A quick calculation races through your mind the moment you boot up Apple’s new iMac with Retina 5K display.
It’s the mathematics of you adding everything in your life, and figuring out whether you can make room for another computer; one that may not exactly be compatible with everything else.
In my case the calculation took place before I had even laid a finger on the new iMac – all I had seen was the screen – and it went something like this:
Can I go back to an iPhone to take advantage of the new iMac/iPhone integration? There must be one in a drawer somewhere in the Labs.
Can I switch my web development platform to MacOS? It’s quite like Linux, so you bet.
Can I use Visual Studio inside MacOS? Not very well, but I can always stop using Visual Studio.
Can I use the AFR’s Windows-only newspaper app on a Mac? Nope, but I could always quit my job.
Oh thank god, I’m a candidate!
The moment you switch it on, you can see that the iMac 5K is something you would go to great lengths to fit into your life. Don’t have room for its huge, 27-inch screen on your living room table? No problem – just tear down the wall and extend the house into the backyard, and into the neighbour’s if need be.
The Mac OS operating system doesn’t fit with the way your job as an accountant? No problem – just become a graphic artist.
LOVELIEST COMPUTER
The new iMac is that sort of a thing, the loveliest desktop computer I have ever seen in 40 years of using computers. There’s the industrial design of the all-in-one computer, which as I said with previous models of the iMac makes it the most attractive PC of all time.
But, honestly, I’ve barely even stopped to marvel at the design of this iMac. As you might guess from the name of this year’s model, this time around it’s all about the display, and my word, what a display it is. I’ve been using it for just on a week now, and I can’t stop marvelling at it.
The display, you see, has a resolution of 5120 x 2880 pixels, exactly four times the number of pixels of the previous 27-inch model (and indeed of the current non-Retina model). If you thought 4K monitors were sharp, wait till you see this one. It’s not just sharp, the screen real estate is so large, you can play a 4K video at full resolution on the 5K iMac, and still have plenty of room on the screen for editing toolbars below and next to the video.
It’s nuts, and having used it, it’s impossible to go back to using a regular computer screen and not think “oh crumbs”, or words to that effect.
Now, screens this sharp come with their SHARE of problems, chiefly related to how they display applications that were never designed with so many pixels in mind.
For the most part, Apple’s new Mac OS X Yosemite operating system does a good job handling third-party apps. Even Google’s Chrome, which usually “poops the bed” (as they say) when presented with a high-res Windows machine, looked pretty amazing on the 5K iMac. The occasional plug-on displayed with pixelated icons, but mostly it coped well.
Not every app we tested fared as well with the 5K display. As part of my desperate efforts to shoehorn my existing computing needs into the new iMac, I tried running Linux web development software in VMWare’s Fusion application, which allows you to run other operating systems inside the Mac OS. Either Fusion couldn’t cope, or Linux couldn’t cope, but every time I maximised Linux to use the entire display, it went black and froze up. And when it wasn’t freezing, the app wasn’t scaling properly; text that should have been silky smooth looked jagged, like it was running on a regular HD display. My eyeballs, having seen how text should look on a computer screen, couldn’t stand it.
The shoehorning also saw me running Windows apps inside Oracle’s VirtualBox application, and while it was able to use the full screen, I was never able to make the text look anywhere near as good in Windows apps on the Mac as it did in native Mac OS applications.
It’s the mathematics of you adding everything in your life, and figuring out whether you can make room for another computer; one that may not exactly be compatible with everything else.
In my case the calculation took place before I had even laid a finger on the new iMac – all I had seen was the screen – and it went something like this:
Can I go back to an iPhone to take advantage of the new iMac/iPhone integration? There must be one in a drawer somewhere in the Labs.
Can I switch my web development platform to MacOS? It’s quite like Linux, so you bet.
Can I use Visual Studio inside MacOS? Not very well, but I can always stop using Visual Studio.
Can I use the AFR’s Windows-only newspaper app on a Mac? Nope, but I could always quit my job.
Oh thank god, I’m a candidate!
The moment you switch it on, you can see that the iMac 5K is something you would go to great lengths to fit into your life. Don’t have room for its huge, 27-inch screen on your living room table? No problem – just tear down the wall and extend the house into the backyard, and into the neighbour’s if need be.
The Mac OS operating system doesn’t fit with the way your job as an accountant? No problem – just become a graphic artist.
LOVELIEST COMPUTER
The new iMac is that sort of a thing, the loveliest desktop computer I have ever seen in 40 years of using computers. There’s the industrial design of the all-in-one computer, which as I said with previous models of the iMac makes it the most attractive PC of all time.
But, honestly, I’ve barely even stopped to marvel at the design of this iMac. As you might guess from the name of this year’s model, this time around it’s all about the display, and my word, what a display it is. I’ve been using it for just on a week now, and I can’t stop marvelling at it.
The display, you see, has a resolution of 5120 x 2880 pixels, exactly four times the number of pixels of the previous 27-inch model (and indeed of the current non-Retina model). If you thought 4K monitors were sharp, wait till you see this one. It’s not just sharp, the screen real estate is so large, you can play a 4K video at full resolution on the 5K iMac, and still have plenty of room on the screen for editing toolbars below and next to the video.
It’s nuts, and having used it, it’s impossible to go back to using a regular computer screen and not think “oh crumbs”, or words to that effect.
Now, screens this sharp come with their SHARE of problems, chiefly related to how they display applications that were never designed with so many pixels in mind.
For the most part, Apple’s new Mac OS X Yosemite operating system does a good job handling third-party apps. Even Google’s Chrome, which usually “poops the bed” (as they say) when presented with a high-res Windows machine, looked pretty amazing on the 5K iMac. The occasional plug-on displayed with pixelated icons, but mostly it coped well.
Not every app we tested fared as well with the 5K display. As part of my desperate efforts to shoehorn my existing computing needs into the new iMac, I tried running Linux web development software in VMWare’s Fusion application, which allows you to run other operating systems inside the Mac OS. Either Fusion couldn’t cope, or Linux couldn’t cope, but every time I maximised Linux to use the entire display, it went black and froze up. And when it wasn’t freezing, the app wasn’t scaling properly; text that should have been silky smooth looked jagged, like it was running on a regular HD display. My eyeballs, having seen how text should look on a computer screen, couldn’t stand it.
The shoehorning also saw me running Windows apps inside Oracle’s VirtualBox application, and while it was able to use the full screen, I was never able to make the text look anywhere near as good in Windows apps on the Mac as it did in native Mac OS applications.
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