Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs—they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

What’s Out There

Click for larger

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two(ish) which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. [Note: There are technically more than two voltages in use, which reader Michael clarifies rather wonderfully here]. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe).” It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything—they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that plans to has adopt[ed] the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the IEC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

Still something you wanna know? Still can’t figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Today, as soon as Google showed off its beta GPS navigator, the stocks of Garmin, TomTom and other companies in that industry fell into the toilet. It’s hard to compete with free Google apps, but that’s not why they’re screwed…

TomTom owns Tele Atlas, who drives the roads of the world in order to make maps, and until recently was a major map provider for Google. Nokia owns the only major competitor, Navteq, who has also provided maps for Google. Look at Google Maps now, though, and you’ll see that the entire US bears just one single copyright: Google’s.

Street View wasn’t just a neat way to get imagery to accompany the data already found in Google Maps. As it happens, it was a way to drive the same roads that were already in Google Maps, tracing them with Google’s own road teams, and—through efficiency and brute force—do away with those costly map licenses. Google has mapped the US, and will surely map the rest of the world soon enough.

This is just a timely example of Google’s monstrous growth, and the destruction it causes. Any business that trades in data or packages it for public consumption may one day face the same issues. It’s not just whether or not to compete with the behemoth, but even whether or not to go into business with it. In either case, there is a chance of being destroyed.

Garmin might have a long-standing relationship with Navteq, but they don’t own any maps. How can they compete with a free Google app when they still have to pay? (Worse, Garmin is still stuck in the hardware business, where profits are extra thin.) TomTom owns the maps, but charges $100 for their own app because they also make money licensing maps to car makers, competing GPS makers and web services—like Google. Before, Google was a fat revenue source for TomTom; now Google is a sprightly competitor.

If a unique supply of data was the only thing keeping TomTom and others on the Google chuck wagon, who will be next to fall off?

I was always afraid of spiders growing up, not because of the eight legs or the umpteen eyes, but because of the way they kill their prey. They get them in a nice convenient position, then they use their venom to hollow out their victim’s insides, until they’re just dead-eyed shells. To be killed in such a manner is my worst nightmare; perhaps I should ask TomTom how it feels.

I am a fan of Google products, and a daily user of them. This is not an attack of Google’s business practices, but an explanation of the sort of destructive innovation that has made them so huge so fast. (It’s also a warning to consider carefully any entities that gets this strong, especially if you plan on going into business with one.) Though predecessors like Microsoft experienced similar explosive growth, and grew a similar sudden global dependence, we’ve never seen the likes of Google. The GPS business isn’t the only one that will be consumed by its mighty maw before it’s had its run.

We’ve already seen the devaluation of the office apps that make Microsoft rich; we’ve already seen how Google’s experiences with Apple and others helped it create telecommunications platforms (both mobile with Android and completely virtual with Google Voice) that threaten its former partners’ existence; we’ve already seen how Google converts photos, videos, news wire stories and other former commodities into freebies by smashing the false notion of scarcity that “service” providers had literally banked on.

So who is next? What other hallowed brands will go the way of Garmin and TomTom? Corbis and Getty? Reuters and AP? Warner and Disney?

This is a tale already told, bound to be told again, but the fundamentals are worth studying—even if we use Google Docs spreadsheets to do it. I have never spoken with a spider, but I am certain they’re not evil, despite what fantasy lore tells us. They’re just doing what comes naturally, and doing a hell of a job.

We see a lot of gadgets come in the door here at Engadget. In fact, getting them in the door is actually the easy part… it’s getting them back out that’s a bit confusing. Recycling — something that most of us do on a day-to-day basis with our trash — is a bit stickier when it comes to gadgets. In recent years, however, most major consumer electronics companies have stepped up their games a bit and begun “take back” recycling programs of their own. There are a lot of resources out there if you want to rid yourself of old gadgets in a responsible way, but it can be a pretty overwhelming prospect, especially if (like us) you have an actual pile of old cellphones which has been growing since 1998. We thought about that a lot, and decided to try to make sense of all the wild masses of information out there on the internet, and to provide our readers a central location to look for all that information. Read on and see what we’ve come up with!

