Last November when I was planning the purchase of my iMac I debated waiting for the Intel Macs to come along. My final decision was to play it safe and buy a G5 trading horsepower for stability. Well it turns out that was a good choice. Today geek.com put out an errata document listing 34 known issues with the new Mac Intel processors. This makes me glad that I played it safe with the G5, but it also concerns me a bit. As Apple grows, I hope that their product quality does not suffer. It was great that they were able to release the Intel Macs so early, but not if quality suffered as a result.

Another thing that bugs me about the new iMac is that Steve Jobs himself touted at MacWorld about how the new Intel iMac was 2 to 3 times faster than its predecessor. Well I had a chance to test this out myself when I was playing with a friend’s Mactel and I can say that this is definitely not the case. I did test the boot time and the Intel Mac does have the G5 beaten hands down with a boot up time of just over 30 seconds. But in terms of processing speed using applications, I didn’t experience that much of a performance increase. I played around in Garage Band (of course), iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and Photoshop and while the Mactel was marginally faster than my G5, there wasn’t a significant difference.

I suppose that at some point I will be using an Intel Mac as my daily driver, but I won’t be buying this year’s model. The time tested advice of waiting till a product has been out for a while to purchase has proven itself true here. My message to Apple, (I know they are just yearning to hear what I think) is to take a little time and manufacture a better product. You might take a sales hit in the short term but you will be far more successful in the long term. Okay, I will get off my soap box for now!

To end this post on a positive note, I do love the new ads for the Intel Macs!