What do you guys think of the new iMac

[element1108]

I like them, unfortunately I dug myself into a hole waiting for the update. I've been putting off side jobs for so long now I just can't wait until December x. As patient as I have been, I was hoping (despite rumours) for a day one or two launch.

Picked up a refurbished I had in my cart 27 i7 for $250 less than it was yesterday.

Perhaps it will buy me some time until apple unveils whatever pro toy they're working on "sometime later in 2013). 7 ipad versions later

I'm happy about the announcement, ego a little hurt the wait all this time couldn't be exploited.

That's life within the paradigm though

 

[tears2040]

This isn't 2003.

Yet all of our hard drives that we even bought last year as well as our computers support Firewire.....

This just further proves my point that many people here only play games on their Imac and do not use this professionally at all.....

 

[Bob T123]

explain how much more powerful it would have been if it was thicker?

It's not that it "would have been more powerful" if it was thicker. It's that the design would not have been pushing the reliability envelope in terms of heat rejection, screen attachment technology, etc. So it would have been more robust and reliable (and, actually, more powerful, in that it would have been able to contain an optical drive).

 

[washburn]

It's not that it "would have been more powerful" if it was thicker. It's that the design would not have been pushing the reliability envelope in terms of heat rejection, screen attachment technology, etc. So it would have been more robust and reliable (and, actually, more powerful, in that it would have been able to contain an optical drive).

this is silly

 

[92WardSenatorFE]

This isn't 2003.

Really? I didn't notice.

I do a lot of video editing and all the devices I use have firewire connections. Superdrive is for burning DVD's. Not everything is in the cloud, especially when you make videos for clients who are not technological savvy or you have clients that rely on DVD players for screening video. I'll admit, we all saw Apple dropping the superdrive but it was silly of them to drop firewire and still have it available on other Mac models (including the Mac Mini).

At this point, if I was to use a new iMac I'd need a thunderbolt to firewire 800 adapter, an external superdrive... when the previous generation iMac has all of this built in. It's silly to have a load of external peripherals and cables when you don't need them.

 

[Bob T123]

It's actually not silly. It's knowledge of engineering and design. Do you have any?

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this is silly

It's actually not silly. It's knowledge of engineering and design. Do you have any?

 

[Swordylove]

I was hoping for 660M for the top 21.5"

 

[smoking monkey]

I like it! I was hoping for a teardrop design, but apart from that, I'm thinking it's a really solid upgrade.

I never play games and I only rarely use photoshop and edit videos now for work. So I don't need the better GFX card or huge amounts of ram (16 will do and I can do that myself)

BUT I do want a big screen for watching movies. And because there is no longer a 24 inch, I have to go for the 27.

I priced them here in Japan using Educational discount and the top 27 is only 15,000yen more expensive than the base 27. That's a bargain at 160,000yen. I guess if I get the Fusion drive it'll push the price up to around 180,000yen, but still, that's totally acceptable and I can claim it all on tax next year!

Only problem is I have to wait until freakin' Decemeber. Better be early December and not mid to late...

 

[nagareru]

Yet all of our hard drives that we even bought last year as well as our computers support Firewire.....

This just further proves my point that many people here only play games on their Imac and do not use this professionally at all.....

Well, when did you expect them to drop firewire? Next year or the year after that? It had to be dropped sometime soon, USB 3 is faster and about the same price if not cheaper.

And I use iMacs for broadcast work, I have a lot of firewire drives, they need an ultra thick, usually 1meter long cable plus a power cord, that makes your workspace very uncomfortable.

----

And I don't understand all these people complaining about the new iMac. These new iMacs have almost everything we were expecting for, GTX680MX(is not 680M but almost the same if not better), user serviceable RAM up to 32 (before up to 16GB officially), Ivy Bridge, USB 3.

Plus we got a redesign, and for those who say its too thin well it doesn't matter. It would have matter if they made it thinner and not include those specs, like a 650m top of the line plus soldered ram, it is not.

And there are many laptops, much smaller than the new iMac that have similar components, if not the same.

People in this thread is just like Lewis CK said, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"…

Please calm down, this is current technology, your money will be well spent.

 

[washburn]

It's actually not silly. It's knowledge of engineering and design. Do you have any?

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It's actually not silly. It's knowledge of engineering and design. Do you have any?

well your take on it seems a bit backwards, we don't know how hot the thing runs, a MBPr doesn't get very hot and rarely the fans kick in or so I heard...they would have done lots of testing on this new iMac thin design for both heat and screen lamination...plus optical drive is dead

now people are claiming that if it wasn't so thin it would have been more powerful, thats just BS

 

[garpen]

I think I'll wait till next year when it's 3mm thick, 5 is too bulky for a desktop IMO.

That says it all.

Where is the CD drive and the Firewire sucker

So long Apple hello Windows PC.

