Apple's new 27-in. iMac can be described in one word: stunning.
Don't take my word for it. That's based on the cluster of techie-types and graphic designers who popped into my office last week to get a gander at the newest all-in-one Mac from Apple. Part of it might have been the novelty: Apple unveiled these larger, widescreen iMacs on Oct. 20 and sent one over for review purposes two days later. It's the biggest change for the iMac since it went aluminum-and-black in late 2007.
Yes, it comes with more processing power and the sleek new Magic Mouse, which several people tried out to mixed reviews. (I love it; others found it a little heavy.) But mostly, it was the super-high-resolution screen that drew people in.
That screen, the largest LED-backlit computer display out there for now, offers a resolution of 2,560 by 1,440 pixels for a true 16x9 aspect ratio. That's 90% of the screen real estate you'd get from Apple's gargantuan 30-in. Cinema Display and it's perfect for viewing high-definition (HD) content. Judging from the coos of approval I heard when I fired up some HD movie trailers for the huddled masses, this iMac should sell well.
In fact, HD content is so sharp and bright that it almost looks 3-D. The big question you'll be asking yourself is: "Do I put this in an office or show it off in the living room?" (I'm having that exact discussion right now with my partner.)
A revamped iMac line
Overall, Apple revamped its entire line of iMacs at the same time it updated the MacBook and Mac Mini. The basic iMac starts at the same price as before -- $1,199 -- but it has undergone a growth spurt. Instead of a 20-in. screen, the new iMac gains an inch and a half in diagonal width, bringing it to 21.5 inches and a 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution. That's essentially the same resolution as the old 24-in. model, and with those pixels packed tighter in the 21.5-in. form factor, they look better than ever.
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According to Apple, the basic model -- and its slightly pricier $1,499 brother -- offers 17% more pixels than the old 20-in. iterations. The main difference between the two is the size of the hard drive and the graphics cards. The $1,499 iMac comes with a 1TB drive, offering twice the capacity of the basic model, and uses the ATI Radeon HD 4670 video card with 256MB of video RAM. The $1,199 model gets by with the now-ubiquitous Nvidia GeForce 9400M card, which relies on 256MB of shared system memory and is used in a number of Apple products.
The model I reviewed, which sells for $1,699 and offers the larger screen, is not even the high-end iMac. That title goes to the $1,999 version, which won't be shipping until next month and comes with an Intel Core i5 quadcore processor. (More about that in a minute.)
All of the iMacs (except the top model) come with a 3.06-GHz Core 2 Duo chip and 4GB of RAM. But Apple has added two more RAM slots, making it easy (though not necessarily cheaper) to max out the memory.
For most users, 4GB should be plenty. But if you do decide to add more RAM, you can double it in the smaller iMacs to 8GB, and quadruple it in the 27-in. models to 16GB. Doing so will cost you, though: $200 if you want to go to 8GB and $1,400 if you go to 16GB. (You can usually get RAM cheaper by buying it from a third-party supplier and installing it yourself.)
Though 4GB is enough for most users, if you're running a virtualized operating system or two, you'll find that 8GB gives you room for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and whatever flavor of Windows or
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