Apple Down Under™ has revealed its today-only holiday gift specials, and with most deals hovering between 5 and 10 percent off, it’s nothing out of the ordinary for Cupertino’s wares. Still, if you ‘re shopping for a new iMac this season, seems like the perfect opportunity to fill up your virtual shopping cart. If historytells us anything, look for these dea ls to hit Apple’s US syndicate sometime around tomorrow.

Update: It’s after midnight in the UK, and as logic dictates, the one-day sale is now in effect there, too.

Apple’s new 27-inch iMac is a speed demon, especially the model shipping with the new Core i7 processor. Even better, the latest iMacs ship with the new Magic Mous e, Apple’s first single-button mouse that gets it right thanks to the powers of multitouch.

Wired.com’s Mike Calore is mesmerized with his Core i7-powered iMac. He gave it a rating of 8 out of 10:

Put one of Apple’s new 27-inch Co re i7 iMacs on yo ur desk, and you run the risk of alienating yourself from your friends, co-workers and loved ones.

Sure, the sheer speed of the thing is amazing — the new Core i7 processor is outrageously fast — but it’s the massive screen that will turn your brain into a gob of HD-saturated jelly. Seriously. The iMac’s screen is so freaking huge, so bright and so crisp, it will render you dumb with child-like glee. You’ll just want to sit there and wat ch movies all day and night.

And yours truly was a fan of the Magic Mouse. I th ink it’s the first Apple mouse that doesn’t suck. (I wasn 217;t a fan of the Mighty Mouse because of its gunk-collecting trackball.) I gave it a 7 out of 10, knocking off a few points because of the lack of Expos? functionality:

The Magic Mouse ditches the lozenge-shaped body and gunk-c ollecting trackball of its predecessor (the Mighty Mouse) in favor of a curvy wedge shape with a fully touch-sensitive housing. The new form factor fits more naturally in your hand than previous Apple mice — enou gh so to erase the painful memories you have of that atrocious hockey-puck mouse from the ’90s.

….

As is often the case, these gains come with loss, too. The Mighty Mouse had a click able scroll wheel and two squeeze sensors on the si de that could each trigger the Expos? and Spaces tools for desktop management. The Magic Mouse doesn’t have any built-in gestures for Expos?, which seems like a wasted opportunity.

Want the full gist? See Mike’s full review of the iMac and my writeup of the Magic Mouse at the Wired Reviews site.

See Also:

Apple Unleashes New Macs, Multitouch MouseNew iMacs Outperform Mac Pros in Benchmark Tests

Photo: Mike Calore/Wired.com

Apple’s new Core i7-based iMac might be a performance monster, but it looks like the whole family’s having some problems getting out of the g ate: in addition to the previously-noted performance issues with the Core 2 Duo models, a quick glance a cross Apple’s support f orums and on other Mac boards around the web reveals that some machines are showing up DOA and / or with cracked screens. We’re a little more familiar with the DOA issue, since the new i7 we just bought doesn’t boot at all, but the cracked screen issue seems to be equally common and mostly affecting the bottom left cor ner, from what we can tell. Now, our review Core 2 Duo 27-inch iMac is perfectly fine, and Chris Ziegler’s new Core i7 machine doesn’t have any problems either, so these obviously aren’t universal issues, but if you’re about to stick one of these under the tree for someone it might be wise to do some surreptitious testing first.

Dozens of owners of Apple’s new 27-inch iMac are reporting performance issues ranging from sluggish Flash playback, erratic hard drive behavior and buggy operating system installations.

The most common complaint seems to revolve around poor Flash performance, whereas videos play back very choppily and appears to cause CPU spikes. The YouTube video below attempts to document the problem.

Some customers complaining in Apple’s support forums also claim there’s a bug forcing the hard drive to spin down, while others have complained their iMacs shipped with a corrupt Snow Leopard installation.

Apple began shipping the 27-inch iMac on Oct. 20. The all-in-one desktop costs $1,700 and includes a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

Having problems with your shiny new iMac, too? Report your issues in the comments below.

Via Engadget