My Intel iMac arrived on Tuesday and I have been playing with it ever since. Overall it is working out really well, it is snappy when running Intel/Universal binaries and the screen quality is superb. The extra 512meg of RAM has not arrived yet so it is hard to judge performance but it is very promising. At the moment it kind of feels like you are driving a Formala One car with the tires borrowed from the family sedan, whilst Intel binaries run very nicely Rosetta is very slow especially when two or more legacy binaries are open at once. I have a feeling however that the extra RAM will help a lot with this.
Fortunately a good portion of the applications I use have Universal binary support. Two of my most used applications, Proteus (IM client) and NetNewsWire (feed aggregator) have yet to gain universal binary support. Rather than wait around I have swapped to the very capable (and Universal) AdiumX and NewsFire, both of which are very nice. Apparently Firefox won't gain Universal support until March which is a pain because my new favourite browser Flock is based on it. Eclipse now has Intel support thanks to a SWT patch but Fink will be a few weeks off by the sound of it. This means I can't use the iMac for development just yet because I use Fink for compiling Ruby, OpenLDAP, PHP5 and Apache for testing. MySQL has been quick to come out with an Intel binary which is good to see.
AdiumX and NewsFire running on the new desktop (click to enlarge)
All in all very promising. I am sure in a month most things will be sorted out and by March all the pieces will be in place to complete the transition. Once that is the case the trusty old PowerBook will be put in a corner and used for the odd occassions when I actually need a laptop.