Tried an imac today... highly disappointed!

[goatsniper]

An Apple Store that has iPhoto 2 still in their machines does not sound right at all.
You have to realize that the computers in the store will be slower due to people opening up many apps, their hard drives are nearly full with demos for many applications, and if the staff is not updating their software, then that makes it even worse.

I've seen iMacs that have nearly every app in the dock open including an iSight windows showing video. Needless to say it was sloooooooow to the point I had to quit every application. It should have crashed right there. I thought it was going to freeze. But it did not. Once I closed every app, everything was good.

Do not think that the iMac is that slow, it probably isn't. I know Garage Band is slow also on the in store demos on the iMacs, but when I installed it at home (2x867) it was nice and responsive.

In this case, the machine was turned off when I got there. The person in the store powered it on and I literally sat down and hooked up my flash card reader to try iPhoto.

He also claimed that they had just reloaded the box a couple days before when they installed Panther. I have no idea why iPhoto 2 was on there, but he did offer to install version 4 for me. I just didn't have enough time to wait and try it out.

 

[Squire]

Good point, MacAficionado. There are only two operations that really bother my Mac: One is the iPhoto Book problem mentioned above and two is playback of one of my GarageBand tunes (23.5 MB with 14 tracks).

Squire

Edit: I recall trying to edit stuff on iPhoto 2 (just simple B&W changes, for example) and having to scroll back one pic, then forward to see the result. No, I'm quite happy with my 5 seconds.

 

[goatsniper]

The person with that 1Ghz iMac never stated that he had iPhoto4, which would come with any new Mac. iPhoto 4 is at least 30-50% faster than earlier versions.

http://www2.truman.edu/~jps137/web/iphoto.avi (requires DivX and sorry, I couldn't find a way to change the video size in QT Pro compressing it to divx, recorded with an iSight)

Awesome video! That helps a lot. You guys are extremely helpful and I appreciate all the input.

From this, I have finally concluded that half of the problem (the scrolling issue) was a memory bottleneck. 256MB is not enough to smoothly move between 4MP pics. It seems the editing features (b/w, sepia, enhance) are processor bound. I'm looking at 4-6 seconds response time here.

 

[brhmac]

Wow!

Have we become that impatient?

Does 5 seconds to manipulate almost 3 megabytes of data really rise to the level of "brutal"?

 

[Krizoitz]

iPhoto 2 came up. The import went flawlessly. Scrolling around and previewing the pictures worked great. When I tried out Edit mode, however, things really bogged down. Moving from one image to the next took 2-3 seconds. Adjusting the contrast and brightness was similarly sluggish. iPhoto was the only application running on the machine.

First you are talking about not one but two generation old software. And performance is one of the things they have really focused on improving with iPhoto upgrades, especially version 4.

Second, I'm not sure how this time compares to other applications so I can't give you a good gauge but I'm running an 800mhz iMac 17" with iPhoto 3 and moving between images in the edit mode (4 megapix images) takes less than a second. Similarly brightness and contrast are snappy too. Black and White takes a couple seconds as does the auto-enhance feature. Oh and I have Folding@Home running in the background plus eyeTV is recording a show.

 

[blackfox]

goatsniper...

Perhaps this is ignoring the problem, but iPhoto 2 was god awful and I have long switched to iView MediaPro...a better program than iPhoto in almost every way...although I cannot comment on how it compares with v.4...The eMac is a great looking machine, if this is all that is holding you back, you may want to consider this alternative...here is a link:
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/products/mediapro/profeatures1.html

 

[Squire]

Have we become that impatient?

Does 5 seconds to manipulate almost 3 megabytes of data really rise to the level of "brutal"?

Whoa! Please reread what I posted earlier.

I specifically mentioned that working with the Photo Book aspect of iPhoto was brutal and then went on to say that the 5 seconds for completing the other commands was okay. I'll gladly show you what I call "brutal" performance.

1) I have a 40-page photo album set up. To move the scroll bar from page one to the last page takes 5 seconds. It's not even a fluid 5 seconds- it jumps over an inch, stops, and moves over 2 more inches, then ends up at the end.

2) To move a page location (say switching the locations of pages 37 and 38) takes 8 seconds. I got the beachball and, in the end, the page didn't go where i wanted it to go.

I could go on, but I think you see my point. The performance of iPhoto 4 on the Kodak Photo Book tasks is brutal. Make a full album (40 pages), load it with 40-60 fairly high quality shots, and play around with it. The 5 seconds is not a problem editing a pic to B&W. The 8 seconds that it took to NOT get the location of my photo book pages correct was not acceptable.

Squire

 

[wrldwzrd89]

First you are talking about not one but two generation old software. And performance is one of the things they have really focused on improving with iPhoto upgrades, especially version 4.

