At the Apple event that took place last Tuesday at San Jose, California, the Cupertino company decided to refresh most of its Mac computers barring some and the one product that we were eagerly awaiting refresh was the iMac and the iMac truly got a great refresh with Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller calling it the “flagship of the product line.” The iMac update was long overdue as the previous version was launched in May 2011 which is a pretty long time considering the fast paced technology market.
The new iMac though will disappoint anyone who was expecting a Retina resolutionary display but others will be glad they waited for this refresh. The new iMac is unbelievably thin occupying 40% less volume than its predecessor with edges just 5mm thick, while it certainly looks sleek and impressive it results in the lack of an optical disk drive (ODD) thus making all Apple products go digital as the Macbook Pro’s too don’t have ODDs now. Apple uses a new technology in which display reduces reflection by 75 percent while maintaining advanced color and contrast and is individually calibrated using an advanced spectroradiometer.
Another major selling point of the new iMac is the inclusion of the so called Apple’s Fusion Drive, the firm’s first ever hybrid storage solution. It merging a 128GB flash drive with a hard drive of 1TB or 3TB -depending on the size model you opt for . Apple touted that the new system is faster at both reading and writing data. As far as RAM is concerned, the 27in desktop adds four user-accessible SO-DIMM slots and is customisable all the way up to 32GB RAM. The new iMac also brings improvements on the connectivity side featuring the latest four USB 3.0 standard ports in addition to two Thunderbolt ports, an all-around improvement on the previous generation.
The iMac will be available in two display sizes, 21.5 inches and 27 inches. The 21.5-inch iMac has a screen f 21.5 resis at 1920 x 1080 resolution available with a 2.7 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.2 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M for a suggested retail price of Rs. 85,900 inclusive of VAT; and with a 2.9 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M for a suggested retail price of Rs. 99,900 inclusive of VAT. The 21.5-inch iMac will be available in November through Apple Authorized Resellers.
The 27-inch iMac has a display resolution of 2560 x 1440 and is available with a 2.9 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M for a suggested retail price of Rs. 1,22,900 inclusive of VAT ; and with a 3.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX for a suggested retail price of Rs. 1,34,900 inclusive of VAT. The 27-inch iMac will be available in December through Apple Authorized Resellers.
Although the new iPad Mini, the 4th gen iPad and Macbook Pros unveiled at the show are great products but for me the iMac was surely a scene stealer bringing some great powerful internals along with very neat features and the new razor thin design surely feels awesome.
