New and Noteworthy: A negative spin on the Intel transition; iMac Core Duo review goes sour; more

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 9:10 a.m. PT

3 min read

A negative spin on the Intel transition Paul Murphy's ZDNN blog spews some harsh criticism about Apple's Intel transition: "First, the reversion to 32bit CPUs isn't much of an issue for the laptops, iMac, and the entertainment products. It does, however, knock out the key business lines: the PowerMac and X-Serves, and therefore cripple Apple's drive to maintain its market share in the high end publishing, photography, and video processing businesses. Fundamentally what's going on with those lines is that each time Intel announces further delays in getting lower power, 64bit, CPUs or integrated multi-core processors out the door in volume, Apple's options for this business line narrow and its credibility among key customer groups driving widespread downstream adoption decreases. Secondly, the promised speed increases simply aren't there. Many reviews have now been done of the Core Duo based products, and the results are virtually unanimous: on applications built specifically for the x86 architecture the dual core 2.Ghz Intel machine is in the range of 10 to 30% faster than the G5 it replaces while producing significantly less than 50% of the G5's throughput on key user applications like Photoshop that have yet to be ported back to the x86 world." More.

iMac Core Duo review goes sour An article for Connected Home Magazine says that what was initially a great experience with Apple's iMac Core Duo turned into something of a nightmare. The reviewer writes: "Somewhat predictably, I've run into a number of problems. Surprisingly, many of these problems have forced me to hard-reboot the machine (by holding down the power button until the device shuts down, then turning it back on). This is something that I've never had to do with previous Apple machines, and I find it disturbing. The Finder, OS X's shell (and Windows Explorer equivalent), crashes fairly regularly and can't be resuscitated. My iPod shuffle refuses to eject and then lingers in iTunes as a weird pseudo-playlist, and the iMac squawks when I remove the device manually. The iMac's three USB 2.0 ports are woefully inadequateï¿½I need at least six, but eight or more would be betterï¿½and the Belkin USB hub I often use refuses to let attached devices appear in the Finder. I purchased a song from iTunes, and it won't download successfully despite repeated tries. Finally, 2 days ago, Apple Mail started crashing incessantly, for most of a day. I'm not sure what fixed it, but when I tested it for the umpteenth time late that day, it started working again. Now I'm not sure that I trust it." More.

Daystar ships 2 GHz Aluminum PowerBook upgrade Daystar Technology today introduced its XLR8 CPU upgrade for the Aluminum PowerBook G4 systems, delivering up to 40 percent more speed for owners of most PowerBook G4 systems. MacNN reports "Daystar claims the upgrade makes G4 PowerBooks run over twice as fast as Intel-based systems running current Mac PowerPC applications and that QuickTime encoding is up to 30 percent faster than Apple's first Intel-based iMacs. The XLR8 MAChSpeed G4 Aluminum CPU upgrade is available for $500 (with three-way shipping), and works with most Aluminum PowerBook G4 systems. It runs at either 1.92GHz or 2.0GHz, depending on the original clock speed of the system." More.

Previously on MacFixIt