Continue reading How-to: recycle your old gadgets

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Back when Norman Rockwell ruled Saturday evenings, Adobe wasn’t even a gleam in some nerd’s eye, but a new book shows that the painter was, nevertheless, a photoshop god.

Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people and the unintentionally hilarious DIY props and sets that he required to make his painted fantasies of Americana come true.

The book is not about painting. Rockwell’s oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell’s photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It’s almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country’s collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The photos are as memorable as the paintings: There’s a little boy whose feet are propped up on thick books, a walking still-life; there’s a naked lady who ended up a mermaid in a lobster trap; there are men and women in various states of frustration, concentration and bliss, whose facial expressions defined Rockwell’s style. These were mostly not agency models, but friends and neighbors who were pleased to help out, but not always thrilled by the finished product.

Since Rockwell was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time, you can imagine the rights to all of his images (paintings and photos) are carefully managed. The publisher was kind enough to let us show you the book cover plus two additional pairings, below. I encourage you to buy the book ($26.40 at Amazon)—what you see here is just a quick lick of the spoon:

Going and Coming, 1947
You’ll notice the book jacket shows a painting of a family embarking on a summer vacation—Granny, Spot and all—coupled with a photo of a similar scene with far less action. There’s a kid sticking out of the car in both, but many family members are missing. This is because they were photographed separately, in Rockwell’s studio, and painted in where needed. (You’ll also notice that the photo on the jacket is reversed—the car was pointed in the other direction but I suppose that wouldn’t have looked as cool.)

Circus, 1955
What I liked about this picture is that you get to see how ridiculous Rockwell’s sets could often be. He needed real faces, but he could fill in the rest. Hence piling chairs up on top of an old desk to simulate bleachers at the circus. Good thing nobody fell off the back and sued ole Rocky for millions—that twine used to hold the little girl’s chair in place doesn’t look OSHA certified. If the geeky looking fellow in the front looks familiar, it’s because Rockwell himself served as a model for his paintings all the time.

The Final Impossibility: Man’s Tracks on the Moon, 1969
Yep, here’s proof that the moon landing was faked. At least, Rockwell’s commemorative portrait of it was. NASA loved his work, so they loaned him spacesuits and helmets whenever he wanted, and for this, he got permission to photograph his models moonwalking around an Apollo Lunar Lander, with a black tarp doubling for infinity and beyond. Remember, this is when Apollo was new and the Cold War was in full swing, so getting access to the latest NASA toys took clout.

Behind the Camera covers many aspects of Rockwell that I had not known about previously. He was an outspoken civil rights activist, and many of his paintings dealt with race relations. There is a painting of two murdered men, one black and one white, accompanied by an almost absurd photo of two very alive guys lying side by side, eyes closed, on a carpet. There’s another painting of a little black girl being walked to school by US Marshals, and the many different closeup shots Rockwell required to paint the extreme detail of the tense, potent—and fabricated—moment.

I wish I could run a gallery of 100 shots from this book, because each page startled me in a different way. Meeting the real people behind the paintings, and learning that every painting was composed of masterfully planned photographs—always black and white, since the artist let his imagination add the color—I will no longer take Norman Rockwell for granted. In fact, I’m gonna kinda worship him from now on. [Amazon sales page; Little, Brown product page]

In the 10+ years since the iMac was born as Apple’s simple computer, it’s become visibly less of a computer and more of a display. And what a screen this new iMac has.

But First, Simplicity

This 1998 ad has Jeff Goldblum narrating that there are two physical steps to setting up an iMac. (“There’s no step three!”) Truthfully, they skipped the mouse and keyboard cable, though, which would bring it to 4 steps. Today, an iMac is set up using just one power cable, depending on wireless networking and bluetooth peripherals to get the rest done. So it’s even simpler than it was 10 years ago. And as I said, the screen is becoming more prominent than ever.

