Why? Apple doesn't normally raise the prices on their iMacs. Unless they decide to introduce a "r-iMac" model completely separate from the others, then that's a different story.
Apple makes the good stuff available for the masses. If anyone can bring the prices down, it'll be them. Crossing my fingers...
While I've been itching to replace my aging 2009-iMac, I think I will wait for the next-gen Broadwell CPU next year. Then, I'll have my wish-list fulfilled.
I agree completely. Apple has a long history of, from time to time, resetting industry expectations with great specs and a surprisingly low price. Then the rest of the industry comes out with a low priced (lower speced) alternative and throws around the idea of an "Apple tax." I have a feeling the next iMac will be like this--incredible display and performance (latest and greatest WiFi, etc.) for a very reasonable price.
I agree completely. Apple has a long history of, from time to time, resetting industry expectations with great specs and a surprisingly low price. Then the rest of the industry comes out with a low priced (lower speced) alternative and throws around the idea of an "Apple tax." I have a feeling the next iMac will be like this--incredible display and performance (latest and greatest WiFi, etc.) for a very reasonable price.
A 27" iMac is a great computer, no doubt, but I hardly call it low price, or like the previous poster you replied to, a product for the masses.
A 27" iMac is a great computer, no doubt, but I hardly call it low price, or like the previous poster you replied to, a product for the masses.
True enough. I was reacting to the speculation that this new iMac would be $3000 or even $5000. That's insane. The entry level 27" iMac today is $1800. If Apple rolls out a new retina iMac, I expect it to come in around that same price and be a great value for dollar. My point (which I didn't make very well, or at all) was that when Apple revises their Macs (desktop and laptop) they tend to reset the value proposition in a very positive way. And unfortunately over time, they look less and less price competitive--until the next reboot. I'm hoping/predicting that the next iMac revision will be "wow, that's a great deal!" events. (Having said that the market for people who "need" a $1800 desktop rather than a $1000 laptop is smaller than it's ever been, and gamers are a huge part of that market.)
PLEASE let it use an nVidia 9xx series processor! I want to get a 970 for my Mac Pro, but OS X will need a baseline driver before the Hackintoshers can get one running.
I'd love one of these but I can't help what kind of GPU they are going to need to drive one of these displays for anything more intensive than web browsing? High end GPUs on windows PCs struggle to do gaming at 4K resolution and if i'm going to spend £2k ($3k) on a desktop I kind of want it to do a bit a high resolution gaming too.
That would be silly, it would be a huge waste of money to add the cost of gaming performance GPUs when 99.9% of customers won't need them.
And all to run a "game" in a bit higher resolution.
fir a 27" display 5k seems like a "show off" spec that doesn't mean much in the end.
I don't think the human eye can discern the difference between 4k and 5k at that size. It would be more expensive without much difference.
I doubt people could even see the difference between 1080p and 4k at 27"..
Am I wrong here?
The current 27" iMac's display is 2560x1440. The important thing about 5K is that it keeps the screen real estate of the current iMacs but gives all of the benefits of retina. If the new iMac's display was 'only' 4K, the screen real estate would be the equivalent of the 21.5" iMac (i.e. 1080P).
I hope this is true. My main (photo-) editing machine is a 2007 Mac Pro (2x3GHz, 17GB RAM, SSD, 2 HDDs in RAID 0, 1 HDD for Time Machine, 30" Cinema Display). It's been nonfunctional since April and I miss it. I spent about 20 hours trying to resurrect it, bought a new video card, and finally gave up and took it to a Genius, who gently wrote my beloved's death certificate.
If this is rumor turns out to be true, this will be my next Mac. If I were still shooting for income, I'd have already purchased the current 27" i7 iMac.
My Maclife timeline has been like this: SE in '90, 7500 in '96, PowerBook Duo in '97, 733MHz G4 in '01, 15" 1GHz PowerBook G4 in '02, Mac Pro in '07, 13" MacBook Pro in '10. (Also, 3 iPads, 5 iPhones, Apple TV, and 3 iPods.) I've never owned a PC.
