Gadgetory

well there really aren't that many ways to change the iMac it's already thin and light though none of that really matters for a desktop it's good-looking it's powerful its high resolution it's not even terribly expensive for what it is so how do you change the iMac this year Apple picked one thing one crazy high-resolution thing this is the Apple iMac with retina display the screen really is the whole story here and with good reason it's a 27 inch display 5000 120 pixels wide by two thousand eight hundred and eighty pixels tall that if you're counting is 14 point seven million pixels and they all look amazing blacks are deep White's or bright viewing angles are outrageous colors pop off the laminated display this is flat-out as good a display as you will see on any computer anywhere having a resolution that high means a few things one is that you get just an incredible amount of space on this screen you can play a 720p video at native resolution open a half-dozen Safari windows side by side and have plenty of room left for Spotify and your calendar and your email it's kind of like being in OS 10 expose view all the time except you can use everything by default the retina iMac runs at 2560 by 1440 turning pixels into an apple calls points points are basically a stand-in for physical distance which means everything on this screen is the same size as on a lower res Mac but it looks better because where you used to have one pixel now you have four that's why at native 51 twenty by twenty eight eighty resolution everything is hilariously small on this iMac if you're using 4k video or a high-res photo the iMac is content-aware enough to render that part pixel for pixel while still doubling everything else basically this is all a complicated way of saying that when you have the content to suit a 5k display the iMac shows it accurately and usually with space to spare otherwise it tries to find the middle ground to make everything a little more usable that content thing is the sticky point of the retina iMac yeah it has a 5k display and yeah that makes most things look amazing text is the big one I can't get over how much I like reading on this thing games to at least the ones that play at 28 80 by 1440 look great BioShock Infinite looks incredible in this screen 4k videos look amazing and play perfectly and I love editing high-res photos on here but when you have pictures and especially video that isn't this high-res can look really bad Netflix doesn't stream in 4k on the iMac and even its highest possible resolution is fuzzy and soft same with Hulu same with most of YouTube and just about anything else you want to watch basically just don't try to watch anything that isn't 4k fullscreen at least not while you're sitting just a few feet away from the iMac of course this happens every time Apple puts out a Retina screen that's more impressive than the last one it'll take the web and developers a little while to catch up and play at this higher resolution but I think they will you just might want to wait to pull the trigger on an iMac upgrade until then the other thing that usually happens when Apple bumps up its resolution is that the first model is slow it takes a lot of processing to power a lot of pixels on my review unit at least that's not a problem but I've been using the top-tier model it's crazy fast consistent and powerful no matter what you're doing it even handles Adobe Premiere playback and editing the things our video team work with every day faster than just about any other machine it's also of course four thousand $399 for a certain kind of person that's a deal it's certainly cheaper than a Mac Pro on a 4k display but for most people that's kind of the definition of overkill the thing is though I get the sense that the iMac with retina display needs just about all of that power to really sing even with specs like I have videos will occasionally still stutter when I open a new Safari tab and games will flicker or tear as I play particularly complicated scenes performance on the iMac is fantastic having this much solid-state storage in particular is great but I don't know how much room there is to spare here tread carefully at the bottom models for $2,499 you get a 3.5 gigahertz Intel Core i5 processor 8 gigs of ram and a one terabyte fusion drive which is port solid drive part spinning drive that's a lot of hardware but it might not be enough if you're going to really put this thing to the test if you just want Safari and Chrome and iPhoto and Spotify though by a way this is the best screen ever for using those things it all runs underneath OS 10 Yosemite the newest version of Apple's software and one specifically built for a screen like this there's lots that's new about Yosemite but nothing specific to the iMac the things like handoff and continuity might actually make a desktop more usable since it's so easy to take your work with you now the insides are all new but the shell of the iMac is still the same it's the same thin silver aluminum shell that bulges slightly in the back and hides all its ports and looks good absolutely anywhere you put it there's a Thunderbolt 2 port for USB 3 slots and SD slot a headphone jack in an Ethernet port their good sounding stereo speakers firing out at the bottom but I'd still connect something external it's it's even on the same stand as ever the hardware just hasn't changed here and it didn't really need to for some people for some uses the iMac with retina display is virtually perfect I love editing photos in this computer and I love just reading and browsing the web on it this is a computer I want to use but it's expensive and it's really expensive if you want to take full advantage if you want a machine that is as powerful as it is pretty but make no mistake retina is the future of the iMac and that is great news