The LCD

The 27-inch iMac’s screen is the thing to focus on in this revision. It is practically as bright (and more contrasty) than any of the previous iMacs—even Cinema Displays—and it looks astounding. It’s LED-driven so it comes to full luminescence immediately and takes up less power. It also has better side-to-side viewing angle as an IPS tech monitor; like the iMac 24 before it, it goes 178 degrees without much change in color accuracy or brightness. And here’s the kicker: Although it has 19% more area of LCD than the old 24-incher, it has 60% more pixels. That makes it more pixel dense than any of the Cinema Displays at 109ppi. And with a 2560×1440 resolution it has 90% of the dot count of a 30-inch cinema display. All these stats are great. They sound great, and they make for a powerful picture. But the actual view of the screen leaves me with a positive—but slightly imperfect—impression.

The default brightness is a bit much, but of course you can turn it down. And the contrast is welcome; even my new 13-inch MacBook Pro looks yellowed and washed out next to it. But at this pixel density, which is sharper than my notebook, it’s almost too sharp, requiring me to sit closer than I would ordinarily do with a 27 inch display. I like the feeling of crispness — 16% crisper than the last generation. But my eyes feel like the pictures are being delivered by a land shark holding a laser pointer straight into my corneas, and I can feel the strain within minutes. I would have to jack up as many font sizes as possible or sit as close as I do to my MacBook to make it work for long long periods of time. Maybe I’m just a wimp of a geek, but I’ve never been sensitive to these sorts of things on any sort of machinery before.

This is the iMac next to a 13-inch MBP and a Dell 2407 24-inch monitor. The iMac’s screen puts both to shame in brightness and clarity.

Apple is making a big deal of the fact this screen is 16:9. I think it looks better in this wider iteration, but it’s not an epic jump since the last gen was 16:10. You’re losing vertical pixel count here, on both the 21.5 and 27-inch models, despite added diagonal inches. Also, the glass cover is now edge to edge, without the thin silver rim around it, on the top and sides. It’s still glossy and very very reflective, despite being covered in anti-reflective coating.

I will feel guilty for mentioning this, because it’s ever so slight, but I’ll feel more guilty if I don’t mentioning it to you: The screen, when it’s white, has the tiniest bit of blotchiness to it. The backlighting is slightly uneven in my model. It had no impact on viewing quality once the screen was filled with an image other than one of pure white, so don’t sweat it.

My previous comparison to the 30-inch Cinema Display wasn’t for academic purposes, either. One of the most interesting features on the new iMac is that it can use its Mini DisplayPort (normally an output) as an input; that is, it can become a secondary display for notebooks or other devices. Factor in the near-identical specs to the 30-inch Cinema Display, most notably its updated LED screen, and you have absolutely no reason to buy a 30-inch Cinema Display when you can have this—but not just yet.

That’s what two full sized 1080p trailers look like on this screen.

Eager to test this shit and be the first to the internet with an image of an Xbox linked into an iMac (“Worlds collide!” would be the headline, I decided), I ordered a monoprice Mini-DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter. Unfortunately, I discovered that the inputs would not work with a PS3 or Xbox at any res, HD or otherwise. The current adapters on the market are unidirectional, I was told, and so they won’t work to take HDMI sources and pipe them into the iMac. I’m sure someone is making a cable as we speak for this very abominable purpose of piping in Microsoft gaming to a desktop Mac—but it’s not here yet. (New cables, by the way, will include audio, which the iMac is capable of taking through its connector and the iMac is able to display video sources up to its native resolution.) The issue is, this could take months. That’s a long time, so don’t buy an iMac planning to use it with a gaming console or Blu-ray player right away.

Using it with a laptop was an interesting situation. Odd, for sure, but a welcome bonus and an obvious use. Here’s how it works. You plug in a Mini-DisplayPort-to-Mini-DisplayPort cable to the iMac, which must be turned on (unlike Sony’s all-in-one, which works while off.) The iMac flickers for a second and the laptop’s picture replaces the iMac’s. Here’s where it gets sort of weird. When the iMac is acting as a monitor, the keyboard and mouse are all blocked from working, except a few keys: The pause/play, FF, RR, volume controls and brightness keys all work. They won’t display the typical volume/brightness/FF/whatever iconography, because you’re actually still looking at your MacBook. You can actually then use your iMac as a display for one computer while listening to music on another—but why would you want to? And if you were playing a game with an Xbox, you’d be listening to the game. To toggle between the iMac and the external source, you hit Command+F2.

