Apple
recently revamped its iMac line up with brand new displays and processors, and we have our hands on the entry-level 27-inch model. Although only introducing a 5K Retina display for the 27-inch iMac line last year, Apple has upgraded it with support for the P3 color space, bringing with it an uplift in color saturation of 25 percent. Also new is the latest in Intel 'Skylake' silicon, along with upgraded AMD Radeon GPUs, faster RAM, and faster flash storage. Read on for our initial impressions.
Apple has been steadily adding Retina display technology to its product line for the past few years now. First introduced on the iPhone 4 in 2010, Retina technology consists of displays that support high-pixel densities, that deliver high levels of crispness and legibility to text, and general content. Retina displays have also, typically, featured high-quality panels that have support for the sRGB color gamut, and offer wide viewing angles, along with excellent brightness and contrast.
Although the pixel density of Retina displays varies from device to device, they are essentially defined by the viewer being unable to discern individual pixels from normal viewing distances. For Apple's iPhones, this means pixel densities over 300ppi, for Retina iPads it is a minimum of 264ppi, for its Retina MacBooks it is at least 226ppi, while for its Retina iMacs it is at least 218ppi. Although Apple has not boosted the pixel density of the new 5K Retina iMac, it has introduced support for the larger P3 color space.
The 5K Retina display Apple introduced last year was already one of the best 5K panels you could find any computer, or even standalone monitor. With support for the full sRGB color gamut, outstanding sharpness, brightness, contrast and viewing angles (along with low level of reflectivity), we found ourselves hard-pressed to fault it. So it was something of a surprise to see Apple already move to upgrade it. However, as we found with
Touch ID 2 on the new iPhone 6s, Apple is keen to keep driving improvements where it can, even when the underlying technology is already more than adequate.
For the average user, the fact remains that the now-superseded 5K Retina was already more than good enough. Even if put side-by-side, with the standard sRGB images, most people would not be able to pick the difference between the 'old' display and the new one, as it was already quite color-accurate. That said, Apple looks to be positioning the new 27-inch 5K Retina iMac at professional photographers and videographers who work in more advanced color spaces. For these users, news of Apple producing an iMac with support for the P3 color space is great news, as it means that photos will be more even truer to life than they were before.
In terms of the hardware, we always welcome spec bumps, especially when they arrive at no additional cost. So in addition to the new display panel, Apple has added the very latest suitable chips from Intel's freshly-minted "Skylake" family, skipping the delayed "Broadwell" silicon altogether -- the previous 27-inch iMac range was running 'Haswell' silicon. "Skylake" is a die-shrink of the "Broadwell" architecture, and offers the typical gains in performance and power efficiency that come with a move to the latest lithography.
The entry-level model, our Apple-sourced test unit, is fitted with a 3.2GHz quad-core Core i5 (sixth-gen) processor. Other options include a 3.3GHz Core i5, or a 4.0GHz Core i7 model that breaks the 4.0GHz barrier on an iMac for the first time by delivering Turbo Boost performance up to 4.2 GHz. RAM is also faster, now clocked at 1867MHz -- officially, Apple says the new iMacs support up to 32GB of RAM, but users have already shown evidence on Mac forums that they have been able to fit up to 64GB of RAM -- this also happens to be on par with the current Mac Pro range.
Apple has also fitted the revamped 27-inch iMac with the latest discrete AMD mobile GPUs, but hasn't yet highlighted how much faster they new GPUs are compared to the outgoing models, except to say that total computing performance from the iMac range with top-of-the-line CPU and GPU combined is around 3.7 teraflops -- again, Mac Pro-like figures. The upgraded flash storage, if you choose a flash storage-only model, is now up to 2.5 times faster than before, with read speeds now up to a phenomenal 1800Mbps. Our review unit also shipped with the new Magic Keyboard and the Magic Mouse 2, which we will write about in a bit more detail in advance of the review.
Needless to say, we will be putting the new iMac through its paces in our forthcoming review, but the overall system architecture suggests that these will comfortably be the fastest iMacs Apple has ever released. As we have recently speculated,
we do wonder where this leaves the Mac Pro line, which has languished without an upgrade since its complete revamp in late 2013. With upgrades not yet forthcoming for the Mac Pro, and no sign of any 5K or 4K standalone displays from Apple, pro users might be taking a more-than-special interest in the performance of the new iMac range.
-- Sanjiv Sathiah
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