 

[JayJayAbels]

I'm an engineer, so I know something about technical design. The thinner a computer is, the more tightly packed the components, the hotter it will run, the more likely something will fail. This is just basic "laws of physics" stuff. In addition, the fact that they had to struggle with getting the "screen bonding" process to work is another indication that they're on the hairy edge of this thing failing (e.g. screen delaminating over time, air bubbles appearing, etc). Of course it looks cool, but let's face it, the older iMac looked extremely cool also (dare I say, "cool enough"?). By pushing the packaging envelope in this way, Apple has sacrificed reliability and robustness, just to go from "ridiculously thin" to "insanely thin". And who ultimately pays the price? We do -- either by having to pay for Apple Care to protect our failure-prone new toy, or (if we roll the dice) by having to replace it years before we should have had to. I would personally MUCH rather have an iMac that is less thin, has an optical drive, and will let me sleep at night not worrying that I'm "on the edge of failure" with my new toy. Plus, I look at my computer from the FRONT -- when will I ever see how damned thin it is, and when will I care??

This entire comment was based on assumptions.

Pic or it didn't happen.

 

[theSeb]

Well, when did you expect them to drop firewire? Next year or the year after that? It had to be dropped sometime soon, USB 3 is faster and about the same price if not cheaper.

And I use iMacs for broadcast work, I have a lot of firewire drives, they need an ultra thick, usually 1meter long cable plus a power cord, that makes your workspace very uncomfortable.

----

And I don't understand all these people complaining about the new iMac. These new iMacs have almost everything we were expecting for, GTX680MX(is not 680M but almost the same if not better), user serviceable RAM up to 32 (before up to 16GB officially), Ivy Bridge, USB 3.

Plus we got a redesign, and for those who say its too thin well it doesn't matter. It would have matter if they made it thinner and not include those specs, like a 650m top of the line plus soldered ram, it is not.

And there are many laptops, much smaller than the new iMac that have similar components, if not the same.

People in this thread is just like Lewis CK said, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"…

Please calm down, this is current technology, your money will be well spent.

The 680 MX is better than the 680M. I am going to laugh at the complaints of how much this upgrade will cost. The 680m is not cheap in other computers and the mx will probably cost more, or nvidia will drop the price of 680m to kill the radeon 7970m and the mx will occupy that price point. Once you add some Apple tax I am sure it will irk many around these parts.

 

[12dylan34]

Check out the box:

Crazy innovation there.

 

[PaulKemp]

Only thinner on the side that doesn't matter!

 

[iMcLovin]

I´m really happy with the new iMac. I guess some people will never get happy. This new iMac has everything I wished for. Awesome design update, lotsa SSD, 680M gpu and 3.4ghz quad core. So, imo specs have not been compromised by the thinnes - then its just awesomely cool. And top of that I get the anti reflective glossy screen tech. It has everything.

I´m ordering the Maxed out version as soon as they let me order it.

Only thing I´m not sure of is if I should get the 768gb of flash or 3tb Fusion.
I plan on getting a 6tb 2big Lacie thunderbolt disk anyway, so maybe the 768gb flash is the best investment.

 

[tom vilsack]

Apple it's 2012 not 1999!

-standard low end 5400rpm hd is a joke!
-sd card slot around back (if any other comp company did this we would mock them big time!)
-640m,650m,660m gpu is great for a laptop but the heck for a desktop!
-unlike LG V325 new all in one..no touch screen,no optical drive (some people like to watch dvd's still...and don't want to pay $$$ for external unit) no tv tuner (would have been nice apple option)

 

[Ak907Freerider]

Hmmm 64 gb?

Seems like apple always goes half on the ram upgrade options. Makes me wonder if 64 gb is possible? I know 2011 can do 32 gb no problem yet apple says 16 gb on the 2011. What u think

 

[theSeb]

Seems like apple always goes half on the ram upgrade options. Makes me wonder if 64 gb is possible? I know 2011 can do 32 gb no problem yet apple says 16 gb on the 2011. What u think

No, what actually happens is that the specs Apple gives is the maximum available at the time. Apple never updates the specs when larger capacity RAM sticks are available. So when the 2011 MBP was released we could only get 4 GB sticks, therefore the max was 8 GB. But then 8 GB sticks were released and even though the CPUs supported 16 GB, Apple never updated the specs. This is a simple problem of number of available RAM slots vs largest capacity available at the time.

It will only be possible if these CPUs support that much and we get 16 GB RAM sticks. We don't have 16 GB RAM sticks yet and unfortunately the Ivy Bridge CPUs only support up to 32 GBs of RAM at this point in time.

Here is the i7 that will be in the top spec BTO 27"

http://ark.intel.com/products/65719/Intel-Core-i7-3770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz

 

[Vandefilm]

My god, I didn't expect these reactions. I love how the new iMac looks and if I hadn't bought a MBA in august I would have bought this baby.