I predict a $300-$500 increase in price over the current iMac. The Retina MacBook Pros were available at a price point above their predecessors, so it's reasonable to assume there'll be an increase in the cost of a Retina iMac. There might even be a different name for this machine, like iMac Pro.
I hope this is true. My main (photo-) editing machine is a 2007 Mac Pro (2x3GHz, 17GB RAM, SSD, 2 HDDs in RAID 0, 1 HDD for Time Machine, 30" Cinema Display). It's been nonfunctional since April and I miss it. I spent about 20 hours trying to resurrect it, bought a new video card, and finally gave up and took it to a Genius, who gently wrote my beloved's death certificate.
If this is rumor turns out to be true, this will be my next Mac. If I were still shooting for income, I'd have already purchased the current 27" i7 iMac.
My Maclife timeline has been like this: SE in '90, 7500 in '96, PowerBook Duo in '97, 733MHz G4 in '01, 15" 1GHz PowerBook G4 in '02, Mac Pro in '07, 13" MacBook Pro in '10. (Also, 3 iPads, 5 iPhones, Apple TV, and 3 iPods.) I've never owned a PC.
I predict a $300-$500 increase in price over the current iMac. The Retina MacBook Pros were available at a price point above their predecessors, so it's reasonable to assume there'll be an increase in the cost of a Retina iMac. There might even be a different name for this machine, like iMac Pro.
I agree. I can't imagine that these new Retina iMacs won't be more expensive than the standard ones are now. This is a two-stage process like the rMBPs. First they bring out the Retina models at a premium price, and then as the cost of the display goes down a little bit, reduce the price to just $100 more than the old set-point. In the laptop arena they had the MBA to slot in below that.
In the case of the iMacs, it's an even more tortuous process, because (I'm guessing) they don't think the 21.5" can handle the heat of a GPU that can drive a double-density display in addition to the current CPU, so they're waiting for the mythical "Broadwell" processors to make a Retina version of that, too. At least until they have all their ducks in a row there, the regular iMacs will stick around. Then eventually, the Retina machines will come down in price to $100 more than the current levels, and they'll have these new cheap iMacs with MBA innards to fill up the bottom tier.
I was just about to build a hackintosh with the same CPU but I guess I'm going to put that on hold for now. iMac retina sounds like a pretty nice deal.
This is by far the best Apple-related news of the last months - whatever it costs, I am buying it as long as it is a 27" retina screen with a strong GPU...I just don't care at this point.
Damn, I was so tired of these boring "me-too" iPhone/iWatch news - the good ol' "Apple Computer Inc." is WAY more interesting.
The current 27" iMac's display is 2560x1440. The important thing about 5K is that it keeps the screen real estate of the current iMacs but gives all of the benefits of retina. If the new iMac's display was 'only' 4K, the screen real estate would be the equivalent of the 21.5" iMac (i.e. 1080P).
They'd still allow you to go to 1440p with 4K. The rMBP for example has a highest scale setting at 1920x1200 but renders at 2880x1800 and not 3840x2400. The iMac could be 4K and have the optimal resolution be 1080p but still scale higher to 1440p.
I personally think 1440p makes UI elements too small on the 27", likewise 1080p on the 21.5". It doesn't matter though, whether they go with 4K or 5K, both will finally allow people to set the displays to more comfortable resolutions, which for me would be 1680x1050 on the 21.5" and 1080p (really 1920x1200) on the 27" and these can be done with resolutions of 3360x2100 and 3840x2400. I like 16:10 too although I don't find it as big of a deal with the desktops because the display is large anyway.
I think the NVidia 980M would be a better option too with 8GB of video memory:
AMD GPUs are cheaper so that might offset the cost of the Retina display a bit. The R9 M290 X is a bit further down, even below the 880M. They tend to do better at OpenCL though.
Apple got into a habit of switching them year about. They've skipped AMD a few times now. That might mean the highest Broadwell MBP comes with AMD mobile too if they aren't going all integrated.
