Today, Apple has updated the iMac. While the design remains the same, it’s a meaningful update here in the twilight of the Intel era.
“Now more than ever, our customers are relying on the Mac. And many of them need the most powerful and capable iMac we’ve ever made,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing. “With blazing performance, double the memory, SSDs across the line with quadruple the storage, an even more stunning Retina 5K display, a better camera, higher fidelity speakers, and studio-quality mics, the 27-inch iMac is loaded with new features at the same price. It’s the ultimate desktop, to work, create, and communicate.”
While the case is the same, Apple has brought the Pro Display XDR’s nano-texture option to the iMac for the first time. Like on the XDR, it will set you back a pretty penny: $500 to be exact.
In more reasonable news, the iMac now supports TrueTone. Above the display is a 1080p webcam, an upgrade from the previous models.
On the spec end of things, the 27-inch iMac now uses 10th-gen Intel CPUs across the board, and includes faster AMD GPUs, providing twice the video memory as in previous models.
In addition to that, the new machine can be ordered with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and up to 128 GB of RAM.
If it sounds like the iMac is creeping up toward the iMac Pro, it’s because it is. Here’s a bit from Jason Snell’s report:
Last year’s iMacs already pushed up against the performance of the iMac Pro, and these will undoubtedly beat it—especially that 10-core model. In an acknowledgement of this, Apple has rejiggered the iMac Pro line, dropping the old base eight-core model and moving the 10-core model to the base price. So now the iMac line ends at 10 cores and the iMac Pro line begins there.
On the storage front, Apple was quick to note the inclusion of SSDs in all standard configurations of the 5K iMac, and that’s true, but the base models come with a measly 256 GB of storage.1 This may be a roadblock for some users, so the Fusion Drive is still an option on the 21.5-inch models.
Speaking of that other iMac, it didn’t get much love today past the storage story.
The 21.5-inch iMac is still using older 7th- and 8th-gen Intel processors, but every base model comes equipped with SSDs. That’s about it in terms of updates for the smaller of the two models. The $1,099 model even still comes with a 1920×1080 display.
- This also means Apple’s T2 security chip is present on the new iMacs, a first for the line. And just because I couldn’t find a good place for it, the new iMacs include a fancy new microphone system, but still come with the previous set of speakers, which were already pretty dang good. ↩