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POLL: Will new iMac have retina display?

Not a chance. Not unless they hold off untill 2013 to release. The cost is too high now and if they did that, the rest of the components would have to be reduced or the cost would have to go up significantly.
I doubt apple would do this unless they have a 2 stream panel budget & pro.
 
I don't think so. One of Apple's successful marketing strategies is to provide consistent pricing for their products even as the technology in them advances. But, look what just happened with the MacBook Pro. The retina machine is EXPENSIVE. Any retina-ized iMac would be looking at a substantial increase in price to compensate for production costs, and would probably be a showstopper for the consumer.

Maybe, they'll come up with a super-expensive retina enabled cinema display, that you can hook up to a Mac Pro (for major bank), or a Mac Mini (to keep the whole package below $2k). Leave iMac's where they're at.
 
Zero chance. A 27" 220dpi display would cost well over $2000 for the panel alone. Would you buy a $5000 iMac?
 
Litany said:
Zero chance. A 27" 220dpi display would cost well over $2000 for the panel alone. Would you buy a $5000 iMac?
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This is just my opinion, but I don't think they'll wait for 27" to be feasible. I think they'll wait until they can do a significant boost on something in the realm of 21-24" and jump on it then to stay ahead. Also dpi is a very weird way to measure devices against vision.
 
I think the issue is really whether or not they can get a retina display in that size in sufficient quantity at a reasonable price. Apple would probably love it if they could get a 27" or 30" retina iMac in large quantities at a price comparable to the current 27". However, I doubt the manufacturers can do it yet.
 
Indeed, plus you view an iMac from further away.

I gauge a screen size based on real estate. We're still using the 24" iMacs in our office. One of the reasons we want to upgrade is to get the extra 3" of real estate. With a retina display, it is very likely usable space will actually decrease.

Take the new retina MBP for example. We've get a previous gen 15" MBP with the hi res screen upgrade. We actually get more useable space on this than the new model with the apps non optimised. The hi res is still essentially 1440x900 of usable space right, doubled up so it's very crisp? Menu's will take up more space than the previous hi res model, unless you play around with the settings, which hampers performance quite considerably.

I would go as far to say that I don't actually want a hi res iMac right now. I just want an updated model with the latest hardware. I would love to see it loose it's chin to come in line with the Thunderbolt Display, but I don't think they'd have enough space to do that with the current innards.
 
I would like to see something like a 22 to 24 inch chinless retina display with a 512 gb SSD, 16mb ram and nice GPU for $3000. to $3500. Am I dreaming?
 
I think we will see a physical redesign and/or bigger physical display before we'll see retina. Apple may want to milk the iMac and save retina for next year. Production/volume may not be able to support retina display for iPad, Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iMac all at once without various capable makers onboard for backup and redundancy.
 
Absolutely not. The latest Nvidia or AMD GPUs do not support 5k resolutions as of now. In addition, prices to manufacture the displays will be insane.
 
I would rather see a 30" or 32" iMac over a 21" 23" retina display iMac ... for me that would be going backwards. Although in a year + when apple said they will do the redesign I would think that the technology would be there to implement a 27" Retina, it will be high end and big ticket and a "innovation" (their words) that would lead the market.
 
boto said:
Absolutely not. The latest Nvidia or AMD GPUs do not support 5k resolutions as of now. In addition, prices to manufacture the displays will be insane.
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They wouldnt need to go to 5k to reach "retina" status. At normal viewing distances for a desktop display even 4k would easily qualify as "retina" and would be perfect for professionals to properly display 4k video. Also, this makes half-res the standard 1920 horizontal resolution, perfect fit again for apps that wouldn't require 4k res....games for instance where running them at 4k would probably not run very smoothly at max settings.

This article covers this in excellent detail: http://www.cultofmac.com/168509/why-you-might-be-disappointed-by-the-resolution-of-those-new-retina-display-macs-feature/

Coincidentally(?), NVidia's Kepler architecture is capable of hardware decoding 4k video.
 
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I own a 27" inch iMac and I actually think 27" is pushing too big, believe it or not, I think 21 to 24 inches is a sweet spot, they could offer a 20" and 24" retina display and I would be thrilled. Bigger display isn't always better, unless we are talking a 4 inch iPhone 5 🙂 I am a graphic designer and believe it or not I prefer working on a 21" iMac display in my office vs the monstrous iMac 27" display at my house. For movies and games the larger display is amazing, but I feel the 27" is a little too large to do graphic design work. I also feel that most consumers are trending to mobile devices nowadays, so they are used to working on 4" phones, 10" tablets, 11" to 15" notebooks....so a 20" to 25" desktop would fill that gap quite nicely, then release a true Apple TV ranging from 32" and higher for those movie buffs. 🙂

I for one would go from my current 27" iMac display to a 24 or 25" retina display!

Have you used a new iPad or the new MacBook Pro retina display, it is ridiculously gorgeous!
 
iMacFarlane said:
I don't think so. One of Apple's successful marketing strategies is to provide consistent pricing for their products even as the technology in them advances. But, look what just happened with the MacBook Pro. The retina machine is EXPENSIVE. Any retina-ized iMac would be looking at a substantial increase in price to compensate for production costs, and would probably be a showstopper for the consumer.
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Retina MBP is far from expensive. It is cheaper than a similarly configured non-retina machine.

However, a 27" screen with quadrupled 1440p resolution would be really expensive, so you are right about this point.

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jmhart said:
They wouldnt need to go to 5k to reach "retina" status. At normal viewing distances for a desktop display even 4k would easily qualify as "retina" and would be perfect for professionals to properly display 4k video. Also, this makes half-res the standard 1920 horizontal resolution, perfect fit again for apps that wouldn't require 4k res....games for instance where running them at 4k would probably not run very smoothly at max settings.
Click to expand...

I am really geting tired to repeat this in every thread, but current 27" iMac with 1440p resolution offers more real-screen estate than pixel-doubled HiDPI 1920p. To maintain the similar real-screen estate with the perfect (pixel-doubling) quality the iMac needs a 5120x2880 display, which would put it on 218 PPI (very similar to the RMBP).
 
I don't think that the new iMacs will be retina this year, however I think there will be a redesign with the MacBook Air/MacBook Pro with Retina style screens that offer less glare. This would make sense as I recall seeing a rumor a while ago about new iMacs having anti-glare displays.
 
boto said:
Absolutely not. The latest Nvidia or AMD GPUs do not support 5k resolutions as of now. In addition, prices to manufacture the displays will be insane.
Click to expand...

Is that simply because they have not been configured for it? The integrated Intel GPU supports up to 4096x4096, so the more powerful separate GPUs must be potentially capable. And if anyone can persuade a company to tailor components, it is Apple.

A lot of the price difference between the retina MBP and the equivalent non-retina MBP can be accounted for by the SSD and RAM. I doubt we will find out the true cost of the screen itself, but Apple have shown they are willing to absorb the initial high price of retina on a model.
 
I vote "No"... retina seems to have taken small steps in jumps in size. First the iPhone/iPod touch, then the iPad and now the rMBP. Its a huge jump even from 15" to 21.5" let alone to 27". My guess is that the price of the panel would make the iMac simply too expensive.

However, I hope that I'm proven wrong 😀

If they wanted to introduce retina to consumer desktop format, I feel that it will be at least a year, perhaps longer.
 
After what Apple said to do to solve the ghost screen issue in the MBP Retina (Lower the resolution in preferences) 🙄 I think I will pass on retina for a while. Seems they overreached a bit.
 
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