As for performance, the laptops can drive 4K displays. Here's an older rMBP driving a 4K display over HDMI at 30Hz:
[VIDEO]
There are some reports of it driving a 4K monitor at 60Hz over the TB/Mini-dp output. The GPUs in the top iMac are usually 2-3x faster than the MBP. It could be that the 21.5" models get 4K and the 27" 5K.
They'd still allow you to go to 1440p with 4K. The rMBP for example has a highest scale setting at 1920x1200 but renders at 2880x1800 and not 3840x2400. The iMac could be 4K and have the optimal resolution be 1080p but still scale higher to 1440p.
I personally think 1440p makes UI elements too small on the 27", likewise 1080p on the 21.5". It doesn't matter though, whether they go with 4K or 5K, both will finally allow people to set the displays to more comfortable resolutions, which for me would be 1680x1050 on the 21.5" and 1080p (really 1920x1200) on the 27" and these can be done with resolutions of 3360x2100 and 3840x2400. I like 16:10 too although I don't find it as big of a deal with the desktops because the display is large anyway.
I think the NVidia 980M would be a better option too with 8GB of video memory:
AMD GPUs are cheaper so that might offset the cost of the Retina display a bit. The R9 M290 X is a bit further down, even below the 880M. They tend to do better at OpenCL though.
Apple got into a habit of switching them year about. They've skipped AMD a few times now. That might mean the highest Broadwell MBP comes with AMD mobile too if they aren't going all integrated.
As for performance, the laptops can drive 4K displays. Here's an older rMBP driving a 4K display over HDMI at 30Hz:
There are some reports of it driving a 4K monitor at 60Hz over the TB/Mini-dp output. The GPUs in the top iMac are usually 2-3x faster than the MBP. It could be that the 21.5" models get 4K and the 27" 5K.
Would the GPUs mentioned above also be sufficient for 5K gaming?
True enough. I was reacting to the speculation that this new iMac would be $3000 or even $5000. That's insane. The entry level 27" iMac today is $1800. If Apple rolls out a new retina iMac, I expect it to come in around that same price and be a great value for dollar. My point (which I didn't make very well, or at all) was that when Apple revises their Macs (desktop and laptop) they tend to reset the value proposition in a very positive way. And unfortunately over time, they look less and less price competitive--until the next reboot. I'm hoping/predicting that the next iMac revision will be "wow, that's a great deal!" events. (Having said that the market for people who "need" a $1800 desktop rather than a $1000 laptop is smaller than it's ever been, and gamers are a huge part of that market.)
If you were talking about my comments, I wasn't talking about an entry level iMac. The base 27" 3.4GHz iMac starts at $1999 Apple store list. It quickly grows to $3449 when you upgrade to the 3.5GHz i7, 32GB RAM (I know I can get RAM for lower), 512GB flash storage, and GTX 780M GPU. If Apple is talking about a 5K iMac, I can't see them starting with the same base configuration and just a better screen. They'd almost need to start with my configuration and go from there. I'm not in the market for the base configuration and I bet the majority of people who visit this website (except for the Apple haters) don't buy the base model of anything Apple sells so I wanted to be more realistic on what the normal selling price would be for a product that had a 5K display. I wouldn't want to but I could see myself spending $5K for a properly configured iMac 5K (why not call it this and charge that amount??). If you need(want) a 5K display, then you need the horsepower to drive it and a reason for it. Surfing the web, reading email, or watching videos don't justify spending this amount of money. Editing videos, transcoding videos, and anything similar, takes horsepower unless you like to drink a lot of coffee while you're waiting for things to finish. This is also why I'm waiting to see whether a Mac Pro is worth the money or if I can exist with a more powerful iMac.
**@wizard69: ;Just because I'm thinking about an iMac doesn't mean I don't need a Mac Pro. Except for GPU-capable applications, a loaded iMac is very close to the base Mac Pro. Upgrade the CPU and GPUs and a new iMac might match or exceed the base Mac Pro (at least until the Mac Pro is upgraded).
