4K and 5K iMacs Support 10-Bit Color Depth on OS X El Capitan

[Glassed Silver]

And SSDs do not yet have the same capacities. Just attach an external SSD and be happy already, eh?

Do you know what the product category is called the iMac falls into?

ALL in one. Not SOME in one. It's ALL in one, meaning all the essentials for meaningful, reasonable operation come in one device + keyboard and mouse combination.

I'm surprised to which great lengths the Apple defense force is going these days, basically completely ignoring the principles Apple once stood for almost exclusively in the market. These days they are leaving many of those behind.


I have to wonder what all these defenders, not necessarily you here, actually still defend Apple for if more and more core values of Apple are being taken away, more and more magic is lost to cost reduction, "clever" up-selling and held back features (don't anyone dare deny this fact, it's well beyond obvious by now, no sweet word by Tim will change my mind).
Are they defending the brand, or the brand they once came to "fall in love" with?

I doubt it's the latter.

But us Apple customers are a special breed. We'll yell and yell loudly and continue to pony up the dough for increasingly less fitting products, until something collapses and they might find their way back to more honest offerings (from an educated buyer's perspective)

Glassed Silver:mac

 

[Peace]

The display does, but that doesn't say anything about the graphics card, drivers and OS support.

You can test this by downloading the ZIP file on the bottom of this webpage, unzip it and open the PSD file in Preview. If the gradient is smooth, it's 10 bit, if you see stripes then it's not.

I downloaded that file and all I see is a smooth black image.

No lines . No stripes.

 

[Luap]

Why Apple go to all this trouble with amazing technology and then cripple it by shoving in a 5400RPM drive is beyond me. You've made 11 billion dollars profit in 3 months. Just make SSDs standard in all your computers already.

Christ.. The post is about graphics so you jump in and whine about HD's?
But now we're here.. 5400rpm drives are not as bad as the nay sayers make out. Increased density see's to that. It's not 1995 any more.
Still, Apple thought of you and provided alternative options. Yay!

 

[till213]

On iPhones, not Macs.

Ahhhhh... a bean counter from the "cost centre" game in the forum! Say "Hello!" to the bean counter!

 

[till213]

There's nothing new here. My 3 year old Thunderbolt Display does 30-bit also.

View attachment 596949

Indeed: 30 bit graphics is nothing new. Standard since Windows 7 (and corresponding GPU/driver). The news here is that OS X now - finally - supports it!

 

[Parasprite]

If you want better performance you must pay for it.

Maybe in Apple world.

I just bought a business class quad core Dell laptop with 240 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM for around $400. I'm sure Apple could figure it out.

 

[JustThinkin']

Raise the price by £100 if you have to, and throw in a 256GB PCI-e SSD on the base model. Just don't offer 5400RPM drives for Christ's sake.

I'm pretty sure Christ is OK with this one. The emperor may charge a high price, and people complain. But you can pay it.

 

[mdridwan47]

Why Apple go to all this trouble with amazing technology and then cripple it by shoving in a 5400RPM drive is beyond me. You've made 11 billion dollars profit in 3 months. Just make SSDs standard in all your computers already.

Amen to that. Apple usually moves the industry forward. But this decision reflects poorly on them. This and the infamous 16GB iOS devices. They should do away with both.

 

[Rocketman]

Just think. In 2015 you can get a 21.5" iMac with retina display and the slower processor and a low-end fusion drive for only $1199, including a bunch of productivity software and a full ecosystem attached. That is pretty economical for a "full featured computer". It even includes the new magic keyboard and magic mouse, not the absolute cheapest accessories possible.

 

[iPadProXL-2.5]

Apple invested in the supply chain in astronomical numbers. Until the stock of the 5400RPM drives are gone, and the cost of a sizable SSD comes down, and Apple can corner that part of the market for their own longevity/sustaining, we won't see it. 2 years ago, I paid ~$370 for a 480GB SSD. I've never worried about running out of space.

Samsung's high quality/premium EVO 250 GB SSDs are already down to about $79-$89 price range, and at the bottom range of SSDs the ADATA, PNY, Kingston, SanDisk low end SSD versions are running as low $45-$60 , which is what the 64 GB drives were the prior 2 years.
With Micron, Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and OCZ moving to denser 3D drives, Apple will have no excuse to include at least the 256 GB SSD as the standard, low end price point for all Macs.

This should allow OS X to add more features and truly become an enterprise OS as they keep bragging to IBM and others. Otherwise, if Apple does NOT see this it will come back and bite them later on when Macs market share will tank. They can't afford to give Microsoft time to recover from the Win 8 debacle. Windows 10 is making strides, and fast. Microsoft will crush them.OS X has been on a snail pace between Mountain Lion and El Capitan. The previous OSs: OS X Lion and Snow Leopard packed much more features. I guess Apple is either out of new ideas, uninterested in the development of OS X (taking a back seat to iOS and watchOS), or spreading too thin on too many levels with more tvOS and possibly carOS. Or they just want to keep supporting Macs as old as 2007 so they can brag that their install base is on over 100 million Macs.

