A Windows User and His New iMac – Day Three

Here are my thoughts and reactions from my third evening of using the iMac. Like day two, it was a weeknight so I didn’t have much time to spend with it.

  • I continue to be pretty impressed by the built in speakers. I plan on connecting the iMac to my AudioEngine A2 speakers and do some comparisons.
  • I’m confused by some folder drag and drop behaviour. Sometimes I’ll click and drag a folder and it won’t move. I downloaded Adele’s new album 25 from Amazon as a ZIP file. It goes into downloads. I open the ZIP file, it opens a new Finder window. I try to drag the folder out of that window and drop it onto my desktop. It won’t work (nothing happens). I end up dragging the folder out of the downloads area to my desktop, and that worked. Not sure what I’m doing wrong here!
  • I keep pressing too hard/long when clicking and dragging and I’m getting the force-touch action. This seems harder than it should be. I’ll adapt.

  • I ran into that “Oh, the app I use isn’t available on OS X..!?” for the first time today. I use MediaMonkey to edit MP3 metadata, and it’s Windows-only. For now I’ll do the clunky thing of transferring the files to my Windows machine to do what I need – anyone know a good bulk-editing metadata tool for audio files?
  • The window animations are cute, but ultimately I feel like they slow things down and feel a bit retro. Maybe they’ll grow on me.
  • Playing around a bit more with the Photo Library problem, I tried the “Open with Terminal” option, which dropped me to the bash prompt (which is the command line, right?) and I typed ls and saw the folders that make up the tool. It feels like I’ve fallen through a wormhole. I understand a tiny bit now why developers and Linux-heads dig OS X.
  • I imported four 1080p video clips into iMovie off an SD card. What surprised me was that after the import was complete, iMovie became partially non-responsive. I couldn’t minimize it reliably, and when I did, it wouldn’t maximize. I’m not sure what it was doing – I know iMovie from a few years ago would transcode HD video clips to an interstitial format of sorts to make editing easier – does iMovie still do that in 2015? I’ll have to experiment move with iMovie to understand this behaviour. I’m not impressed though if that’s considered normal.
  • I fed a 25 GB MKV file into Handbrake, and started a 1080p MP4 transcode. It took about 30 seconds until the iMac fan was at full blast; it’s louder than I was expecting, and louder (smaller fan) than my desktop PC (bigger, quieter fan). Thankfully, there’s no high pitch whine or rattle, so while it’s audible, it’s not full-on irritating. I’ll probably leave the room in the future when I’m rendering video though, which is unfortunate. I don’t have to do that with my PC. Average frame rates in Handbrake are around 40fps. Pretty decent. Will need to do some more testing.

Here’s what day four was like.

New to this series? Start the journey with day one, or go back further to why I wanted to buy a Mac in the first place.