Apple just pulled a fast one on Canadian consumers. The 2 iMac 27' non-retina models went up in price by $150. Why would an iMac model that is a year old go up in price? And the new iMac retina is $2749. This is outrageous!
Oh dear, here we go again. Time for a reality check. Dell's upcoming 27" 5K monitor will cost $2500. This is the monitor only. Apple includes for the same price a computer too, loaded with a great OS and applications. How is that outrageous?
Factoring in the price, this iMac is one of the most impressive Macs ever.
What I find outrageous is the difference in price between Canada and the USA. And what is more outrageous, and what really pissed me off, is that they raised the price on all the older models. The 27' iMacs non-retina went up by $150CAD. These models have not been bumped. They just raised the prices on them. I understanding that the Canadian dollar may have lost some value against the U.S. dolar in the last year or so, but this shouldn't be a reason for rasing the price on a computer that is essentially a year old. I agree with most other posts here. The new imac is well priced for the US. Not so well for Canada.
Apple just pulled a fast one on Canadian consumers. The 2 iMac 27' non-retina models went up in price by $150. Why would an iMac model that is a year old go up in price? And the new iMac retina is $2749. This is outrageous!
It's a scheme to get our Northern neighbors to travel more to the US.
So...anyone been to a retail store yet to see if these are on display? Nobody seems to know and you can't call the retail store...goes to a call center right now.
All things being equal, I will be in the market for a new one in 2015 or 2016 to replace my 2008 3.06 model. Amazingly, a specced out model is about the same price as the old specced out non-Retina model. They've reduced the price of the Fusion Drive a lot.
I may give in and get the iPhone 6, but I'm not sure I can live with that excruciating protruding camera lens.
The iPad Air 2 128 is high on my list. I don't like the loss of the mute button. If it has 2GB of RAM, I will probably give in.
...It looks like the M295X will be about 40% faster than the M290X and that is about 10-15% slower than the 780M. The 780M is comparable to a single D300 in tests but it varies quite a lot. I'd expect the raw performance of the D300 to be a bit higher.
If we go with the 295X being 1.4 x 0.9 x single D300, that would make it ~26% faster than a single D300. Dual D300 should still beat it but when a single GPU is being used, the iMac would be faster. The AMD GPUs in a Mac Pro refresh would likely push the MP back ahead though.
In other words, the M295X is a decent GPU. There's no room or ventilation in the iMac for a second GPU (to be used exclusively for computing) so I'll need to determine just how fast I want/need to go. I re-ran the numbers for a non-5K iMac vs a iMac 5K and for $350 more, I get the 5K monitor, TB2, faster CPU, faster GPU. Sounds to me like it's worth the "spare change."
I also compared the iMac 5K to the equivalent (kind of) nMP and without any monitor, the cost would be very close and I'd get the second D300. Add the Apple display and the bottom end nMP is still $1100 more than the fully blown iMac 5K and it has lots of upgrade potential. I don't think I'd do enough high-end work to justify the nMP, especially since I could get a good start on a TB2 RAID for that extra $1100.
I use lots of Photoshop filters. I question whether the i7 and/or the graphic card upgrades @ $250 a pop are worth the incremental performance boost? I plan on ordering 16GB RAM with 3TB Fusion which kicks it up to $2849. I'll have to wait for the Geekbench numbers to see if another $500 on top of that is justified.
The 5k Display that Dell currently sells is $2500 (which is pretty similar to this iMac)! I can't believe Apple is selling this so cheap! Even if the base price were $3500 it was well worth it.
Exactly my state of affairs. Since my CRT died, I've done no photography because I only have a 13" regular non-retina MacBook. I'm tempted by this retina iMac, but I don't trust laptop-style components for professional heavy duty use. GPU defects in laptops is well known.
Laptops tend to run pretty hot if they have beefy discrete GPUs, and heat is the worst enemy of computer hardware. Desktops typically are better at dissipating heat because they have larger cases that allow better airflow. Thus you don't see reports of widespread GPU failures on desktops.
