I guess the question is if there is a real advantage with getting the retina unless you are doing video or photos. Sure the screen is much clearer and you get more estate on your screen, but at what cost?
A laggy computer with heat problems?
So what do you expect of the machine? Of course, the iMac 5K's a natural in doing photos and videos as you can view much of the materials in full clarity, all of the video and most of the raw photos. Nope, you're not getting more real estate if you're using Retina displays correctly, amazing clarity is why people use Retina mode. Of course, using 2880p and squinting at the screen with a magnifier is also an option. Why are you considering the iMac?
So... Laggy? I think the posts about that were mainly or Mission Control lagging, which unfortunately is persistent on a lot of macs. Heat problem? I don't think I've seen a thread about fried logic boards yet so not a "problem"... Knocks wood. If this iMac as faulty as the notorious actually overheating MacBook Pro 2011 then we'll all get free replacements from Apple. But whatever, I live in Thailand and the thing hasn't gotten any close to overheating on me.
A charming feature of this forum is massive whining when a new product hits the shelf. iPhone 6+? Oooooh, huge ugly bending scrap metal. How many actually bent unintentionally? If the forum is correct then Apple would have hundreds of thousands bent iPhones!
Every time it's the same story of the older version is better. Before the iMac 5K launch? iMac 2012 were much better! Well, I do agree in terms of value of money. The iMac 2013 weren't a huge upgrade from 2012, but then looking at both Intel and Nvidia at the time not shipping any vast improvement either. Ok, everyone agrees that Mac Mini 2012 are vastly better than 2014 yes. Hardware-wise is the iMac 5K vastly superior to iMac 2013? Of course not but then i7 4790k is not much faster i7 4770k, but what can you do? That's the fastest consumer CPU in the world! Is the m295x underpowered? It's got 1Tflop more computing power than GTX 780m and better OpenCL capability!
What cost? You expect every $3,000+ dollars computer to work right out the box? Well, you must be very disappointed in the current Mac Pros can be even much more expensive as monitor is not included!
😛 I think what we all need are more realistic expectations. Buying a $3,000 iMac 5K today? You're getting a great IPS display at the highest resolution in the market. With 15 million pixels! While the rest of the world are using something like 2 million pixels and the elite few using 8 million pixels... what else? Fastest consumer CPU and fastest AMD mobile GPU using the latest architecture and potentially supporting all their current bells and whistles. The awesome RAM upgrade window is still there! Oh and fast storage also. That's plenty for me.
Want Target Display Mode in iMac 5K? Displayport 1.3 is specified but no GPU has that yet. It'll come with Thunderbolt 3 which would be available in no less than a year but probably more than that as Intel is not punctual recently. Want to play every game at Ultra detail in full resolution? No single GPU available can achieve that even at 4K. Probably at least another 3 years until we have an expensive desktop GPU that can barely do that. Waiting for that? Get comfy then
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