Today, Apple has updated America’s best-selling desktop computer with an addition to its iMac lineup. The 27-inch model had a 5K “Retina” display last year, while the smaller, 21.5-inch model was slimmed down with its larger pixels.
Now 21.5-inch model available for purchase it has a true 4K display (official resolution is 4096×2304). If you don’t want to do the math, that’s about 219 pixels per inch (5K iMac saves about 218 ppi for comparison, and iPhone 6s ~ 326 ppi).
The new Apple 4K iMac.
This is enough to natively display the image from a 9 megapixel camera, making it easy to edit photos. However, it’s not just resolution that’s increased, as Apple uses a new display technology to raise the color gamut. The new 4K iMac can display 25% better color (especially reds and greens) than previous models. This “P3” (probably referring to the color space used in movie theaters) uses red and green phosphor LEDs instead of the pure white of previous models.
The new 4K iMac starts at $1499, but the base configuration still comes with a slow 5400rpm hard drive; Upgrading components can cause your prices to skyrocket.
21.5-inch 4K iMac and 27-inch 5K iMac.
To keep the price down, Apple created a new version of the Fusion Drive that combines a regular hard disk drive with a certain amount of flash storage; The operating system caches commonly used files on the SSD partition to make your computer faster. Previous Fusion Drives with 128GB SSD cache + hard drive; The new 1TB Fusion Drive only comes with 24GB flash cache to buffer the slower hard drive. This new version will cost $100 to upgrade over the base model; The 2TB/3TB Fusion Drives still come with 128GB SSD caching and cost $300 and $400 respectively.
Other optional upgrades include a 3.3GHz quad-core i7 CPU over 3.1GHz quad-core i5, Thunderbolt 2, and 16GB DDR3 RAM over the base 8GB; there is no option to upgrade from standard Intel Iris Pro graphics. You also get the faster 3-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard across the range.
4K iMac 2 with Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse.
Apple’s 5K iMac It has received some upgrades, including AMD Radeon M380, M390, M390, and M395X GPUs, as well as up to 32GB of RAM and a 4GHz quad-core i7 CPU (one of Intel’s new Skylake processors). The 5K iMac also gets the new display technology from the 4K iMac, which means better colors for everyone.
The base price of the 27-inch iMac is now $1799, but that includes the Retina Display – you can no longer buy a new 27-inch iMac with an older, lower-resolution display from Apple.
Updated 27-inch 5K iMac, now with Skylake CPUs.
Apple also introduced the new Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2 today. While the Magic Keyboard comes free with your 4K iMac purchase, if you want to upgrade from Magic Mouse 2 to Magic Trackpad 2, it will cost an extra fifty dollars. You could previously upgrade to the Magic Trackpad at no extra cost (this reflects the $50 increase in the purchase cost of the Magic Trackpad 2 on its own).
Both 4K and 5K iMacs are available today online and in Apple Retail stores.