I'll try to hold out until it can accept video in from either DisplayPort 1.3 or Thunderbolt 3, because TB2 wont suffice to drive 5120x2880 in 60Hz unfortunately.
Any chance that Apple is rushing TB3 and that's why the desktops haven't seen updates in awhile?
Comments
Why? Apple doesn't normally raise the prices on their iMacs. Unless they decide to introduce a "r-iMac" model completely separate from the others, then that's a different story.
Apple makes the good stuff available for the masses. If anyone can bring the prices down, it'll be them. Crossing my fingers...
While I've been itching to replace my aging 2009-iMac, I think I will wait for the next-gen Broadwell CPU next year. Then, I'll have my wish-list fulfilled.
I agree completely. Apple has a long history of, from time to time, resetting industry expectations with great specs and a surprisingly low price. Then the rest of the industry comes out with a low priced (lower speced) alternative and throws around the idea of an "Apple tax." I have a feeling the next iMac will be like this--incredible display and performance (latest and greatest WiFi, etc.) for a very reasonable price.
I agree completely. Apple has a long history of, from time to time, resetting industry expectations with great specs and a surprisingly low price. Then the rest of the industry comes out with a low priced (lower speced) alternative and throws around the idea of an "Apple tax." I have a feeling the next iMac will be like this--incredible display and performance (latest and greatest WiFi, etc.) for a very reasonable price.
A 27" iMac is a great computer, no doubt, but I hardly call it low price, or like the previous poster you replied to, a product for the masses.
A 27" iMac is a great computer, no doubt, but I hardly call it low price, or like the previous poster you replied to, a product for the masses.
True enough. I was reacting to the speculation that this new iMac would be $3000 or even $5000. That's insane. The entry level 27" iMac today is $1800. If Apple rolls out a new retina iMac, I expect it to come in around that same price and be a great value for dollar. My point (which I didn't make very well, or at all) was that when Apple revises their Macs (desktop and laptop) they tend to reset the value proposition in a very positive way. And unfortunately over time, they look less and less price competitive--until the next reboot. I'm hoping/predicting that the next iMac revision will be "wow, that's a great deal!" events. (Having said that the market for people who "need" a $1800 desktop rather than a $1000 laptop is smaller than it's ever been, and gamers are a huge part of that market.)
PLEASE let it use an nVidia 9xx series processor! I want to get a 970 for my Mac Pro, but OS X will need a baseline driver before the Hackintoshers can get one running.
Mac Mini? When? What?
name change? new form factor?
Imagine MILF porn sites on this :-)
That would be silly, it would be a huge waste of money to add the cost of gaming performance GPUs when 99.9% of customers won't need them.
And all to run a "game" in a bit higher resolution.
I don't think the human eye can discern the difference between 4k and 5k at that size. It would be more expensive without much difference.
I doubt people could even see the difference between 1080p and 4k at 27"..
Am I wrong here?
As a photo retoucher who is used to retouching at 100% 1 to 1 pixel size, this new wave of technology is going to make me blind.
Dear Bill
That's the way I roll, too, unless, of course, I'm working at 400%.
Imagine MILF porn sites on this :-)
Great, so the display can render stretch marks even better...
....ewww.
fir a 27" display 5k seems like a "show off" spec that doesn't mean much in the end.
I don't think the human eye can discern the difference between 4k and 5k at that size. It would be more expensive without much difference.
I doubt people could even see the difference between 1080p and 4k at 27"..
Am I wrong here?
The current 27" iMac's display is 2560x1440. The important thing about 5K is that it keeps the screen real estate of the current iMacs but gives all of the benefits of retina. If the new iMac's display was 'only' 4K, the screen real estate would be the equivalent of the 21.5" iMac (i.e. 1080P).
I'm hoping for 5K and SSD as standard.
