New online 27-inch iMac orders now ship in January

Buy AAPL now

Well.

 

I finally cracked last night and ordered mine.

 

We're looking at 4th-11th of Jan' as they quoted me.  But it was always going to be about a 3-4 weeks/a month-ish as they only became available to order 30th/1st Dec'.  

 

i7.

680MX.

Fusion Drive.

8 gigs of Ram.

 

That there...is a fast machine.  Much faster than my current Core 2 Duo from 2008 with 8800GS.

 

I would have liked the retina for a 27 inch iMac.  Knowing my luck Apple will update the iMac in June with retina. :P  But I didn't think waiting for next Intel cpu was worth it with little anticipated performance increase with mainly power savings and more bumps to Integrated crappics.

 

But...I think i get the vibe we're at least a year away from that...and then...a GPU fast enough to push it in the way a 680MX pushes the current top res'?  ...and look at the prices of the retinas for just 13 and 15 inch Macbooks!

 

I'm sure it will looking stunningly sharp when it arrives.  Speaking of 'Sharp', did Marv' or one poster push a link of a 32 inch screen with a 4k res?  But again.  How much would an iMac with that cost?   I'm sure the retina iMac will come in the next 1-3 years.

 

So, there we have it.  I'll have the new sexy thin super powerful iMac. 

 

...and the LED monitor they do have is far punchier with colours and pops with more vibrance.  So, it is an improvement too.

 

It wasn't cheap.  I don't like that Apple put the price up by £100, dropped the DVD AND charged me £50+ for an external.  That's a £150+ price hike.  I don't like that they're basically charging £200 for an £80 128 SSD part.  I don't like their ass reaming prices on ram £160(?) for an extra 8 gigs to take it up to 16 gigs?  (Seriously...greedy b*stardness...)  Can get a stick of '8' gigs for about £30-ish quid?

 

The top end iMac still sits on i5 cpu (a £1000 'rig' and lower cpu...)  It's gone up in price from £1500 to £1800 over the last few years.  And you still have to BTO an i7 and the 680MX which should come as standard on the top end iMac in my view.

 

But compared to the entry level Mac Pro (a joke of a machine...with an outrageous price for an upgradeable machine (Yeah...) the BTO'd iMac is a real heavy weight for value, GPU punch, big beautiful screen and Fusion.  I hope 'pro' aspirees have their day in the sun.  But I get the feeling at Apple's current rate of going it will be late '13.

 

I'm looking forward to getting a commercial copy of Photoshop, an A3 scanner, sticking some extra ram to take it to 16 or 24 gigs...and having some fun doing 3D work, some 2D art and the odd game ;)  Should perform 4-5 times faster on cpu and the same or more on GPU.  

 

I'll lose the guilt over the price when it arrives, I guess.... :D  Can't wait to see how fast it boots.

 

Ramble over.

 

Lemon Bon Bon. ;)

Does anybody know when the IMac will be in stores. It looks great and before people complain more about the IMac display. Most computers run at 1080p on the display whether it is 7-30 inch and at 7 inch a steep price. Now if it could have a 5000 pixel res. yet you could hardly notice the difference probably, retina could be on IMac or could not yet it still works great.

 

That's what I'm wondering, too. No 27" on display in SF yet, just the 21".

Yeah, this one here:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/05/viewsonic-vp3280-led-4k-monitor-hands-on/

It's hard to say how much it would cost with Apple because they're shipping to consumers. As soon as you take things away from being exclusively for the high-price/low volume market, they can drop prices considerably because the volumes go up massively. Apple can sell a $1000 display stuck to a $1000 computer far more easily than a manufacturer can sell a $1000 display on its own. When the 27" iMac launched, they even managed to undercut Dell on 27" IPS displays.

One factor will be getting the GPU to drive it. The 680MX probably could but the 660M might struggle. They could have just made a single top of the line model but they wouldn't get the volumes.

Thanks for the re-link, Marv'.

 

That's the one.

 

150 ppi and 31.5 inches?

 

With a 6 core xeon...and you'd have the ultimate iMac.  

 

Apple have history of the Cube's monitor at 21-22 inches.  It looked massive at the time.  The alu 30 incher.  That was stunning.

 

Perhaps Apple can drive the 21 inch iMac down into the sub £1k bracket and introduce the 31.5 incher.  Given that it costs the price of a car...it could be at least a year to a couple of years away...even with volume discounts..?  We'll see.  Apple does surprise from time to time...just like the original 30 inch LCD launch.  (I remember being blown away by that!  Can Apple blow us away again?)

 

But like you say, GPUs will have to 'go some' to run it convincingly. 

 

By the time my new iMac (well ships... :P) has seen a couple of years service maybe this 4k monitor will be a reality..?  And we'll have had a new Mac Pro worthy of it too... ;)

 

Lemon Bon Bon.

