liken the carrying out of the iMac Core Duo to PowerPC - base Macs testify to be quite a challenge for us here at Macworld Lab . With so few worldwide - binary applications available at the prison term of the Intel - based iMac ’s release , our functioning evaluation rely hard upon the lately announced , though kookie , iLife ’ 06 .

As the April 2006 issue give-up the ghost to press , Apple relinquish updates to several lotion in the iLife ’ 06 suite . And though the updates were welcome , it send us scrambling to update the iMac Core Duo recapitulation as the issue was being shipped .

It turns out that the various iLife update did fix a few bugs , but change petty in terms of performance . In fact , there were no differences in our test of iPhoto , iTunes , or four of our five iMovie psychometric test . The only project that modify was the iMovie Export to entanglement result . The trials with the update software package run about 45 per centum quicker on the Intel - establish iMacs , and about 23 pct slower running on the PowerPC iMac — though not enough for the Intel Macs to overtake the PowerPC address system .

Upon confining interrogatory , we name the reason for these pep pill difference — the preset for Export to QuicktTime / Web had been changed radically . If you choose this preset in iMovie HD 6 , you ’ll get a 12.5 megabyte , 240×180 pixel QuickTime moving-picture show , using QDesign Music 2 and H.263 codecs . If you choose this preset in iMovie HD 6.0.1 you ’ll get a 9.6 MB , 320×240 pixel QuickTime movie using AAC and H.264 codecs .

iMovie Core Duo Tests

Best results inbold . Times are in minutes : s .

Using the expert setting in the Share carte du jour , we were able to closely match version 6 ’s configurations in 6.0.1 and found the results for the Intel iMacs were roughly back in line with the original results we printed .