Dear Friends
I hope this is true. My main (photo-) editing machine is a 2007 Mac Pro (2x3GHz, 17GB RAM, SSD, 2 HDDs in RAID 0, 1 HDD for Time Machine, 30" Cinema Display). It's been nonfunctional since April and I miss it. I spent about 20 hours trying to resurrect it, bought a new video card, and finally gave up and took it to a Genius, who gently wrote my beloved's death certificate.
If this is rumor turns out to be true, this will be my next Mac. If I were still shooting for income, I'd have already purchased the current 27" i7 iMac.
My Maclife timeline has been like this: SE in '90, 7500 in '96, PowerBook Duo in '97, 733MHz G4 in '01, 15" 1GHz PowerBook G4 in '02, Mac Pro in '07, 13" MacBook Pro in '10. (Also, 3 iPads, 5 iPhones, Apple TV, and 3 iPods.) I've never owned a PC.
I predict a $300-$500 increase in price over the current iMac. The Retina MacBook Pros were available at a price point above their predecessors, so it's reasonable to assume there'll be an increase in the cost of a Retina iMac. There might even be a different name for this machine, like iMac Pro.
I agree. I can't imagine that these new Retina iMacs won't be more expensive than the standard ones are now. This is a two-stage process like the rMBPs. First they bring out the Retina models at a premium price, and then as the cost of the display goes down a little bit, reduce the price to just $100 more than the old set-point. In the laptop arena they had the MBA to slot in below that.
In the case of the iMacs, it's an even more tortuous process, because (I'm guessing) they don't think the 21.5" can handle the heat of a GPU that can drive a double-density display in addition to the current CPU, so they're waiting for the mythical "Broadwell" processors to make a Retina version of that, too. At least until they have all their ducks in a row there, the regular iMacs will stick around. Then eventually, the Retina machines will come down in price to $100 more than the current levels, and they'll have these new cheap iMacs with MBA innards to fill up the bottom tier.
Edited for clarity
I was just about to build a hackintosh with the same CPU but I guess I'm going to put that on hold for now. iMac retina sounds like a pretty nice deal.
This is by far the best Apple-related news of the last months - whatever it costs, I am buying it as long as it is a 27" retina screen with a strong GPU...I just don't care at this point.
Damn, I was so tired of these boring "me-too" iPhone/iWatch news - the good ol' "Apple Computer Inc." is WAY more interesting.
They'd still allow you to go to 1440p with 4K. The rMBP for example has a highest scale setting at 1920x1200 but renders at 2880x1800 and not 3840x2400. The iMac could be 4K and have the optimal resolution be 1080p but still scale higher to 1440p.
I personally think 1440p makes UI elements too small on the 27", likewise 1080p on the 21.5". It doesn't matter though, whether they go with 4K or 5K, both will finally allow people to set the displays to more comfortable resolutions, which for me would be 1680x1050 on the 21.5" and 1080p (really 1920x1200) on the 27" and these can be done with resolutions of 3360x2100 and 3840x2400. I like 16:10 too although I don't find it as big of a deal with the desktops because the display is large anyway.
I think the NVidia 980M would be a better option too with 8GB of video memory:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980M.126692.0.html
AMD GPUs are cheaper so that might offset the cost of the Retina display a bit. The R9 M290 X is a bit further down, even below the 880M. They tend to do better at OpenCL though.
Apple got into a habit of switching them year about. They've skipped AMD a few times now. That might mean the highest Broadwell MBP comes with AMD mobile too if they aren't going all integrated.
As for performance, the laptops can drive 4K displays. Here's an older rMBP driving a 4K display over HDMI at 30Hz:
[VIDEO]
There are some reports of it driving a 4K monitor at 60Hz over the TB/Mini-dp output. The GPUs in the top iMac are usually 2-3x faster than the MBP. It could be that the 21.5" models get 4K and the 27" 5K.
They'd still allow you to go to 1440p with 4K. The rMBP for example has a highest scale setting at 1920x1200 but renders at 2880x1800 and not 3840x2400. The iMac could be 4K and have the optimal resolution be 1080p but still scale higher to 1440p.
