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First Hands-On Impressions of 27-Inch Retina iMac: Sharp Image Quality, Great Viewing Angles

Fishticks said:
If you can't see the tiny details, no need for a sharp resolution and even less need for a 5K screen !!!
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Actually, retina screens help with presbyopia. I originally thought that it wouldn't matter and since I'm in that age range where I need to deal with bifocals/progressive lenses/reading glasses, I was happy to stick with my old 17" MBP because I thought that physical size was the only thing that would let me fit more content on the screen. But then I got a 15" rMBP for work and discovered that I can easily read as much or more content on the smaller screen as I could on the 17" due to the sharper text. Whenever I go back to my personal 17" non-retina laptop I find everything harder to read even though it is larger.

Sharpness does matter when your reading eyesight is failing...
 
flar said:
Sharpness does matter when your reading eyesight is failing...
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This is just worth repeating, because people with perfect eyesight cannot imagine it. Even if your eyes are bad enough so you cannot see what the difference between non-retina and retina is, text on a retina display is still easier to read.
 
FrozenDarkness said:
it's definitely not POWER considering it's more powerful than the imac. It's mostly to do with I/O. Has resolution finally outpaced I/O?
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In a word - yes, at anything more that 8 bit color IIRC. The DP 1.3 standard, which will come with TB 3, is meant to handle 5K @ million of colours though. This means that the 1st gen of Mac Pro won't ever be able to power a single 5K monitor unless a dual TB 2 method can be devised that works well.

The new 27" iMac with 5K Retina Display will never be able to power an external 5K monitor either for that matter - it isn't a matter of power, for sure. It is indeed I/O that is limiting at this particular point in time.
 
Woyzeck said:
Dell's (higher quality) Ultrasharp displays always used the same panels as Apple's, but were 1/3 cheaper, better calibrated, had much better connectivity and non-glare coating. They didn't look as nice, though.
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Their 5K display is announced for $2499. Same price as the iMac. When announced, they actually said "twice the resolution of an iMac" ! (Which admittedly was true until a few hours ago).
 
price complaints?? maxed out new iMac is $3800 (4.0ghz i7, 1TB flash storage, M295X @4GB GDDR5), and then you go buy cheap RAM from your favorite online supplier.

i don't see how complaints for those specs at that price in a 5K display are very well founded. their $600 RAM upgrade is the only facepalm point and its entirely avoidable.
 
It's a great all in one computer and it makes me excited for the standalone Thunderbolt 5K display which I'm sure will launch alongside the revised Haswell-E Mac Pro which will no doubt include the required DisplayPort 1.3 ports.

Can't wait to get three 5K panels to replace my aging 30" 2.5K panels. :p
 
tillsbury said:
Running 4k on MST is already a dog's breakfast, what with monitors failing or half-failing to wake up from sleep and all sorts of other issues getting them to run at 60Hz reliably. How messy is it going to be to be running double TB2 cables? A fudge is not the right solution, and DP1.3/TB3 is not here.
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It's not going to be messy if Apple does it to work with only their own machines. It's messy right now because of hundreds of different setups out there. One setup works, the other doesn't. Apple only has to get this working for the Mac Pro's.
 
George Knighton said:
...
If I'm looking at something that cannot be zoomed, then I'll switch to 1920 x 1080 and that usually does the trick, but of course it's not as crisp and clean looking as the native resolution.

So here's my stupid old man question: With this new 27" Retina display, how can I be sure I'll be able to see and read text easily?
...
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With this new iMac you'll be able to switch to its equivalent of 1920 x 1080, but it will still be quite sharp because it will actually be rendered at 3840 x 2160 at least.

In fact, it might look good enough that you will just want to stay at "Retina 1920 x 1080" mode (or whatever they call it). That should save you the trouble of zooming and changing the display configuration all the time.

If at all possible, try to get to an Apple store or other store with one of these on display and try it out.

Also, just in case you haven't checked it out yet, OS X has a pretty well regarded "Zoom" accessibility feature. This is different than Cmd +/- zooming that some apps have and it works for all apps and everything else. There are a bunch of different options so you might find a setup you like a lot. Like switching to 1920 x 1080 zoomed things end up less sharp, but again, this Retina 5K iMac should greatly improve this.
 
This product doesn't sense. The display will essentially be useful forever until it breaks, whilst the internal computing components it's tied to will quickly be ageing until a version of MacOS X shows up that suddenly means "whoops, no more OS upgrades for you". And it can't be used fully as a standalone display because they didn't wait for TB3? But presumably it could have if they went for the 21" format first.

I think the non-upgradable all-in-one format was dead as soon as the Retina screens showed up. They should do just standalone displays, first in the 21" format and then in the 27". The computing components should be moved out from behind the screen, into the base like a super-slim Mac mini (which also makes sense because the base should be heavier for stability).

From a design, environmental and value perspective, the improvement of the screens to Retina quality, make the iMac a monstrosity. I do wonder if Steve was alive whether he would have pointed that out, because under his leadership the iMac form changed dramatically over the years following the technologies inside, whereas this just seems like "hey, we have a great new display, let's shove it into the existing form without considering the consequences"
 
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laserbeam273 said:
Text will look good on the screen - I think there's some of that in the OS. ;)
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Text and the OS will obviously be optimized. Look how sharp Safari's nav bar is! While most assets on screen look like crap if you fill more than half the screen with the browser window. And third party apps will take forever to update as usual. Have you forgotten that there's hardly any 4K, viewable media, period? Seems silly to want UI chrome look pin sharp, but have no concern for the content that UI is there to present.
 
