Apple’s got a major revision of the 27 inch iMac, it may be the very last new Intel powered Mac we ever see.
Should you upgrade now or wait for the inevitable Apple silicon version?
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We all knew an iMac upgrade was coming long rumored Apple’s already updated a bunch of other Mac’s this year the 13 inch air and the 13 inch pro both got pretty big upgrades in the spring.
This iMac we knew it was going to happen but we didn’t know if it was going to be an Intel powered Mac like all Macs have been for many, many, many years or who’s going to be the first arm powered Mac.
The first one to use The Apple silicon that Apple announced at WWDC where they were going to use their own chips.
They were designing very similar to the ones in iPhones and iPads.
And that transition, Apple said was going to take a couple of years on a rolling basis, but you might start seeing these machines as early as sometime in 2020.
Well turns out this is not the first arm powered Mac.
This is a traditional Intel powered one but it does move up to the 10th Gen Intel chips as opposed to ninth Gen previously and the graphics are also getting an upgrade.
AMD has a new Radeon 5000 series you’re going to be able to get those in these new iMacs and of course that’s very important For people who use a 27 inch iMac, who are probably doing, photo editing or video editing or CAD.
Things where you really need a lot of both CPU and GPU horsepower, and of course these new iMac As they’re really transitioning fully into SSD newer hybrid drives.
They start out with either a 256 or a 512 gigabyte SSD, you can get that all the way up optionally to 8 terabytes, that’s probably gonna be pretty expensive.
But that’s double the previous high end capacity of 4 terabytes.
And again, if you’re working with things like 8k video, you know you’re gonna need that kind of space.
I totally get that.
Now while the new iMac looks the same on the outside, and frankly that look is getting a little old on the inside besides just the CPU and the GPU and the storage options.
There’s a lot of other new stuff- These new IMAX add the apple T2 chip again found in other Mac, and Apple products, and that lets you add a Siri that lets you do a lot of other stuff with the camera, and the audio.
In fact, this camera I think is probably one of the most exciting upgrades even if it’s a relatively minor one in the big scheme of things because they trade up to a full 1080P camera.
Mac cameras whether it’s iMac or Mac books have frankly never been that good.
In fact, laptop cameras altogether have really never been that great.
And now that we’re all doing zoom meetings and web meetings from home all the time, people are really starting to notice that their their webcams are not very good.
I like to shoot everything on my phone myself because you can shoot in 4k and you get a lot of other bells and whistles and it looks a lot better than the built in little camera on your laptop.
So you get the 1080p camera here in the new iMac And the T2 chip lets you do things like face tracking.
Now, this is not face tracking like facial recognition login or to like lock onto your face and move the camera image as you’re moving around.
Apple says this is really just used to adjust the exposure and lighting to make sure that the faces on screen look the best and your images, I think those are not like, the background.
You know, that’s pretty smart.
We’ll make some better video.
Obviously I think we’d all like to see facial recognition login like you have on your iPhone.
Now, that is not happening at least with this version of the new iMac.
And of course for all you Zoomers and webcam meteors, it’s not just the Images it’s the audio so Apple has taken the what they call the studio mics on the 16 inch MacBook Pro which were really very good and put those in this 27 inch iMac as well so you get upgraded video.
And upgraded audio and some smart stuff to make sure the exposure and lighting on your webcam is going to look as good as it can.
So I feel like this is really going to be a prime zoom meeting machine, even if that’s not its primary purpose.
One more fun extra I’m really looking forward to is the nano texture display.
This is something They had on the apple pro display that really expensive one and instead of just a regular glossy screen, the nano texture option had a subtle etching on the screen that makes it basically glare free.
And they’re adding this to the 27 inch iMac However, it’s about a $500 upgrade.
So while the nano texture is an expensive ad on at least the other new features, the better processors, better graphics, better storage options, the better camera and microphones, the TT chip.
Those are all included at the same base price the 27 inch iMac was before that’s typical Apple standard operating procedure.
They upgrade the systems they keep the base prices the same.
So you feel like you’re getting more for your money than you were last year even though it’s still the same price.
The new 27 inch iMac should be available to order right now on Apple and the company says they’ll be in stores later this week.