I personally think 1440p makes UI elements too small on the 27", likewise 1080p on the 21.5". It doesn't matter though, whether they go with 4K or 5K, both will finally allow people to set the displays to more comfortable resolutions, which for me would be 1680x1050 on the 21.5" and 1080p (really 1920x1200) on the 27" and these can be done with resolutions of 3360x2100 and 3840x2400. I like 16:10 too although I don't find it as big of a deal with the desktops because the display is large anyway.
I think the NVidia 980M would be a better option too with 8GB of video memory:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980M.126692.0.html
AMD GPUs are cheaper so that might offset the cost of the Retina display a bit. The R9 M290 X is a bit further down, even below the 880M. They tend to do better at OpenCL though.
Apple got into a habit of switching them year about. They've skipped AMD a few times now. That might mean the highest Broadwell MBP comes with AMD mobile too if they aren't going all integrated.
As for performance, the laptops can drive 4K displays. Here's an older rMBP driving a 4K display over HDMI at 30Hz:
There are some reports of it driving a 4K monitor at 60Hz over the TB/Mini-dp output. The GPUs in the top iMac are usually 2-3x faster than the MBP. It could be that the 21.5" models get 4K and the 27" 5K.
Would the GPUs mentioned above also be sufficient for 5K gaming?
True enough. I was reacting to the speculation that this new iMac would be $3000 or even $5000. That's insane. The entry level 27" iMac today is $1800. If Apple rolls out a new retina iMac, I expect it to come in around that same price and be a great value for dollar. My point (which I didn't make very well, or at all) was that when Apple revises their Macs (desktop and laptop) they tend to reset the value proposition in a very positive way. And unfortunately over time, they look less and less price competitive--until the next reboot. I'm hoping/predicting that the next iMac revision will be "wow, that's a great deal!" events. (Having said that the market for people who "need" a $1800 desktop rather than a $1000 laptop is smaller than it's ever been, and gamers are a huge part of that market.)
If you were talking about my comments, I wasn't talking about an entry level iMac. The base 27" 3.4GHz iMac starts at $1999 Apple store list. It quickly grows to $3449 when you upgrade to the 3.5GHz i7, 32GB RAM (I know I can get RAM for lower), 512GB flash storage, and GTX 780M GPU. If Apple is talking about a 5K iMac, I can't see them starting with the same base configuration and just a better screen. They'd almost need to start with my configuration and go from there. I'm not in the market for the base configuration and I bet the majority of people who visit this website (except for the Apple haters) don't buy the base model of anything Apple sells so I wanted to be more realistic on what the normal selling price would be for a product that had a 5K display. I wouldn't want to but I could see myself spending $5K for a properly configured iMac 5K (why not call it this and charge that amount??). If you need(want) a 5K display, then you need the horsepower to drive it and a reason for it. Surfing the web, reading email, or watching videos don't justify spending this amount of money. Editing videos, transcoding videos, and anything similar, takes horsepower unless you like to drink a lot of coffee while you're waiting for things to finish. This is also why I'm waiting to see whether a Mac Pro is worth the money or if I can exist with a more powerful iMac.
**@wizard69: ;Just because I'm thinking about an iMac doesn't mean I don't need a Mac Pro. Except for GPU-capable applications, a loaded iMac is very close to the base Mac Pro. Upgrade the CPU and GPUs and a new iMac might match or exceed the base Mac Pro (at least until the Mac Pro is upgraded).
The 27" is used a lot in publishing. It'll be interesting to see how this works with CS6, since the GPU will already be taxed pretty hard.
Interesting machine, but I'll certainly wait for the reviews before I buy one.
Yes! Finally happened.
I'll try to hold out until it can accept video in from either DisplayPort 1.3 or Thunderbolt 3, because TB2 wont suffice to drive 5120x2880 in 60Hz unfortunately.
Any chance that Apple is rushing TB3 and that's why the desktops haven't seen updates in awhile?
Or is Skylake still the best we can hope for?