(*The 21.5-inch iMac is not as sharp or impressive as the 27, but a fine evolution nonetheless; see chart)

Oh, one more thing: The LED display is also thinner than the traditional panel. Even so, when combined with the extra width and height, Apple’s designers are given adequate room to play with the layout and thermal properties of the iMac. Which brings us to the chassis and internals.

The Chassis

The iMac’s chassis went from all plastic to aluminum and glass in 2007. The first aluminum models were stamped out in car factories because no computer factories could work with aluminum pieces that big. Now, the iMac has even more aluminum in them with bigger cases and a seamless wraparound back made of metal instead of the black plastic cap. Despite the loss of the slimming effect of a black plastic back, the computer’s dimensions work in its favor; it’s about 1mm thinner and obviously wider, so it still feels undoubtedly skinny.

Oh, and the stand is tapered by 1.1mm on its front (as is Apple’s wont), to further hide volume.

Aside from the more flattering aspect ratios, the chin—one of the only giveaways that this is not just a screen but a computer—has shrunk by 22%. It looks much better, in my opinion. The case’s bigger size affects its internal layout, too. Apple and iFixit brought several of these details to my attention.

The most important changes are that the GPU and CPU are placed at nearly opposite ends of the case, with their own heatsinks to throw off copious heat with three very quiet fans. (The iMac’s sound profile at idle, for a stock build, is still just a whisper, less than 20db.)

Ports: The back of the case has a Mini DisplayPort, 4 USB 2.0 ports, power plug (the machine’s only wire), Firewire 800, minijack/optical input and output, and Gigabit Ethernet. There’s Bluetooth 2.1 EDR wireless with which the mouse and keyboard interface, and 802.11 N Wi-Fi. Although the entire case is aluminum, the antenna has been cleverly hidden in a plastic Apple logo top center on the back. Reception is a touch stronger than on my notebook.

The iChat camera and microphone (the latter of which is made up of about a dozen closely-grouped pinprick holes, like on the MacBook Pro) are situated on the top of the iMac. And despite the new model’s height they sound fine (if not a touch more distant because of the height) when compared to previous models. The top mount for the microphone keeps the sound from the new, more powerful two-way speakers from interfering with it; measured using a song and SPL meter, my notebook came in at 70db and the iMac at 76db at sitting distance. Louder, richer and noticeably so than a laptop, though I didn’t have an iMac 24 on hand to compare with.

The larger case allows the iMac to use four sticks of user-serviceable RAM, accessible from the bottom. (That’s useful futureproofing now that OS X Snow Leopard is shipping, and programs and the OS in 64-bit can address more than 4GB at a time.)

How About Performance?

The iMac I’m testing is a 3.06GHz Core2Duo processor with 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 4670 graphics. Those are decent parts but not the highest-end quad-core i5/i7 chips or ATI Radeon 4850 GPU that will ship in iMacs in November. More importantly, the machine I have here that is shipping now is about on par with higher-end, custom-order machines from the last generation. The system benchmarks I ran earlier this week indicate that everything performs practically the same. And since we don’t have a Core i5/i7 machine to work with, I’ve included Apple’s approximations of how much boost the iMac will get from those parts — obviously, many grains of salt are necessary when reading, especially when measuring value of extra CPU cores as literal multipliers when most software still can’t leverage those channels efficiently.

As for 3D, Maclife has some framerate scores from Doom 3 and Call of Duty that are not by any means exact but somewhat representative of the machine I’m using today. But again, the bottom line is that this machine that I have, shipping today, is not faster than machines equipped similarly from the last generation—they’re just cheaper for any given performance point.

But again, even if you wait for the higher end machines, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to access most of that extra power. Snow Leopard hasn’t seen many apps, besides the ones that ship with it that can take advantage of its multicore CPU and GPU technologies. Programs will come, but immediate speed gains aren’t guaranteed here if you buy the quad-core machines.