It sounds like a very decent machine. But in light of them dropping the internal drive and making the RAM much harder to access and self-install (on the 21.5" model), I'm very happy that I got my BTO 27" with an i7 last year and slammed it with RAM myself. But in any case, these are excellent, well built machines.
 

I am a bit confused by one thing though... since it's a desktop, why would anyone *really* care that it's thinner and/or lighter than its predecessor? Other than when I had to move my desk, in the 12 months that I've had mine, I've never picked it up. And with the iMac and the ACD both angled inward, no one can see how thick they are anyway. I don't know... it just seems like a rather odd selling point, given what it is.

I rather wish I were in the market for an iMac at the moment - got one in 2011 that was the mid-2011 model, just before the mid-2011 model was released (and I didn't know unti reading here a few weeks ago that I could have swapped it:no:). The mid-2011 model supports AirPlay Mirroring, which the mid-2011 doesn't; and of course, the new one has the non-reflective screen. Unless you're made of money (I'm not ), you can never keep up.



The iMac was purchased to replace our PowerMac G5 that, while it was (and is) still going strong after 7 years of almost complete 24/7 use, had the rug finally pulled from under it by Snow Leopard. We looked at the Mac Pros very briefly: we were horrified to find that the only one that we could (only just) afford would only take a maximum of 3 GB RAM.

That gave us a lot of pause for thought, as the G5 had 4 GB in it. We switched to a 27" iMac with a quad 2.9 GHz i7, 8 GB RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GPU, and have been quite pleased with it, although not nearly as happy with it as we were with the G5.

I am one of those who would love to see Apple sort out the Mac Pro line and/or add a mid-range machine (i.e., an iMac-like config in a configurable not AIO box with a separate monitor). I guess I can only dream...
Edited by AlexN - 12/10/12 at 2:52am

Am picking up my 27" iMac today

It was time to upgrade as my current MBP is first generation Intel one, so can't run latest OSX and XCode. I can't complain, it's still a very useable laptop (okay for building iPhone apps with iOS5 SDK) whilst almost seven years old!

Looking forward to the bigger screen though.

Btw I am in the UK.

 

Found one in Palo Alto yesterday -- they said I bought the last one. Ultimate model.

My iMac is still 'processing.'

 

Lemon Bon Bon.

My imac setup

 

 

Still processing.  Ordered Dec' 6th.

 

Lemon Bon Bon.

Just got shipping notice on a 27" ordered Dec. 8th.

Arrived today, 2 days earlier than Apple suggested in their shipping e-mail. Performing brain transplant from old Mac. Screen look very nice, as does the svelt body.

Waiting.........

Last Friday (Jan. 11) I walked into the Apple Store at Southpoint in Durham, NC and purchased a 27" iMac. They had two in stock. They had precisely the options and specs that I had already determined I wanted before I made the trip.

 

27" iMac

3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz

8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM

1TB Fusion Drive

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB GDDR5

Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (They replaced out the wireless keyboard)

Magic Trackpad

 

Other:

Apple Mouse

Apple USB SuperDrive

AirPort Extreme Base Station

AppleCare Protection Plan

Epson Artisan 837 All-in-One Printer

 

Separate order from Crucial of 32 GB RAM that I will install myself... saving me $400.

 

This computer is beautiful. The 27" looks better than the 21" because the taper from the front edge surrounding the display back toward the greatest depth of the "bulge" is more gradual than the 21". (This machine replaces our 2003 "Lamp" iMac. 10 years with not a single issue... may it rest in peace.)

 

The 27" display on this iMac has good color... No yellowish tint that I have read about in other posts and forums. Haven't experienced any Light bleed or image persistence yet, but admittedly have not had it long enough yet. Also pleased with the reduction in reflections as compared with all the previous iMac models I have seen my co-workers working with.

 

The audio is better than I had expected, given there are no external forward-orientd speakers.

 

Boot up time is blazing fast... faster than my maxed out MacPro at work. The OS and applications on the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive certainly makes a difference.

 

My career involves using After Effects, Maya, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and other supporting visual FX software. I'm looking forward to seeing how this new machine performs (at home) in comparison to my maxed out Mac Pro (at work.)

Welcome to AI!  And lucky you for getting your machine so easily!  Hope to hear how it works.

 

Will stop by my shop tomorrow to see if there is any change in my order status...

I picked up a base model 27 inch iMac 5 days ago from the Apple Store in Gilbert, Az. I would have liked a fusion drive., but, to compensate I doubled the ram with 2 8 gig sticks. This computer just flies compared to my 1.8 dual G5 Powermac. The display is amazing compered to my 20 inch Cinema Display from 10 years ago. Hopefully I can get the same longevity as my last Mac. I replaced my old setup due to the lack of support for the PPC Macs, Not, because of failure, count me lucky I guess.