Second, I'm not sure how this time compares to other applications so I can't give you a good gauge but I'm running an 800mhz iMac 17" with iPhoto 3 and moving between images in the edit mode (4 megapix images) takes less than a second. Similarly brightness and contrast are snappy too. Black and White takes a couple seconds as does the auto-enhance feature. Oh and I have Folding@Home running in the background plus eyeTV is recording a show.

No, it's only one generation behind. Did you see the keynote where Steve Jobs introduced iPhoto 4? If you didn't, he said he was going straight from iPhoto 2 to iPhoto 4, skipping 3. So there is no such thing as "iPhoto 3".

 

[goatsniper]

Have we become that impatient?

Does 5 seconds to manipulate almost 3 megabytes of data really rise to the level of "brutal"?

My main concern is to not take a step backward in performance. My current setup is a dual 733 PIII / 256MB machine running Win XP.

To compare, the one-click auto enhance feature in Photoshop Elements is nearly instantaneous on my box with 4MP pics. Sepia and B/W filters work likewise.

Not to compare PSE with iPHoto, but yes, I could get impatient waiting 5 seconds to enhance a photo on a new machine when I have 100 of them to do.

From an earlier post, I learned that I could still use PSE to edit from iPhoto, but I still need to launch the app EVERY TIME I want to edit a new pic. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but that sucks too.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

My main concern is to not take a step backward in performance. My current setup is a dual 733 PIII / 256MB machine running Win XP.

To compare, the one-click auto enhance feature in Photoshop Elements is nearly instantaneous on my box with 4MP pics. Sepia and B/W filters work likewise.

Not to compare PSE with iPHoto, but yes, I could get impatient waiting 5 seconds to enhance a photo on a new machine when I have 100 of them to do.

From an earlier post, I learned that I could still use PSE to edit from iPhoto, but I still need to launch the app EVERY TIME I want to edit a new pic. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but that sucks too.

There is another way...don't go through iPhoto at all! Open Photoshop (or whatever editing application you want to use), then navigate to the iPhoto library folder, and inside there, find the picture you want to edit. This saves you from needlessly launching and relaunching your editor app. It has one downside, though - you may not know which photo is which in your iPhoto library folder. That's what the Preview column in Column view (used in Open & Save dialogs) (if enabled) is for, right?

 

[ingenious]

I'm not a Mac owner and normally do not have access to a store to try out products. I'm seriously considering the new emac 1.25ghz for home use... mainly the iphoto, itunes, and garageband apps. But after trying an imac recently in a store, I now have serious concerns about performance.

I was at a retail store yesterday and was able to try out an imac for the first time. It was a 15" 800mhz model with 256MB and Panther 10.3.2 OS. I was very impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and found it very easy to navigate.

So I proceeded to plug up my flash card reader with four high resolution (4 megapixel) photos on it to test iPhoto. iPhoto 2 came up. The import went flawlessly. Scrolling around and previewing the pictures worked great. When I tried out Edit mode, however, things really bogged down. Moving from one image to the next took 2-3 seconds. Adjusting the contrast and brightness was similarly sluggish. iPhoto was the only application running on the machine.

My question is, if I do go for the emac, is it going to be substantially faster doing these iPhoto edit operations? Will 512MB RAM also improve the performance? I understand that iPhoto 4 improved performance for large albums, but I was only dealing with 4 pictures here. I was really unimpressed with the 800mhz G4. So what it boils down to is... will a 1.25ghz G4 be substantially faster, or should I go for a low end G5?

Thanks for everyone's input.

Yes, I the eMac will be faster. iPhoto 2 had some speed issues that iPhoto 4 cleared up. It will come with your new computer.

 

[vouder17]

Ok well i have a 233mhz imac 384MB RAM, and have iPhoto 4, it took only 11 seconds to convert a 5megapixel picture to black and white with 4 other apps open. Which compared to everyone else i think it is quite fast!!

But that is just what i think. I reckon you wll be more than happy with the 1.25Ghz emac, and i think you should perhaps fill it up with RAM, and i don't think you will notice any problems with the new eMac's

 

[rueyeet]

From an earlier post, I learned that I could still use PSE to edit from iPhoto, but I still need to launch the app EVERY TIME I want to edit a new pic. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but that sucks too.

Edit the photos directly in Photoshop first, then import. iPhoto is mostly meant as an organizer, not a full-featured image editor. Sure, the functions are there, but they're intended more for the average Joe who takes a dozen or so moderate-resolution shots and then just wants a quick touch-up, not a pro or power-consumer who wants to batch-edit hundreds of hi-res photos.

And yes, definitely the more memory the better for OS X.

