Without a doubt, the best part of today’s Apple event held in San Jose, CA was the announcement of the all new, iMac. It is being heralded as the device that will bring the death of the desktop.
The new iMac looked sleek and stunning and made the crowd gasp once of was revealed. There was a bit of lighting effect going on, and they choose perfect angles to make it look paper-thin. If you look closely, you will see it does start to bulge out as it gets closer to the center. A mix of clever engineering and start of the art super thinness has brought a change in time without a doubt. There wasn’t a person in the crowd that didn’t want to get their hands on one of these new iMacs. It’s been two years in the making and well worth the wait.
Apple never makes products cheap, and they back that up by explaining the materials they use to make the product aren’t cheap either, which is true to an extent, but still Apple is generally over priced. Throughout the day that didn’t change either, until the iMac was revealed at what seemed to be a really fair price of $1299 for the baseline model. Compare that to the iPad mini and the iPad 4, and it seems worth every penny.
Expect a considerable bump up in price for the other models, especially if you’re looking at an iMac with built-in retina display which was somewhere in the $1700 ballpark, and from the views trending social media was just way too pricey, and people would be giving that one a miss. The baseline iMac though, people were responding with bring out the checkbook.
You can see from the image below just what made the crows gasp; it is super thin the new iMac. It does beef out, which you can’t see from the clever angle shown. It almost seems a bit of a lie this image, but make no mistake about it; it is thin.
As you can see, the display looks really great too. Not only in the picture either, but they did also bring out a real model with the same display image, and it looked just as impressive in real life. It seemed capable of really bringing out super bright colors without an overbearing contrast.
The entire computer is built into the back of that screen ladies and gentlemen; there are no gimmicks. This is the device being dubbed the desktop killer and for a good reason. All you need with the new iMac is basically a screen on a stand with a wireless keyboard, it’s amazing.
There was a bit of confusion with what the iMac actually has. The iMac will have USB 3.0 as well as Ivy Bridge, the new processor that was brought out in the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro earlier. We know it doesn’t have any disk drives, but yet they say its compatible so whether it’s going to have an add-on or what we aren’t yet sure. It does have a fusion drive which is a new creation of Apple which apparently combines the flash drive and disk drives or as they call it “bridges the gap” between the two.
They, unfortunately, didn’t display just what they meant which was a shame because it has no doubt left many, like myself, slightly confused. They did, however, mention that you get the storage of an HDD with the performance of an SSD. So an entirely new feature here by Apple that we’ll have to see if it becomes universal and used by the competition or if it will be Apple only.
Shipping for the iMac will begin next month in 2 different sizes – either the 21.5 inch or the 27 inch are your options to purchase.