Here’s an exception: Those Core i5/i7 chips are also clocked slower than the Core 2 Duo chips on the lower-end machines, but have the ability to run single core applications at a greater clock speed. Since all four cores won’t be burning, the chip uses the spare electricity and the extra thermal overhead to dynamically and automatically overclock the core that is working: The i5 chip goes from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz and the 2.8GHz i7 chip goes to 3.46GHz (with 4 cores that run hyperthreaded for up to 8 virtual cores.)

Sounds fast, but we’ll dive into deeper tests in November. For now, you should be aware that if your desktop is less than 18 months old, you’d be somewhat silly to upgrade before the highest end chips from this generation of iMac are out.

What Else You Got?

The iMac replaces its old mouse with the new Magic Mouse, with a multitouch surface and 360 degree scrolling and swiping, almost like the gestures you find on a Macbook trackpad. I’ve said it before: I primarily use Laptops because I love trackpads. The gestures, fingertip precision and proximity to the keyboard make it a must have, and this mouse fixes some of those issues. (*Jason Chen reviewed the mouse and liked it but it was not without flaws. Read that if you’re considering buying an iMac, because it’s the only option Apple offers.)

The one detail I found problematic specifically with the Magic Mouse as it pertains to the 27-inch iMac is that even when the pointer sensitivity is set to the highest level, a swipe of the wrist at a moderately fast speed goes only 2/3 across the giant pixel landscape. Only by whipping my hand across my mouse pad can I trigger enough mouse acceleration to get across the screen. They should turn up the sensitivity, frankly. Software update please!

The keyboard is also changed, going from the old wired keyboard, which was stamped out of the screen cutout of the chassis, with a wireless Bluetooth model. Apple states that the keyboard’s narrow profile makes it a better fit next to the mouse. I think it also makes sense as a remote control for the computer from afar when watching media, since this is the biggest iMac ever that doubles as a monitor. But it looks a little small and out of proportion with the machine itself, since the Mac got wider and the keyboard got shorter. (Correction: The keypad-less change happened last revision. I just miss that numeric pad keyboard’s width from the first generation of Aluminum iMacs. It seemed to fit perfectly.)

Oh, the white plastic remote that used to ship with all the laptops, AppleTV and iMacs has been replaced by an elliptical, aluminum remote with black rubber buttons. It’s longer, and shaped like an iPod nano but no longer comes with the iMac. It costs $19. I think when you buy a computer that is this expensive, they should THROW IN THE DAMN REMOTE.

Competitive Check

There are other all-in-ones from PC makers, but at the moment, none as large or high-res as the iMac 27. The ones from Sony (like the L) and HP have various extras like IR touchscreens, glowing monitor bodies, TV tuners and Blu-ray drives. Some are pretty decent, like the Touchsmart we just reviewed. If these things matter to you and you are not married to the Mac platform, you might consider them. But that touchscreen functionality is still half-baked, so don’t do it for the groping potential.

Value

The sweet spot is the $1200 21.5-inch config. But don’t upgrade that model beyond base without seriously considering the big bad 27-incher for $1700. And don’t upgrade that one at all without considering the quad-core models; both look very promising at $2000 or $2200. Basically, the custom builds are not a great value until you get to the quads. Go cheapest, 27, or quad. But cautious folks will wait on the quads ’til we test them.

There’s another angle here, too. Again, comparing the 27-inch iMac to the old as hell 30-inch Cinema Display makes those standalone monitors look like a pretty bad value when it costs only $100 more for just 10% more pixels—and, hey, it’s also not a computer.

Nerds, Sheathe Thy Wallet If You Can

Although the quad core benchmarks aren’t here yet, I think you’ve got enough information here to make an adult decision on whether to go cheap or double your price for something faster and bigger. It’s not like those new chips will be slower. But waiting a month on a new internal layout, design and screen is a great way to let Apple shake out whatever inevitable hiccups are there at the start of a new run. Plus, if Snow-Leopard-specific apps make their way to market (hello, <Handbrake!) and some performance scores come out in the meantime, hey, cool.

Big beautiful screen is super high res and bright.


Chassis design evolving to new heights of beauty; less chin.


Faster parts not out yet; current components available in previous generation.


No Blu-ray player, touchscreen or other things that aren’t important to me, but may be important to you. Maybe.