Gadgetory

what's good guys Jonathan here and this is my review of the 2015 21 point 5 inch 4k iMac now design wise not much has changed it's got that classic brushed aluminum finish and these just a single power cable to get you up and running which results in a super clean minimal and space-efficient setup on the back we have the power button and then your ins and outs include gig Ethernet Thunderbolt 2 USB 3 SDXC and a headphone jack which also doubles as an optical audio output now as most of you should know by now I am not afraid to rip Apple especially when they deserve to be ripped but when it comes to what is the single most appealing thing about this iMac which is the 4k display if you love pixels if you love technology there is no denying that this looks insanely good for reference the videos that you're watching right now is output it to a resolution of 3840 by 2160 which is technically UHD then we have cinema 4k which is 4096 by 2160 and then this iMac is slightly larger than that with a resolution of 4096 by 23:04 now as far as why you'd want a screen resolution that high on a screen size that small what Apple does is scale everything down so for text and UI elements this is done at a four to one ratio meaning for every pixel of screen real estate there are four pixels jammed inside and that's actually what allows the text and things like the application icons to look super sharp and super crisp now what's awesome is things like photos and videos those are scaled to a one-to-one ratio so for example here in Final Cut Pro 10 I have a full 1080p video plane and I'm able to see a hundred percent of those pixels with a ton of screen real estate left over now on the technical side this iMac is scaled to look like 2048 by 1152 but you can also give yourself a little extra room with options that look like 2304 by 12 96 or 2560 by 1440 which crazy enough was the resolution of the 27-inch iMac before it got the 5k upgrade now speaking of the 27-inch iMac one of the big upgrades there was the fact that it now supports AP three color gamut which is 25 percent wider and that also applies to these 21 inch IMAX and that really just kind of the cake on the overall quality and fantastic display now if there were any downsides with this display I would say it's the fact that there is no target display mode which means you cannot use it as a monitor with other Macs and that's definitely a bummer so that was the good but now it's time for some ripping because for some reason Apple decided to take this beautiful machine and stick a 5400 rpm hard drive in there which is a travesty if you walk into the Apple store and they try to sell you a machine with a 5400 rpm hard drive you tell them no hell no now if we open up black magic to speed test we're getting around 98 megabytes per second on both read and write which isn't terrible but by no means good especially in 2015 as far as what that translates to you're going to get painfully slow boot ups which gives you flashbacks to those older computers where you turn it on walk away go make coffee and do you like 15 of the things before your computer started up on top of that that means you're going to get that dreaded doc bounce now because of that you should never ever ever buy or let someone buy this iMac with a 5400 rpm hard drive and in my opinion there are only two configurations you should consider the first being the hundred dollar upgrade which gets you a one terabyte fusion drive or the second being the two hundred dollar upgrade which gets you 256 gigs of pure flash storage now the reasoning behind that and to put things in perspective if you did the fusion drive upgrade you're looking around $15.99 us if you upgraded either the RAM or the processor you're at $17.99 which is also the same price as the entry-level 5k iMac which not only get you a bigger higher resolution screen but also a dedicated AMD r9 M 380 graphics card conversely if you were thinking about maxing out the processor and the RAM on this 4k iMac that puts you at $19.99 us which is the same price as the second tier 5k iMac which not only gets you a fusion drive as a standard option but also a bump in graphics with the r9 m390 also with the 27-inch iMac you're able to upgrade the RAM after the fact and with the 21 inch iMac you are capped off with what you order as far as performance goes you're getting a 3.1 gigahertz eye 5 quad core processor which will also turbo boost up to 3.6 gigahertz in Geekbench 3 on a single core side dished out a score of 3779 as far as multi-core formitz that was twelve thousand six hundred and seventy now I went ahead and tested out a little bit of 4k editing in Final Cut Pro 10 and much to my surprise it actually handled my fs7 footage pretty well I was able to export a 60 second 4k h.264 file in about 90 seconds which considering isn't bad at all so the performance is there but I think again the biggest bottleneck here especially if you're trying to edit 4k video is that hard drive so again at the very least make sure you get the fusion drive or ideally you want to be editing off an external scratch drive as far as graphics go this features intel's iris pro graphics 6200 and as far as integrated graphics go it actually performed really well running tomb raider at 1080p on low settings i was seen around 43 average frames per second hopping over to battlefield 4 windows 10 by a bootcamp at 1080p on low settings we're getting nearly 50 average frames per second now yes I know this is not a gaming machine nor is it intended to be so if you want to go game build your PC but it's still nice know that as far as integrated graphics go you're getting some pretty solid performance with this machine so all know aside from the horrendous based option as far as your hard drive goes this is a pretty solid machine it shipped with El Capitan you now have the new magic keyboard and the Magic Mouse - with the dummest charging port on the face of this planet or you have the option to upgrade to the Magic Trackpad - for 50 bucks more which I prefer over the Magic Mouse now for those curious those fancy-pants graphics that you saw during Geekbench and the speed test those were courtesy of videoblocks comm specialize in stock footage motion graphics and After Effects templates on top of that they also have a marketplace you guys that shoot crispy video can also submit your footage to be sold as stock footage and make a hundred percent of the cash now if you guys want to check this out you can do so for free for seven days all the details are linked down below slide from that hopefully enjoyed the video if you did and you are feeling like being awesome make sure to smash that like button as hard as you would smash a 5400 rpm hard drive its Jonathan with TLD and I will catch you guys later