Apple Imac

The elegant and colourful OS X operating system has been fully rewritten to run on the Intel processor, as has Apple's Ilife software suite, which comes free with every Mac and includes software for playing music, video editing, creating DVDs and mucking about with digital photographs.

All this software makes the Imac very good value for money. It performs well with the speedy new processor and, in terms of ease of use, it runs rings around most comparable Windows packages.

However, one fly in the ointment: Apple may have updated its own software for the new Intel processor, but no other major software developers have done this yet.

Existing software written for the old PowerPC processor will still run on the new Imac (thanks to an emulation system called Rosetta), but it won't run as fast as native software specifically written for the Intel processor.

This isn't too much of a problem for programs such as the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Neither Word nor Excel need vast amounts of processor power to run smoothly, and these two programs ran perfectly well on the new Imac during our tests.

However, load up some heavy duty software such as Adobe Photoshop, or even a few 3D games, and the Imac's performance does suffer quite noticeably.

Macs do attract many home users that want to use Photoshop - so this could be a problem - but there aren't many people who buy the Mac for games.

We also suspect Apple is going to have a sticky few months with its professional users, while they wait for developers to update programs such as Photoshop and Quark Xpress for the new generation of Intel Macs.