bennett discusses the imac 27

i recently purchased a new computer. i wanted something fast, powerful, and ready to rock to use for photoshop, maya, and z brush. so, being an electronics sales person, i happen to know the many virtues of mac products when it comes to computing. i have never purchased an apple product. i had an ipod, for less than a year, that my mom gave me because she couldnt figure out how to use it. i loved it, up until the battery in it died for no good reason and i could no longer charge it. now i'm using a dell jukebox, and mp3 player that may even predate the ipod that i borrowed from an ex girlfriend before she was an ex girlfriend. it still works, despite its clunky, outdated, menu structure. my overall impression was that apple had a good product, but not worth spending money on.

when it comes to computers, i used a few g5 mac towers at school in my filmmaking classes, and occasionally played around on the apple macbook/pros. My girlfriend has one, my best friend has one, theyre fairly common among people in my life and i enjoyed using the simple interface and they really are powerful machines. plus the 27 inch widescreen LED seemed like a nice deal. so i bought one, despite my misgivings on the quality of the user expirience for more than a few hours.

the expirience has been less exciting than i had hoped.

most of my problems have stemmed from the mouse and keyboard, a problem i thought would be easily fixed with a new mouse and keyboard, however, i am now typing on a regular windows style keyboard and have discovered in maya that using the f8 key does nothing. at all. the end and home keys also remain useless, unsuprising because i dont remember seeing them on the original keyboard, but somewhat counter productive when i am writing. most of the keyboard shortcuts i know from zbrush dont work on the mac, and ive yet to find a keyboard layout in any of the menus (the search feature proving pretty much useless) and so have to manually adjust my brush sizes vie the space key instead of a simple click of my brackets. its performance in 3d applications has been somewhat appaling, i had a 3 second load time to rotate a 6 face cube sitting by itself in zero space. maybe i shouldve held out for a better graphics card model.

the mouse also has no middle mouse click, so i cant really use it for navigating maya, and for some reason i bought a really shitty mouse to replace it that i am going to return, it keeps trying to scroll if i dont click down on it directly.

the 27 inch display is quite lovely, vibrant, and has been a nice upgrade over my old, dim-by-comparison- 22 inch screen except for the flickering problem. apperently, in this first generation of new imacs, there is a problem among the 27 inch sized models that causes the screen to flicker, shut off and on, and then pacman down through the bottom of the monitor and back out to top. when i ignored this issue, continuing to go about my business sawn in half and placed atop itself, i discovered that the screen will continue to click around over the course of about 45 minutes and eventually cycle a full circle. this problem is apparently known by the wonderful people at apple who have no idea why it happens and have yet to offer me a valid fix.

having covered the bad things, i have to say i am enjoying the machine itself. when NOT using maya it runs very fast, zbrush didnt seem to crawl too slow and i am hoping if i upgrade to 8+gb of ddr it will increase my performance and stop the slowdown problems i've been having with maya. it works great with photoshop, problems with the keyboard shortcuts, no issues with using high resolution images or running large filters. and for watching movies its great when the screen isnt flickering.

it seems ot handle multitasking well, i generally have several applications open at once. i was able to illustrate an animatic while going back and forth between photoshop and affter effects with oth programs open with no difficulties and the renders go much faster than on my pc. it seems like a really great purchase except for a few slightly major setbacks.

what i would like to do is get bootcamp set up and see how this thing runs with windows 7, because then i wll be able to use my keyboard properly, and enjoy myself a bit more. nothing against the mac OS, its just not what im used to. whne i get around to setting that up, i will probably return to this subject. right now, my feelings are i shouldnt have bought this mac, and just gone for a nice quad-core asus and a samsung led monitor instead.