Apple wouldn't have needed a custom timing chip with 4x the bandwidth for 30Hz and 30Hz is barely usable in a computer, you can see the mouse lag. There are some theories here:
"Since Tonga (AMD GPU) doesn’t support HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.3 (which does support 5K SST), DP 1.2 is the only available standard to piggy-back. If Apple had somehow redesigned the TCON to compress a 5K stream into existing DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth, it wouldn’t need a 40Gbps TCON in the first place. Anandtech notes that there’s another possibility — Apple may indeed have designed its own TCON, overclocked it, customized it for low overhead timing, and be pulling just enough bandwidth out of DP 1.2 to get it done. Here, the question of refresh rate becomes critical –5K @ 60Hz requires far more bandwidth than 5K @ 30Hz does.
This kind of issue is common with MST — but did Apple overclock DP to hit higher bandwidths and avoid MST?
Either way, Apple would have to overclock the DisplayPort signal by 50-100% to hit the bandwidth it needs for 5K on single stream transport.
One major point that Apple left out of the discussion is whether or not these monitors are 30Hz or 60Hz. Hopefully 60Hz — I expect 60Hz — but 30Hz wouldn’t surprise me."
"Since the iMac is an all-in-one device, Apple is more or less free to violate specifications and do what they want so long as it isn’t advertised as DisplayPort and doesn’t interact with 3rd party devices."
GPUs and DP 1.2 are capable of outputting two 60Hz streams at lower resolution so maybe they feed two signals into another piece of hardware to merge them and send them to one panel vs two.
Whatever it is they're doing, you'd be able to tell very easily if it was 30Hz. It could be 50Hz though:
Comments
OWC has a cheaper model, but I have no idea on the quality:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/ThunderBay-4
$2,179 for 6*4=24TB Or get the bare box: $459
Apple just pulled a fast one on Canadian consumers. The 2 iMac 27' non-retina models went up in price by $150. Why would an iMac model that is a year old go up in price? And the new iMac retina is $2749. This is outrageous!
Oh dear, here we go again. Time for a reality check. Dell's upcoming 27" 5K monitor will cost $2500. This is the monitor only. Apple includes for the same price a computer too, loaded with a great OS and applications. How is that outrageous?
Factoring in the price, this iMac is one of the most impressive Macs ever.
Hmm, so if I don't do video editing or serious photo editing either, would that 5k be a needless $700 upgrade over the standard-res Mac?
I'm also wondering how games are going to handle that resolution.
Have you ever seen a Mac with a Retina Display?
The experience is the same as the difference non-Retina and Retina iOS devices....one is amazing, one is not.
I wonder if the iMac can drive a 2nd 4k display...
According to Apple Tech Specs:
"Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 3840 by 2160 pixels on an external display"
It's a scheme to get our Northern neighbors to travel more to the US.
So...anyone been to a retail store yet to see if these are on display? Nobody seems to know and you can't call the retail store...goes to a call center right now.
All things being equal, I will be in the market for a new one in 2015 or 2016 to replace my 2008 3.06 model. Amazingly, a specced out model is about the same price as the old specced out non-Retina model. They've reduced the price of the Fusion Drive a lot.
I may give in and get the iPhone 6, but I'm not sure I can live with that excruciating protruding camera lens.
The iPad Air 2 128 is high on my list. I don't like the loss of the mute button. If it has 2GB of RAM, I will probably give in.
I'm tempted by this retina iMac, but I don't trust laptop-style components for professional heavy duty use. GPU defects in laptops is well known.
AMD Radeon R9 M295X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory is not a laptop GPU.
If you order the SSD 1TB then that eliminates the laptop grade HDD.
That's what I'm getting.
...It looks like the M295X will be about 40% faster than the M290X and that is about 10-15% slower than the 780M. The 780M is comparable to a single D300 in tests but it varies quite a lot. I'd expect the raw performance of the D300 to be a bit higher.
If we go with the 295X being 1.4 x 0.9 x single D300, that would make it ~26% faster than a single D300. Dual D300 should still beat it but when a single GPU is being used, the iMac would be faster. The AMD GPUs in a Mac Pro refresh would likely push the MP back ahead though.