 

[learthur]

Speed comparison

I think the REAL question is "Is a 1.25 Ghz G4 fast enough for casual use?" It most certainly is fast enough for all the iLife apps, especially iLife '04 which comes now standard with Panther (10.3.3).

Don't even hesitate. Having switched from the PC world myself 20 months ago, I can tell you, in the store your first impressions and skeptical attitude (like mine) may in some areas leave you wondering about the speed. Once you get the machine home and use it for a couple weeks, all your fears, concerns, and skepticism will vanish--guaranteed! In fact, you will probably join the tribe of Mac zealots.

In general, I think anything slower than 1GHZ G4 runs a bit sluggish. Once you get to 1GHZ and for sure at 1.25GHZ, things run VERY smooth. Remember that a 100MHZ speed bump in a G4 is A LOT more speed bump (as far as your UI perception anyway) than 100MHZ in a Pentium 4.

There is no doubt in my mind the new eMac is a great machine.
Enjoy it!

 

[cdp788]

Great! Exactly what I needed to know. I had a hunch that the 256MB on my test machine was the bottleneck.

I was thinking of ordering an emac 1.25ghz with 512MB. Do you think that is enough to eliminate the problem?

you may want to order it with stock memory and then get the additional mem. stick from crucial. apple's markups are near 100%. for what you'd pay apple, you could have 786 mb.

 

[learthur]

How much memory?

Mac OS X handles memory very efficiently. Much smoother than Windows (as far as user perception is concerned).

I routinely put at least 1GB RAM in all my Macs. Most applications will never need this. In fact you can run a dozen applications at once and do just fine in most instances with just 512MB.

The problem is those few apps which use LOTS of memory. Examples include AmadeusII (I use for audio recording), and Combine PDFs, and I think iDVD uses lots of memory when encoding (not sure), perhaps iMovie does too.

I agree with above, order as little memory as possible from Apple then use Crucial memory. Order your Mac with as many free memory slots available as possible. Then try it at 512MB and then upgrade to 1GB if you aren't happy. Mac OS X comes with a simple and neat ACTIVITY MONITOR utility which will show you in real time how much memory you are using.

 

[MacAficionado]

My main concern is to not take a step backward in performance. My current setup is a dual 733 PIII / 256MB machine running Win XP.

To compare, the one-click auto enhance feature in Photoshop Elements is nearly instantaneous on my box with 4MP pics. Sepia and B/W filters work likewise.

Not to compare PSE with iPHoto, but yes, I could get impatient waiting 5 seconds to enhance a photo on a new machine when I have 100 of them to do.

From an earlier post, I learned that I could still use PSE to edit from iPhoto, but I still need to launch the app EVERY TIME I want to edit a new pic. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but that sucks too.

The iMacs in the store should have Photoshop installed. Maybe you should try using PS instead. PS Elements I believe are in there too, should have better perfromance that iPhoto for editing.

I never saw iPhoto as an editor, more like an organizer that with time developed more "capabilities". Try Photoshop Elements, you will not be disappointed!

I hope!

 

[goatsniper]

I think the REAL question is "Is a 1.25 Ghz G4 fast enough for casual use?" It most certainly is fast enough for all the iLife apps, especially iLife '04 which comes now standard with Panther (10.3.3).

Don't even hesitate. Having switched from the PC world myself 20 months ago, I can tell you, in the store your first impressions and skeptical attitude (like mine) may in some areas leave you wondering about the speed. Once you get the machine home and use it for a couple weeks, all your fears, concerns, and skepticism will vanish--guaranteed! In fact, you will probably join the tribe of Mac zealots.

In general, I think anything slower than 1GHZ G4 runs a bit sluggish. Once you get to 1GHZ and for sure at 1.25GHZ, things run VERY smooth. Remember that a 100MHZ speed bump in a G4 is A LOT more speed bump (as far as your UI perception anyway) than 100MHZ in a Pentium 4.

There is no doubt in my mind the new eMac is a great machine.
Enjoy it!

Ok, I'm convinced. I'm probably overanalyzing the iPhoto issues anyway. Like someone else said, the editing features are just for casual use. I still have PhotoShop Elements for the really tough jobs.

So I think I'll order the $999 emac and upgrade the standard 256MB with a $120 512MB stick from Crucial for a total of 768MB. That should do fine.

Thanks again to everyone for the input.

 

[carbonmotion]

if you want to edit photos, get the dummy version of adobe photoshop...enough said

 

[zaphoyd]

667 DVI TiBook
1GB of ram
10.3.3
iPhoto 4.0.1
Photoshop 7.0.1

scrolling and switching pictures is instant 5-6 seconds for black and white/sepia 1-2 seconds for enhance.

if I set photoshop as the iPhoto editor, double clicking a photo opens in photoshop. you do NOT have to relaunch photoshop each time. It takes a few seconds to load the photo in photoshop, same as regular photoshop load from its open command. Change to black and white from photoshop is instant. saving in photoshop saves it back to iPhoto.

if you select a group of photos in iphoto then double click on one, it opens ALL selected photos in photoshop automaticly. You can then hit B&W save close window very quickly.

