Apple iMac-Santa Rosa (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz; 20-inch LCD; Superdrive)

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The biggest improvement, specs-wise, is in the iMac's new 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter. 802.11n gives you roughly twice the range and between two and three times as much practical data bandwidth as the older 802.11a, b or g standards. Of course, you'll need a compatible wireless router to get the benefits of 802.11n, and because the Draft-N standard hasn't been completely standardized yet (which is why you'll see it referred to as Draft-N), your best bet is an N router from the same manufacturer as your N Wi-Fi adapter.

The new iMac keyboard is an outstanding example of Apple's trademark industrial design.

Fortunately, Apple has just updated its Airport Express router to the N standard. For our own testing, we successfully connected the iMac to an older 802.11b router, but your mileage may vary, depending on the make and model of your networking hardware. If you spec out a system from any other PC vendor, the price will be similar to a comparable iMac. But, of all the major computer vendors, only Apple offers Draft-N wireless in a desktop.

In addition to 802.11n wireless, Apple also increased the bandwidth of wired data transfers--as well as the usual FireWire 400 connection, there's now also a FireWire 800 port on the back of the unit. No Windows PC offers this, either. FireWire 800 should particularly benefit digital video editors who need to transfer HD movies via a digital camcorder--or really, anyone who needs to move large amounts of data from an external device. FireWire 800 was formerly an exclusive to Apple's Mac Pro, but by bringing it to the iMac, Apple makes its mainstream desktop even friendlier to professional customers.

Apple has also included its new iLife 08 media software suite, which gives you all manner of tools for organizing and editing digital photos and videos.

Performance
Now that the Intel-compatible Mac version of Photoshop CS3 is out, Apple can compete on a level playing field with Windows desktops. And as expected, the new iMac dominates on Photoshop and on multimedia multitasking, and it also does very well on iTunes and CineBench, the latter as much a measure of overall multicore processing power as it is an indicator of a system's ability to process movie files. Compared with a wide range of competing mainstream desktops, the new Apple iMac more than holds its own, with one typical exception: Gaming.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Apple iMac

133

HP Pavilion Media Center TV m8120n

178

Dell Inspiron 531

232

Sony VAIO TP1 Living Room PC

243

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Apple iMac

161