Cupertino-based technology company Apple on Monday announced its three exciting iMac all-in-one desktop computers at the company’s annual developer conference in San Jose, California. This new range of iMacs include an iMac 21.5-inch standard variant, a 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display, and a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display. The upgraded variants of the iMac powerful desktop are designed to offer improved performance. The latest generation of iMac models come with 7th-gen Intel Core Kaby Lake processors, improved display performance, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, up to 64GB of RAM on the 27-inch model, up to 32GB of memory on the 21.5-inch model and Apple’s Fusion drives as standard.
As for pricing and availability, the new updated iMac models will be made available for order in the US starting Monday via company’s official online store, apple.com, and will be made available for purchase in the US starting Wednesday via Apple Stores. The 21.5-inch iMac will be made available for purchase at a starting price of $1,099, the 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display will cost you $1299, while the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display will go on sale at a starting price of $1799.
John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, said at the conference that the new iMac will feature the “best Mac display ever” that offers 500 nits of brightness with support for one billion colours or a total of 43-percent brighter than the previous generation. Apple also confirmed that the standard iMac lineup will ship with new 7th generation Intel Kaby Lake processors, at up to 4.2 GHz with Turbo Boost or up to 4.5 GHz. They also come with higher memory capacity, next-generation graphics, and super-fast storage, as well as a pair of Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports.
In terms of visual performance, the entry-level 21.5-inch model will come with Intel Iris Plus 640 GPU, while the 21.5-inch 4K Retina display model will feature Radeon Pro 555 and 560 graphics cards with up to 4GB of VRAM. And the 27-inch 5K Retina display model will have a choice of Radeon Pro 570, 575, and 580 graphics cards with up to 8GB of VRAM for 5.5 teraflops of graphics computing. All the new graphics cards come bundled with the new improvements in macOS High Sierra, that means these new machines will support VR content. In terms of memory, the 21.5-inch model now can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM, while for the 27-inch high-end variant, it can be customized with up to 64GB of RAM. In terms of storage, the SSD storage options are now up to 50 percent faster than the previous versions, and users can be further customized with up to 2TB of storage, Ternus said. Additionally, the new machines will come with an improved 1080p scale FaceTime Camera, Bluetooth 4.2 and UHS-II SDXC card slot.
In addition, Apple has also introduced an entirely new workstation-class all-in-one desktop computer, dubbed as iMac Pro, which is claimed to be the most powerful Mac device it has ever built. The iMac Pro is designed and architected especially for high-end professional creatives. The all-new iMac Pro sports a gorgeous 27-inch Retina 5K display and a powerful 8-core Intel Xeon processor. The machine can be further configured with an 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation. Further, the iMac Pro features a stunning new space grey enclosure that allows incredible performance for virtual reality content creation, advanced graphics editing, and real-time 3D rendering. The iMac Pro will come with a new AMD Radeon Pro Vega discrete graphics cards with up to 16GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) memory. It will have SSDs with storage of 1TB to 4TB, up to 128GB of ECC RAM, four Thunderbolt 3 ports, and built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet. And an all-new thermal design is said to deliver up to 80 percent more cooling capacity in the same thin and seamless iMac design. Notably, the new iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December this year with a starting price tag of $4,999 (US).
“We’re thrilled to give developers and customers a sneak peek at iMac Pro. This will be our fastest and most powerful Mac ever, which brings workstation-class computing to iMac for the first time,” said John Ternus. “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it,” he added.
