14 DAY TRIAL // Preliminary reports about the latest iMovie application, a part of iLife 08, are not all that favorable. While the new features that make it to movies what iTunes is to music are much appreciated, the fact that they seem to have come at the cost of editing features is disappointing. Similarly, there is a general feeling of discontent about the hardware requirements of the application.
This new version of iMovie marks the start of the end of the PPC line and the first instance of Apple dropping G4 support in a consumer application. According to Apple's official specifications, iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster). While this might seem reasonable at a first glance, since the G4 processors are two generations behind and any hardware needs to be replaced at some point, that is not the whole story. While desktops have indeed gone through two generations of processors and desktop G4 models are quite outdated, things are decidedly different when it comes to portables. Apple only introduced the MacBook at the beginning of last year and it took a month before the things actually started to ship? With top of the line machines sold just one and a half years ago being left out the of the picture, it is little wonder that their users are not happy. The situation is quire ridiculous when you consider that these users can run Final Cut on their machines, but they cannot use consumer grade applications.
The hardware transition was bound to start cutting into the older machines sooner or later, so nobody is surprised. However, the portable market has been Apple's strongest for many years and it has also been an area in which Apple hardware was lagging quite heavily behind the competition until recently. That these same people are the ones that start getting hit first is a shame.
On the up side, there is nothing preventing the use of the current version of iMovie, as the new one des not replace it and the rest of the iLife 08 suite should work fine.