After placing my order, I've been thinking and thinking..

How likely or how soon is it possible that apple redesigns the iMac appearance?
 
new display, but what about the rest??

The new iMac seems to get both praise and flak based on the 5K display, which I admit is pretty cool, but seeing that we are talking about a computer, with lots of other components I am wondering how much of the hardware differ, from the non-retina 27" iMac.

Specifically the processors, are they from the same generation/iteration of Intel? Am I correct to assume that the existing (non-retina) iMac did **not** get a update, or did I misunderstand? The seeming 0.1GHz difference doesn't mean anything.. or rather let's say it is insignificant to justify the price difference, if 5K-res is not your cup-of-tea.

I have been looking at trying look at the detailed specs on apple, but the website is down at the moment. Likewise 3rd party pages l(e.g. everymac.com) do not have the specs for the latest one. Is there a side-by-side comparison of the 27" models, with detailed specs (i.e. in more detail than http://www.apple.com/imac/specs/)?
 
gnasher729 said:
Their 5K display is announced for $2499. Same price as the iMac. When announced, they actually said "twice the resolution of an iMac" ! (Which admittedly was true until a few hours ago).
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Well I'm sure Dell will have to reevaluate about the price. I'd say Dell will sell it at $1499. Yes Apple is very generous, spec wise when it comes to iMac. Few years ago iMac often compared to similar specced custom built PC and turned out iMac is not a bad deal. Moreover when you include the display. 1440p was a huge deal even now, yet today, the 2880p just reenforce its position as a king of all-in-one.

But of course I am still concerned about how well it performs in graphic intensive tasks, given insane resolution feed by mediocre graphic. (It may be the fastest mobile chip, so it's still a laptop GPU nonetheless)
 
How many fanboys dropped $2500 and up yesterday buying one of these? Insanely high priced. The display does seem nice, but its not worth $1700. Because you can buy or build a PC with same hardware for $800 or less.

I could then go out and buy a 32" 4K display for $500 and only have $1300 in it for what amounts to the exact same computer (I realize it'd be 4K display vs 5K). But fully upgradeable and future proofed.
 
derek4484 said:
How many fanboys dropped $2500 and up yesterday buying one of these? Insanely high priced. The display does seem nice, but its not worth $1700. Because you can buy or build a PC with same hardware for $800 or less.

I could then go out and buy a 32" 4K display for $500 and only have $1300 in it for what amounts to the exact same computer (I realize it'd be 4K display vs 5K). But fully upgradeable and future proofed.
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Or you can just wait 3 or 4 years, 5K display will be matured by the time and the spec (CPU/graphic/SSD) will be better and cheaper than today. Also the price will go down along the way. Look at rMBP, it was insanely expensive at first, but today .. not really much more expensive than comparable cMBP.
 
derek4484 said:
How many fanboys dropped $2500 and up yesterday buying one of these? Insanely high priced. The display does seem nice, but its not worth $1700. Because you can buy or build a PC with same hardware for $800 or less.

I could then go out and buy a 32" 4K display for $500 and only have $1300 in it for what amounts to the exact same computer (I realize it'd be 4K display vs 5K). But fully upgradeable and future proofed.
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Heh, you can always "build a PC" for less than any Mac. It won't run OS X easily, and it wont be as neat or nicely integrated. That's actually worth money to a lot of people.
 
Laughing so hard at the "hardware will age much faster than the display" comments here. I am an ABSOLUTE power user: I do high end music production, front end development, semi-professional photographer, video editor and digital design (and occasional print). I play the odd game in my down time. Oh, and it is also my media centre that literally serves as my TV. About the only things I don't do is compiling software and high end 3D graphics.

You know what? I am WELL SERVED with a four year old (mid 2010) iMac. With a 256SSD and an aftermarket 3TB HD installed (+ 6TB of external storage), 16GB RAM and the 1GB HD 5750 this machine is an absolute powerhouse that deals with whatever I can throw at it.

The only thing I could possibly need from it is a retina display. And that's what I am getting now in this iMac. Hardware has both levelled out the last half decade as it has more than met the needs of even the most power hungry users (again, compiling and 3D rendering and high end mathematics notwithstanding). I can guarantee you that this machine will last me another 4-5 years at least. And if it can last me that long, it sure as hell can fulfil the needs of the average computer user for at least that long.

And really, if you make any money out of your computer at all, you really only need it to last you long enough to recoup your investment.

Perspective people. Perspective.
 
I wonder if there's a single human being on earth that would buy the stock configuration. If someone goes for this model, they'll most likely up the RAM to 16, CPU to i7 and GPU to 4gb of ram to support external displays. All in all, it's actually pretty pricey. But it's nice that the entry level for 5k monitors is set at 2500$.
 
odedia said:
I wonder if there's a single human being on earth that would buy the stock configuration. If someone goes for this model, they'll most likely up the RAM to 16, CPU to i7 and GPU to 4gb of ram to support external displays. All in all, it's actually pretty pricey. But it's nice that the entry level for 5k monitors is set at 2500$.
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skip upgrading RAM through apple, buy cheap RAM, save up to $600. good deal
 
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