In other words, the M295X is a decent GPU. There's no room or ventilation in the iMac for a second GPU (to be used exclusively for computing) so I'll need to determine just how fast I want/need to go. I re-ran the numbers for a non-5K iMac vs a iMac 5K and for $350 more, I get the 5K monitor, TB2, faster CPU, faster GPU. Sounds to me like it's worth the "spare change."
I also compared the iMac 5K to the equivalent (kind of) nMP and without any monitor, the cost would be very close and I'd get the second D300. Add the Apple display and the bottom end nMP is still $1100 more than the fully blown iMac 5K and it has lots of upgrade potential. I don't think I'd do enough high-end work to justify the nMP, especially since I could get a good start on a TB2 RAID for that extra $1100.
I use lots of Photoshop filters. I question whether the i7 and/or the graphic card upgrades @ $250 a pop are worth the incremental performance boost? I plan on ordering 16GB RAM with 3TB Fusion which kicks it up to $2849. I'll have to wait for the Geekbench numbers to see if another $500 on top of that is justified.
No, your government did.
Why would currencies change in relative value? Gee, I wonder.
Then maybe you should have joined the Union like we've been wanting you to for the past 237 years.
The exchange rate has gone to hell of late, which probably explains why the prices rose on the old models.
The 5k Display that Dell currently sells is $2500 (which is pretty similar to this iMac)! I can't believe Apple is selling this so cheap! Even if the base price were $3500 it was well worth it.
Exactly my state of affairs. Since my CRT died, I've done no photography because I only have a 13" regular non-retina MacBook. I'm tempted by this retina iMac, but I don't trust laptop-style components for professional heavy duty use. GPU defects in laptops is well known.
Laptops tend to run pretty hot if they have beefy discrete GPUs, and heat is the worst enemy of computer hardware. Desktops typically are better at dissipating heat because they have larger cases that allow better airflow. Thus you don't see reports of widespread GPU failures on desktops.
Does anyone know if the monitor is 30 or 60 Hz?
No point in doing so if they have the same specs as the 15" don't you think?
Apple wouldn't have needed a custom timing chip with 4x the bandwidth for 30Hz and 30Hz is barely usable in a computer, you can see the mouse lag. There are some theories here:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/192305-analyzing-the-imac-5k-retina-display-how-do-you-squeeze-5k-out-of-a-last-gen-gpu
"Since Tonga (AMD GPU) doesn’t support HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.3 (which does support 5K SST), DP 1.2 is the only available standard to piggy-back. If Apple had somehow redesigned the TCON to compress a 5K stream into existing DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth, it wouldn’t need a 40Gbps TCON in the first place. Anandtech notes that there’s another possibility — Apple may indeed have designed its own TCON, overclocked it, customized it for low overhead timing, and be pulling just enough bandwidth out of DP 1.2 to get it done. Here, the question of refresh rate becomes critical –5K @ 60Hz requires far more bandwidth than 5K @ 30Hz does.
This kind of issue is common with MST — but did Apple overclock DP to hit higher bandwidths and avoid MST?
Either way, Apple would have to overclock the DisplayPort signal by 50-100% to hit the bandwidth it needs for 5K on single stream transport.
One major point that Apple left out of the discussion is whether or not these monitors are 30Hz or 60Hz. Hopefully 60Hz — I expect 60Hz — but 30Hz wouldn’t surprise me."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8623/hands-on-apples-imac-with-retina-display
"Since the iMac is an all-in-one device, Apple is more or less free to violate specifications and do what they want so long as it isn’t advertised as DisplayPort and doesn’t interact with 3rd party devices."
GPUs and DP 1.2 are capable of outputting two 60Hz streams at lower resolution so maybe they feed two signals into another piece of hardware to merge them and send them to one panel vs two.
Whatever it is they're doing, you'd be able to tell very easily if it was 30Hz. It could be 50Hz though:
5120 x 2880 x 24bpp x 50 = 17.6 Gbps