In any case I'm disappointed they never thought of bringing Siri to the Mac, so i can finally talk to my mac and tell it what to do for me, order pizza from my favorite place, log into my credit card account and read me the balance, compose a letter at my voice dictation, search the web by a keyword or a phrase I command, or even become a (rudimentary) beta intelligent JARVIS assistant (see Iron Man case study).

Innovation... my ass back @ ya' Apple!

 

[Nunyabinez]

I downloaded that file and all I see is a smooth black image.

No lines . No stripes.

Are you on a Retina iMac? I have a 2011 iMac at work and the 5K at home and I can definitely see the stripes on my screen. I guess it's possible that your eye is not sensitive to the difference.

 

[Nunyabinez]

This is REALLY tempting me to get a 5K iMac. Must…resist…

I don't want to be a pusher, but I bought the 5K a year ago and love that machine like no other that I've ever owned. I was a little worried that they would come out with an update this year that would make me regret the money I spent, but so far it's going strong and looks sooooo awesome.

 

[SteveJobs2.0]

Why Apple go to all this trouble with amazing technology and then cripple it by shoving in a 5400RPM drive is beyond me. You've made 11 billion dollars profit in 3 months. Just make SSDs standard in all your computers already.

Short-term vs long-term perspective. Tim Cook believes that higher margins today are worth the risk that competing products will improve and match Apple's product offerings.

 

[why2wow]

I can confirm that the NEC MultiSync PA301W, PA271W, and EA244UHD all report 30-Bit Color (ARGB2101010) on a Mac Pro 2013 with dual AMD FirePro D500 cards running El Capitan 10.11.1. The test ramp looks perfect in Preview, but shows banding in Photos and Photoshop CC (20150529.r.88 x64), so it appears that there's some software updating still required.

 

[c0ppo]

People moaning about 5400rpm drives are really boring. Its not like its the only choice, then it would be worth moaning about. What you're actually complaining about is that you think its too expensive to buy the drive you want and you expect it for less. Who cares if they offer 1000rpm drives? Buy the model you want and consider THAT the base entry price and if you think thats too expensive moan about that, not that the model you can afford doesn't carry the specs you want. Apple stuff is expensive, we've known this for decades.

Also these 5400rpm drives are only in the the 21" iMac. I really wouldn't like to know the heat a 7200rpm 3.5" drive would kick out in those things, you'd have to cripple one anyway at which case you'd be better off running a 5400 WD Green. The perceivable difference between the two these days is negligible, its not like it would be running a WD Black 7200 even if there was one. I wouldn't run a system without forking out for an SSD now days anyway, which is available.

SSD wouldn't heat up not near as a HDD would, right?
And you are wrong, for lots of us only basic configurations are a choice. I live in a country without an Apple store. Sure, I can order a custom configuration form a 3rd party seller. But then I have to wait 2 months to get it, and it costs a fortune (far more then in US for example).

And putting any kind of HDD in such expensive computer is a joke. Even bigger one coming from the richest company of all time.

 

[MacVidCards]

You can turn on 30 bit in switchresx.

See thread in Mac Pro forum

 

[kd5jos]

Well, given that we can ALL see gradation issues with 8 bit, they must be on to something right?

The secret is that reproduction of light intensity by pixels, as well as the capturing of light intensity by photosensors, is linear. Half the value, half as much light.

The eye, on the other hand, does not process light information linearly. We tend to be able to pick out detail in medium dark areas better than those in very dark or very light areas.

As such, if you were to use 7 or 8 bit color, the eye can easily see incremental changes in color in the middle brightness band, whereas incremental changes in very bright parts of the band are nearly impossible to discern.

By increasing the bit level, you better cover this gap in the perceptual gamut of the eye. You could get the same value in 7 pixels by applying a mapping function equivalent to the eye's discrimination to the hardware pixels and to the light signal in memory.

However, you'd find this used a LOT more resources and was incorrect far more often than simply pushing some extra bits. That's because mapping is computationally expensive, every eye is different and it's unlikely a mapping function on commodity hardware and in commodity software is going to meet your exact need.

Then why does steganography work?

 

[navaira]

Short-term vs long-term perspective. Tim Cook believes that higher margins today are worth the risk that competing products will improve and match Apple's product offerings.

Competing products have improved and outranked Apple's offerings (except screen quality) a long time ago. But as long as they don't run Mac OS, they don't interest me... much. At some point, possibly soon, the iMac will need replacing and if I have to spend twice as much on a Mac as I would on a PC... I'll have to figure out if the luxury of not dealing with Windows is really worth €1000 or more. I have no use for 10-bit colour depth. I do, however, have use for €1000.

 

[Jcknows0]

If you opt to go for the non-fusion drive, that choice is yours. If you want better performance you must pay for it. If you are a low power user maybe the $100 savings is all you actually care about.

