac? (Mac mini or Power Mac)

Has anyone else recently switched to Mac? Please share your experience.

Forgive me, if this has been repeated in this group before.

Thanks,

Michael

iBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Nov 29, 2005 8:06 AM

Best reply

howwow

Level 4

3,538 points

Posted on Nov 29, 2005 9:53 AM

Hi Michael, I am very delighted to help you answer your queries, from one mac lover to another...

I think this is my 4th or 5th Desktop Mac that I owned, the last was the G4 Cube which I "loved to death" also I put in considerable upgrades, but the lure of the iMac G5 was simply just too powerful, I also had an iBook 12" and now own a PowerBook 12".

iMac G5 Pros
•Relatively "cheap", affordable - for everything you need in one sleek and extremely beautiful design, you can't find another in the market today
•Space Saver - takes up little space, light-weight, easy to carry around, even to the Service Centre
•Less wire clutter - if you go totally wireless with the keyboard, mouse and internet. But I would hold on to the Mighty Mouse
•For a consumer mac, its G5 power is more than adequate for your computing needs, from iLife apps to games etc
•You get a "free" iSight camera built-in

iMac G5 Cons
•Limited Expandability - Only supports up to 2.5G Ram right now, with just one Ram slot in the Rev. C, so you must choose your Ram wisely; Same goes with one Hard Disk, Graphics Card etc, it's all built-in, you will need to get external FireWire drives, should you one day run out of the (BTO) 500G HD space!
•Only up to 20" Screen Space, if you want something bigger, you might want to opt for the Mac mini
•Fan noise - this is really user-dependent, some suffer from constant buzzing and fan noise, especially from the Rev. As, some Rev. Bs, but others have absolutely quiet iMacs...
•Hard or Impossible to Upgrade - again, with everything in a sleek enclosure, but harder if you want to change or add a new HD, upgrade a new Graphics Card, add another PCI card etc etc... but then and again, if you need to do all that, you'd probably better off with a Pro Mac G5

I think that's about all I can contribute, but seriously, I would advice you to get the 20" iMac instead, the screen size is just nice, nowadays for home consumer computer needs, if you notice, LCD screen models are coming out with more and more 19" and above... You won't regret the 20", I love mine just the way it is...

Althought it is a G5 processor, of course the computing power cannot be compare to a Pro G5, which has higher processor speed, front side bus, video ram, dual core etc, those are meant for pro running applications, if you find yourself needing to run apps like FCP, Motion etc everyday, then you should be looking for the G5

Other than that, I think the iMac G5 20" is the "perfect home consumer" mac.

Cheers

iMac G5 20" (Ambient Light Sensor) Mac OS X (10.4.3) 250G HD, 2G Ram

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49 replies

Dec 5, 2005 1:50 PM in response to Dave Jones4

Mega-ditto my friend.

hansa

Level 1

0 points

Dec 10, 2005 1:38 PM in response to Nigel Hamlin

Yeah- thanks for the reply.
I have turned it off, but only when forced to because the freeze will not even begin to thaw otherwise.

I did try your combo suggestion and it wroked very well until recently- I ran the software update and installed a few things. After restart I had the same problem! Now it is worse, though.

****.

hansa

Level 1

0 points

Dec 10, 2005 4:16 PM in response to hansa

I think it has something to do with the migration from my laptop because when I operate under a newly created login user, it works fine....any more ideas?
Hansa

Dec 10, 2005 4:52 PM in response to hansa

Hi Hansa,

I think it has something to do with the migration from my laptop because when I operate under a newly created login user, it works fine....any more ideas?

Ah, interesting! So now I'm wondering, when you migrated your user account from the PowerBook, how exactly did you do that? And what exactly did you copy across, rather than re-install?

Of particular suspicion could be the preference files (in ~/Library/Preferences). NOT copying these across does mean that you would need to reset all of the prefs in each of your apps, but copying them does risk 'importing' damaged pref files into your new system. Also, it's a bad move to copy across some of the stuff in ~/Library if, at the same time, you are implicitly moving up to a newer OS version. What version of the OS were you running on the PowerBook just prior to the migration?

One thing you could try checking are the Fonts (in ~/Library/Fonts), particularly if it's possible that you copied some, or all, of these across: launch Font Book (in Applications), select the User font collection, click on one of the fonts, then do CMD-A (to select all of them), then select "Vailidate Fonts" from the File menu.

Try that lot, and then let us know what, if anything, you found!

Nigel

iMac G5 (iSight 2.1GHz), PB G3 (WS 300 MHz) and 9600/350 Mac OS X (10.4.3) Also still running 10.2.8 and 9.1 (for posterity!)

iMac G5 Pros and Cons