I have all normal operatting apps running. mail, ichat, safari, itunes, preview, terminal, bbedit, text edit, launch bar etc.



-Peter Thorson

 

[goatsniper]

667 DVI TiBook
1GB of ram
10.3.3
iPhoto 4.0.1
Photoshop 7.0.1

scrolling and switching pictures is instant 5-6 seconds for black and white/sepia 1-2 seconds for enhance.

if I set photoshop as the iPhoto editor, double clicking a photo opens in photoshop. you do NOT have to relaunch photoshop each time. It takes a few seconds to load the photo in photoshop, same as regular photoshop load from its open command. Change to black and white from photoshop is instant. saving in photoshop saves it back to iPhoto.

if you select a group of photos in iphoto then double click on one, it opens ALL selected photos in photoshop automaticly. You can then hit B&W save close window very quickly.

I have all normal operatting apps running. mail, ichat, safari, itunes, preview, terminal, bbedit, text edit, launch bar etc.

That's great news regarding Photoshop editing from iPhoto. I assume the same goes for PS Elements. I thought the open/close repeat cycle sounded a bit bone-headed.

Thanks for replying. Now I'm definitely going for the emac 1.25!

 

[oingoboingo]

That's great news regarding Photoshop editing from iPhoto. I assume the same goes for PS Elements. I thought the open/close repeat cycle sounded a bit bone-headed.

Thanks for replying. Now I'm definitely going for the emac 1.25!

Goatsniper, I think you'll be happy with the new 1.25GHz eMac. Just for comparison, I did a quick test with iPhoto 4 and PhotoShop 7.0.1 on my 1GHz 12" PowerBook, with 768MB RAM. Converting a 2 megapixel colour image to black&white using iPhoto took approximately 3 seconds. Doing a sepia conversion took around the same length of time...roughly 3 seconds.

When using PhotoShop 7, the same image took approximately 0.5 seconds to convert to B&W. There's a world of difference between iPhoto image processing performance and PhotoShop performance. It's not necessarily the hardware's fault...as others have pointed out, iPhoto is a basic photo library application, with some simple image editing thrown in. It's not a speed demon with these kinds of tasks, but that doesn't mean that other software on your Mac won't be, and also as pointed out, you can use iPhoto's organisational abilities and PhotoShop's editing power hand-in-hand.

By the way, your 1.25GHz eMac should be a fair amount faster than my PowerBook...25% higher core clock speed and a 167MHz bus (I think), so you should be experiencing half-second, but most likely, less than that, processing speeds (for a 2MP image anyway) in PhotoShop.

Let us know when you have your new eMac!

 

[realityisterror]

if you want to B&W a 100 or so at a time, just use iphoto's batch edit...
select the pictures and Photos --> Batch Change... from there set it to B&W the images and hide iPhoto. do some macrumor'ing and wait till it's done...
in all seriousness, you will have no problem with the eMac and iPhoto. even if it is slow, remember that it (unless you're making a book apparently) works right and makes sense. and that's the most important thing right??

reality

 

[Dave00]

I would agree that iPhoto in its current iteration is not meant as a full-featured editor, but more as an organizer/viewer. If you want to edit/batch-edit photos quickly, the best app is Graphic Converter (http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/graphcon.htm). It's shareware, $30 to register, and very, very fast on my Pismo (with 400Mhz G3 and 320MB ram). Some features are still in development - red eye reduction still isn't that good, I use Canon software for that - but other features are top-notch. There's no better/faster way to say, convert 50 photos into a web-optimized format.

iPhoto is better for organizing your "finished product" photos (although Graphic Converter also has a very nice browser). For each of my photos, I have the original unedited version from the camera, an optimized version (crop, color balance, etc.), and then any modified versions (web optimized, area crops, sepia version, etc.).

-Dave

 

[Squire]

if you want to B&W a 100 or so at a time, just use iphoto's batch edit...
select the pictures and Photos --> Batch Change... from there set it to B&W the images and hide iPhoto. do some macrumor'ing and wait till it's done...
in all seriousness, you will have no problem with the eMac and iPhoto. even if it is slow, remember that it (unless you're making a book apparently) works right and makes sense. and that's the most important thing right??

reality

Hear, hear!

I hope you enjoy your new purchase. Probably the best thing that comes with Macs (besides the OS) is the community of people willing to help. These forums are a life-saver.

Squire