It is a choice. Apple is not forcing anything on you despite all the "likes" your post has received. It is marketing driving it. They have a "low base price". That's it. That's all. I don't think anybody I know should buy the base model.

Only problem is all the Mac deals are usually on standard models. BTO or CTO usually have no deals and the iMacs are the odd man out as all Mac laptops and Mac Pro are SSD standard. Apple really isn't saving any money by sticking with spinning platters given how high their margins are compared to other PC makers. They are serving a lot of their desktop market that are not power users and think they are getting so much more space not realizing how much performance they give up. The rest of us lose in the bargain.

 

[Peace]

Are you on a Retina iMac? I have a 2011 iMac at work and the 5K at home and I can definitely see the stripes on my screen. I guess it's possible that your eye is not sensitive to the difference.

Nope. I'm using the "new" Mac Pro with dual graphics cards with a thunderbolt display and a Dell 27" attached.

 

[kd5jos]

That is entirely false.

Keep in mind however that the human eye has different sensitivities to different colors. The eye can distinguish far more shades of green than shades of blue. It's trivially easy to create a deep-color image where green varies slightly from left to right. Sampled at 8-bits, there will be tremendous vertical banding where your eye notices each single-bit step. Sampled at 10-bits looks much better.

Partially because... YOU MISQUOTED. I said 21 bits, 7 per channel. I may be wrong, but your quote of me is wrong too. I never said the human eye only sees 7 bits of color any more than you said, "The eye can distinguish... 8-bits... much better."

 

[Evil Spoonman]

This seems very inconsistent to me. None of the new iMacs I have checked support 10-Bit color. My Dell display which I know does 10-Bit color also isn't recognizing it.

What chain of devices must be used to support this?

 

[dysamoria]

Samsung's high quality/premium EVO 250 GB SSDs are already down to about $79-$89 price range, and at the bottom range of SSDs the ADATA, PNY, Kingston, SanDisk low end SSD versions are running as low $45-$60 , which is what the 64 GB drives were the prior 2 years.
With Micron, Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and OCZ moving to denser 3D drives, Apple will have no excuse to include at least the 256 GB SSD as the standard, low end price point for all Macs.

This should allow OS X to add more features and truly become an enterprise OS as they keep bragging to IBM and others. Otherwise, if Apple does NOT see this it will come back and bite them later on when Macs market share will tank. They can't afford to give Microsoft time to recover from the Win 8 debacle. Windows 10 is making strides, and fast. Microsoft will crush them.OS X has been on a snail pace between Mountain Lion and El Capitan. The previous OSs: OS X Lion and Snow Leopard packed much more features. I guess Apple is either out of new ideas, uninterested in the development of OS X (taking a back seat to iOS and watchOS), or spreading too thin on too many levels with more tvOS and possibly carOS. Or they just want to keep supporting Macs as old as 2007 so they can brag that their install base is on over 100 million Macs.

In any case I'm disappointed they never thought of bringing Siri to the Mac, so i can finally talk to my mac and tell it what to do for me, order pizza from my favorite place, log into my credit card account and read me the balance, compose a letter at my voice dictation, search the web by a keyword or a phrase I command, or even become a (rudimentary) beta intelligent JARVIS assistant (see Iron Man case study).

Innovation... my ass back @ ya' Apple!

OSX doesn't need more bloat. It needs less of that since the iOS ecosystem got involved. OS X needs more bug fixing and optimization.

Windows is the disaster it has always been because of not spending the time to work on all parts of the os: to remove the backwards compatibility cruft (among other thing causing perpetual growth of Windows installations and archaic components seemingly forgotten by the product manager) and eliminate the cess pools of explorer.exe's plug-in functionality and the central monolithic failure zone called the registry. Stomping out the free-for-all of system-level functionality being replaced by third party apps and utilities and system services is another thing Microsoft should've done by now (I'm looking at you, almost every printer and scanner maker ever).

It's comical: You're complaining of OS X moving too slowly, yet most content creators using Macs are complaining about being forced into upgrades that break their productivity. Offices don't want continually broken productivity due to short upgrade cycles. That's why most corporate environments stay on old OS and software versions until forced to upgrade years later. Industrial cases of avoiding upgrades go on for many decades.

Your complaint sounds more like a tech fetishist end user's complaint, wanting bleeding edge gadgetry ASAP.

All that the real workers seem to want is a reliable and stable system (and a Mac Pro with first party support retina display so we can do photography with less zooming).

 

[dysamoria]

Partially because... YOU MISQUOTED. I said 21 bits, 7 per channel. I may be wrong, but your quote of me is wrong too. I never said the human eye only sees 7 bits of color any more than you said, "The eye can distinguish... 8-bits... much better."

Well, that's how your post read to me, too, so the mistake might've been in your presentation.

 

[toke lahti]

The average human eye registers... 7 bits of color.

Bollocks, you really don't see banding in fine gradients?