Who needs a DVD-drive? Come on, nobody uses it anymore. And for the 5 people complaining about it here, buy the superdrive. I saw somebody said he uses it for burning music.... come on, really?

And yes, for another 20 geeks here it is very important to search the internet for a couple of hours to find good RAM to upgrade your computer. The iMac is a consumer product for people who just want a great computer to use for iTunes, iMovie, browsing and stuff. 8 gigs of RAM is good enough for them for the next 5 years. Get over yourself and if you want to upgrade buy the 27 inch.

And for the graphics card as well. If you are a solid gamer you probably have an Xbox or a playstation. 50% of the people have that. If you want to play some games the iMac is good enough. Now you have 90% covered. For the geeks who still play games on a desktop, you can upgrade to a good graphics card.

I can't believe people complaining about how the way it looks doesn't matter, but are complaining about 2 cables they have to use. I can remember the release of the first iMac and how it was important how it looks, without all the cables and people were amazed.

So get a life, get over yourself and buy a freaking tower if you don't mind how it looks.

 

[Haugiz]

I loved the design on this thing, and it was nice to see the iMac gain so much attention on stage - I would say it got as much spotlight as their number one selling laptop, the 13 rMBP.

I'm a bit dissappointed in the 21". I was planning to get the 21", but with 5400rpm drives, no SSD expandability (sans fusion), and worse GPU than I'd hoped, it seems I'll be going for a top 27"

I also think they're getting a bit pricy. The top 27" now costs 175$ more than last gen here in Norway, without any obvious upgrade except for double ram.

They sure made it easy to climb the ladder from base 21" to top 27" this time I'm pretty excited to see the price on the 680MX. Think I'll have to go with this seeing how I plan to do a fair amount of gaming on this machine for the next three years. (Please don't tell me I should build a custom gaming PC).

All in all, I think the 27" is a great update for me.

 

[theSeb]

Apple it's 2012 not 1999!

-standard low end 5400rpm hd is a joke!
-sd card slot around back (if any other comp company did this we would mock them big time!)
-640m,650m,660m gpu is great for a laptop but the heck for a desktop!
-unlike LG V325 new all in one..no touch screen,no optical drive (some people like to watch dvd's still...and don't want to pay $$$ for external unit) no tv tuner (would have been nice apple option)

They are mx, not m GPUs. There is a large difference. I am frankly surprised to see the mx versions in there, since mx is the faster version

 

[WillMcAvoy]

The iMac would be great if it had a 7200 rpm HDD in the basic 21.5 model and it would be ok if you could just upgrade any 21.5 model with a fusion drive.

But now you would have to buy the high-end 21.5 model and upgrade it to have a decent HDD and thats ********.

You would have to pay 1800 Euros for a 21.5 machine with a decent HDD and even then you still cant upgrade your ram-memory by yourself and the gpu is still a low-end product.

 

[theaero]

It's not that it "would have been more powerful" if it was thicker. It's that the design would not have been pushing the reliability envelope in terms of heat rejection, screen attachment technology, etc. So it would have been more robust and reliable (and, actually, more powerful, in that it would have been able to contain an optical drive).

Thats what the said about last gen iMacs. Yet, I had a maxed out 27" that I use to the LIMIT (gpu and cpu)

Never had a problem. Never got hot. Always reliable. Screen is perfect. Also use 2x dell 3007wfp hcs. The other monitors get hotter than the iMac does.


As far as I'm concerned, this new iMac is more powerful, and whilst we can't say for sure, I have a PRETTY good feeling it will be very reliable, and heat won't be an issue.

That being said, its ugly as all sin from profile view.

 

[Mxbzz]

Sorry, you have no idea what you're talking about.

In a blind test, with average use, you would not be able to tell the difference when using your same computer with 2 vs 8 gigs of RAM. (this is excluding MAJOR video rendering/editing with many open and active processes)

Your computer is just going to leave old programs in the extra ram if its there. If you dont have the extra ram, it will clear out the older stuff sooner. 2 GB is still plenty and there will be a LOT of extra, old data in the wings already before it gets cleared.

When you say you have 6.5 in use, you are not actually using 6.5. Know what I'm saying?

RAM is like the new megapixel war, where tech newbs always think that higher megapixels in a camera is paramount, ignoring the actually-important parts, like the sensor and lens glass. More megapixels with the same optics means higher resolution grainy crap, not better pictures. RAM is not always the answer.

Argue all you want, but the bottom line, and my original point, is that 8GB will never give you problems for the entire life of the system for your intended use.

Did you even read what I typed? I counted 6.5 gigs and specifically mentioned that I included inactive and wired memory to avoid replies like this. It really feels like you skipped over my entire post just to regurgitate what I said. Did I say 20 gigs was optimal? No. I said 8 was a safe choice.

I'm going to disagree with you on your 2 GB argument and I will leave it at that.