It may not have been the absolute centerpiece of the show, but it still looks nifty.
Per Macworld, Apple on Tuesday released a new, thinner iMac. The company reengineered the iMac’s internals and display, and Apple says the display system is 45 percent thinner and 8 pounds lighter.
The new iMacs are available in 21.5- and 27-inch models, with displays that support native resolutions of 1920-by-1080 pixels and 2560-by-1440 pixels, respectively. Previous models of the iMacs had a 2mm air gap between the glass and the display; that gap has been removed in the new iMac. Apple now laminates the display directly to the glass, and the company says the full lamination will improve optical quality.
Besides the new design, the other marquee feature of the new iMac is the Fusion Drive, which is a hybrid storage technology that combines flash storage with a hard drive. The Fusion Drive comes with 128GB of flash storage used mainly by the operating system to provide fast performance. The hard drive portion of the Fusion Drive is available in 1TB or 3TB capacities.
However, the Fusion Drive isn’t part of Apple’s standard configuration for the iMac—it is a build-to-order option. Apple has yet to release upgrade pricing for the iMac models with a Fusion Drive, though it’s worth noting that the 1TB Fusion Drive upgrade for the 2.3GHz Core i7 Mac mini is US$250.
As seen with the Retina MacBook Pro, Apple is relying on Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 for connectivity. The iMac has two Thunderbolt ports and four USB 3.0 ports, as well as a gigabit ethernet port. FireWire is no longer offered on the iMac, and users of FireWire devices will need an adapter.
The iMac also features a built-in FaceTime HD camera, dual microphones, stereo speakers, built-in Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.0. The optical drive is no longer included, and the SDXC card slot that was located next to the optical drive can now be found on the back of the iMac, between the headphone jack and the USB 3.0 ports.
The 21.5-inch iMacs have only two RAM slots and support a maximum of 16GB of memory. The 27-inch iMacs have four RAM slots and support a maximum of 32GB of memory.
The new iMac is available in the following four configurations:
US$1299: 21.5-inch model with a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5, 8GB of memory, a 5400-rpm 1TB hard drive, and 512MB nVidia GeForce GT 640M graphics.
US$1499: 21.5-inch model with a 2.9GHz quad-core Core i5, 8GB of memory, a 5400-rpm 1TB hard drive, and 512MB nVidia GeForce GT 650M graphics.
US$1799: 27-inch model with a 2.9GHz quad-core Core i5, 8GB of memory, a 7200-rpm 1TB hard drive, and 512MB nVidia GeForce GTX 660M graphics.
US$1999: 27-inch model with a 3.2GHz quad-core Core i5, 8GB of memory, a 7200-rpm 1TB hard drive, and 512MB nVidia GeForce GTX 675M graphics.
The 21.5-inch models will be available in November, while the 27-inch models will be available in December.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
3 replies on “Apple announces updated, slimmer, Ivy Bridge iMac”
As far as I’m concerned, the iMac was the most important announcement. Apple has been neglecting its OS-X users in its rush to develop iOS. That brings them revenue, but I think iOS is half-baked and I have no use for it. It’s the Windows CE version of OS-X. Mobile myopia is not good in the long term – Apple needs to resume raising the bar in high-performance computing and OS. Or they’ll become as irrelevant as µ$.
Note, evidently, only the 27-inch model as slots where the user is able to actually install memory themselves. The 21.5 inch model doesn’t have a hole in the case for the user to install memory.
I don’t like the increasing “disposability” of the Macbooks and, apparently now, iMacs. I *expect* – as a minimum, to be able to upgrade RAM, swap the HD (or SSD), and for laptops, replace the battery myself. (I make an exception for the Macbook Air, where portability is the key parameter).
For the other laptops – if the battery has to be glued in to enhance structural integrity, that is form over function, gone way too far. Perhaps the Apple engineers can discover if they have the talent to keep the hardware both pretty -and- serviceable.