A friend of mine has an I-Mac sitting idle in his office, and today he offered to give it to me. He says it needs a new OS, but he can provide one.
What do I need to know about the Mac? What can I do with an I-Mac? For reference, I’m using a 500mHz Pentium right now. Do I-Macs have enough storage and processing power for Final Cut Pro? (I’d like to learn FCP and practice with it.)
It’s iMac. If you keep saying “I-Mac,” people will point and laugh at you.
There are many many different models of iMac, so it’s impossible to answer the question without more information. A newer one can definitely handle FCP like a champ.
If you don’t know which model iMac it is, you can find out at applehistory.com.
Depends on which iMac you’re talking about (see the Apple History link above).
Though if you’re currently using a 500MHz Pentium, almost any iMac will be faster by comparison.
Is it one of the white flat screen “desk lamp” iMacs or the pretty fruity colored ones with the built-in CRT monitor?
I don’t know if Final Cut works on G3s (fruity CRT iMacs), but it should work on G4s (desk lamp). (I am not really familiar with Final Cut, to be honest, so I could be way off.)
Unless he’s offering you one of the first models of iMac (the Bondi—more like a teal) iMac from 1998 (which had a 233 MHz CPU), then most any iMac you get will be a step up from your current PC. And any iMac (even 1998 Bondi) will run the latest OS X, Panther. (I think the original Bondi might be dog slow, but Apple says it’ll run.)
It looks like this, only purple.
Well, it could be one of several iMac revisions. Revision C is pretty old and slow—266 MHz CPU, max 256 megs of RAM. Not much better than the first Bondi iMac. It was followed by Revision D (link at bottom of C page) which was a little better, and took more RAM.
However, the iMac DV was much better, with CPU speed of 400, max. RAM of 1 GB, and a larger (but not whopping large) hard drive. After the iMac DV, I think they stopped doing the fruity colors.
iMac hard drives and CPUs can be upgraded, though. At a cost, of course. The RAM limit—well, there’s not much to be done about that.
You can tell if you are talking about one of the faster iMacs if it has a “slot loading” CD (DVD) drive, instead of the tray that pops out to take your CD. If it’s got a slot (where you slide the CD in and the CD drive “grabs” it), then you’ve got a pretty nice iMac there. The older ones—well, something can be done with them, they’re cool, but more limited. I had a slot-loading iMac for a while and it was very nice. Ran OS X well.
I use this computer (PC) for getting on the Internet, sending e-mail, composing web pages (I use Netscape Composer for that), editing photos (Ulead PhotoImpact 6), and writing Word documents. Im guessing the iMac will do all that just as well? Better?
Suppose I get an iPod? I’m guessing it will plug right into the iMac? (Also, would I be able to copy my CDs onto the iPod with the iMac?)
The Mac is pretty much made for that stuff, so I’m guessing you’d have at least as good an experience as you currently have on your PC, and probably much better. There are plenty of good browsers to choose from on the Mac. You’ll need to find substitutions for your web authoring and photo editing apps, but again, there are plenty of options on the Mac side. I’m not familiar with the apps you named (except Word, of course), so I can’t recommend anything offhand. The Mac version of Word is fully compatible with the current Windows version.
Keep in mind that the G3 processor in that iMac is seriously long in the tooth, and that even some of Apple’s consumer-grade apps won’t run on it, or will run really slowly. If you find you take a liking to the Mac experience, I’d say consider dropping a few hundred dollars on a G4 upgrade for the machine, or else put it on eBay and put whatever you get for it toward a Mac mini.
If your iMac model has a Firewire port (the iMac DV came with them), then you’ll have no problem using your iPod with it. (In order to run the necessary iTunes version, you need to make sure you’re running OS X, which it sounds like your friend will get for you.) You can rip your songs from your CDs to the iMac, and then copy from the iMac to the iPod, with no trouble. If it’s an earlier model without a Firewire port, you may be out of luck; there might be a workaround, but I don’t know what it would be.
I’m afraid the mods have prohibited me from divulging any information on iMacs or anything Apple-related outside of The Pit.
Johnny L.A., assuming that the iMac in question has MacOS X installed, you can always go to the Apple menu in the upper-left corner, choose “About This Mac,” then click on “More Info…” to get a truckload of details about the specific configuration of the computer.
And as a guy whose primary home computer is an iMac DV+ (450MHz G3 processor, 384MB of RAM), I think it holds up pretty well for a five-year-old computer; I don’t see any reason why your iMac can’t do all the tasks you listed without any problems.
You can run an ipod off a USB port, it’s just slower.