Apple's new iMac has been warmly among critics, who praise the desktop's sleek design and impressive under-the-hood credentials. While the absence of a built-in DVD drive and the company's tendency to set premium prices for its devices may turn off some consumers, it's clear that faithful Apple loyalists will find much to admire in the iMac's latest iteration. Let's look at the reviews.
In a desktop computer, though, the pursuit of thinness at the cost of features makes less sense. The vast majority of the time, it's going to be sitting on your desk, and users will be interacting with a separate keyboard and mouse, pausing only occasionally to plug something in or adjust the screen's angle. Giving up desirable features like user-upgradeable RAM just to make a thinner desktop seems like the wrong move, even if it's one that only IT people and power users will notice or care about.
All of those gripes aside, there's a lot to like about the new iMac. There's also plenty to recommend it over last year's model: it's thinner, lighter, cooler, and quieter. Its screen, while still sort-of-reflective, is much less so than previous models. Its CPU performance is always better than last year's model, and its GPU performance is often better (and once you start buying higher-end models, this once again changes to "always better"). Our biggest practical gripe is with the 5400RPM hard drive's speed, and the fact that remedying it with a Fusion Drive adds $450 to the price of the 21.5-inch model. Apple's own MacBook Air was one of the first to really begin pushing SSDs as main system drives, so it's sad to see the company's flagship desktop using the same sort of hard drive you'd find in a cut-rate, bargain-basement laptop.
The newest iMac is a great product, and despite Apple's reputation for making pricey things, it's actually a great value, too. Even as other computer makers catch up in terms of screen resolution and industrial design, the iMac stands out with a stunning display that really does cut down on screen glare. As for FusionDrive, it's exceedingly rare to find a consumer system that uses an HDD for storage and an SSD for system stuff. That's a clear step up from typical hybrid drives, which use a much smaller amount of flash memory, mainly for caching and improving start-up times. And while Apple doesn't always win on specs, it makes a tempting offer here: you get beefier graphics than on competing systems, which should help creative professionals, amateur photographers and casual gamers alike.
The 2012 iMac is an update that pushes the needle in all the ways we're used to from Apple - improved performance, better hardware under the hood, etc. - but it also adds the most dramatic and attractive case redesign in recent memory to the mix. This is both nice from an aesthetic perspective, and a welcome change for anyone who needs to move their all-in-one around or just wants it to take up less space on the desk. It also works in target display mode, making it a sleeker (albeit more expensive) alternative to a Thunderbolt Cinema Display as a second screen for your Mac notebook. Some might gripe about the sacrifice of the built-in DVD drive, but in my book that's not even a noteworthy admission given all the improvements on board, including many more high-speed I/O ports than previous generations have offered.
You might be alarmed by the fact that the design is the most interesting thing about the new iMac. A thin bezel is nice to look at, but it doesn't improve processing speed, workflow, or overall utility. Fortunately for Apple, it evolved that design from a computer with a strong technical foundation. It is the updates to that foundation, and a few points of polish along the way, that keep this iMac on elite footing. I'll suggest you line up behind the Blu-ray fans to those of you hoping Apple will someday add touch-screen input to the iMac. Instead, this is a computer for serious, performance-driven users, particularly those who need a high-resolution display, and fast graphics and disk performance.
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