A number of sources are reporting on the poor performance of the new iMac for using the Internet and other applications. In Wired's Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?, one user commented, "I spent $1,800 on a computer that's slower than the $400 eMachine it replaced." Tests in the report indicate that " a new 800 MHz iMac takes an average of twice as long to render Web pages as a comparable or cheaper PC running Windows XP." Wired also comments on the performance gap, in favor of the PC, between a $1500 Dell laptop and a $3,000 Powerbook G4. Their report concludes that it's not the hardware, but OSX causing the problem.

Yet, the May 2002 print edition of Maximum PC benchmarked the new iMac (800mhz processor) running OS9 against a top Athlon powered machine (Athlon 2100+ processor), finding that the PC ran Adobe Photoshop "three times as fast," Adobe Premier "about four times as fast," and in Quake III Arena, a popular 3D game, the PC was five times as fast. The results suggest to me that OSX may not be the only performance problem in the case of the new iMac, but rather that it is also underpowered.

There are also comments supporting these findings at Slashdot. Many slashdotters have said that they have switched to Linux to improve performance of the machines.

So if you are thinking about a new Mac, consider carefully whether your comfort with the GUI and the nice styling is worth the extra cost for a machine with much slower performance. But buyers looking for a new Mac for it's supposed better desktop publishing power should definitely beware that Apple seems to be hoping to capitalize on what is now the myth of the Mac as superior to the PC.