So I went to the Apple store in Manchester yesterday. Had a go on all the new intel machines and the new iPod HiFi (Total waste of money, bass is boomy and distorted!).

Overall I was impressed, in relation to the new macmini the new dual intel was much faster than my current G4 1.42. All the worries about the intel gfx are unfounded, the output is sharp and slick, desktop ripples are very very smooth and scrolling through an iPhoto library is much much slicker than on my current machine.

The machine does tend to hang during some operations, this seems to be until the program is fully loaded into memory, so for example opening and then closing iPhoto the first time takes an age (it took about a minute to exit) but then opening an closing gets faster each time, I repeated this with other apps and saw the same results. It is something I have never noticed on my G4. I assume it will be sorted with future updates?

I am going to get one of these new machines, they are faster in general use than the old G4's. It was a top of the line machine though

Cheers

Cris.