Just got my 5K iMac last Friday. I was actually more interested in the ability to review spreadsheets, architectural plans and other technical diagrams as opposed to video or photo work.
I must say, I am really impressed. Text is amazing. AutoCAD looks freaking awesome. I kept my old computer with 24" 1920x1200 display turned on while I was setting up the iMac and I'm already at the point where I can barely stand to look at the 24". Everything looks so fuzzy on the 24" now.
I'm not quite sure why some posters criticized the off-axis viewing. I did detect some very minor brightness fall-off, but it does not show at all in any normal viewing position. Who looks at their screen off-axis anyway? So far as brightness, I work in a well lighted office with a window and even with all the ambient light, I found that It was actually better to lower the screen brightness a bit. Having 27" of retina class screen real estate is truly a sight to behold.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
And hope being quoted makes you a little less sad.
The last and final revolutionary tech will be "direct-to-brain" interface I/O? Everything else still uses your senses ...
Why do folks poo-poo every new thing as "just incremental". These are the folks that basically invent or create nothing but think they are hot shit writing on computers across the internet invented by other people.
I would still say that the march of technology is still VERY fast regardless of these naysayers. The last 15 or 100 years of history will show this to be the case..
We also have no idea how Apple's "incremental" products have contributed to the advance of other people's ideas and technologies. I would imagine the effect is HUGE.
The last and final revolutionary tech will be "direct-to-brain" interface I/O? Everything else still uses your senses ...
Why do folks poo-poo every new thing as "just incremental". These are the folks that basically invent or create nothing but think they are hot shit writing on computers across the internet invented by other people.
I would still say that the march of technology is still VERY fast regardless of these naysayers. The last 15 or 100 years of history will show this to be the case..
We also have no idea how Apple's "incremental" products have contributed to the advance of other people's ideas and technologies. I would imagine the effect is HUGE.
Or maybe I'm just a fanboi.
I understand your frustration.
I think it's a question of looking at the big picture. My iPad Air 2 is a transformed experience compared to my iPad 2. It's still only an incremental improvement, even though all those increments have added up to vastly improve the experience.
We see incremental as meaning slight, small, minor. I don't see it that way, but as purely an improvement to an existing category (as Solip corrected me), no matter how big an improvement. But when the iPad becomes replaced with something else, or a new form is created, that becomes more than an incremental improvement.
You could say that the Apple Watch is a new category for Apple. I just don't think it'll be a successful one.
Just got my 5K iMac last Friday. I was actually more interested in the ability to review spreadsheets, architectural plans and other technical diagrams as opposed to video or photo work.
I must say, I am really impressed. Text is amazing. AutoCAD looks freaking awesome. I kept my old computer with 24" 1920x1200 display turned on while I was setting up the iMac and I'm already at the point where I can barely stand to look at the 24". Everything looks so fuzzy on the 24" now.
I'm not quite sure why some posters criticized the off-axis viewing. I did detect some very minor brightness fall-off, but it does not show at all in any normal viewing position. Who looks at their screen off-axis anyway? So far as brightness, I work in a well lighted office with a window and even with all the ambient light, I found that It was actually better to lower the screen brightness a bit. Having 27" of retina class screen real estate is truly a sight to behold.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
And hope being quoted makes you a little less sad.
Look at the ad carefully, and see how much attention to detail there is there, and how forward looking the device is. Apple watch will be iPod all over again, mark my words. It's wearable tech at it's finest.
First sentence teases those Mac Pro owners wanting a retina display for their Macs. It's not a display. It's an integrated computer, with laptop-style parts that will likely suffer premature heat death on the GPU, after a few years of pro-level use of GPU and CPU, if recent history MacBooks are any example. Not interested.
You mean like my bulletproof 2009 iMac i7 which has never failed after being on 18 hours a day since I got it?
First sentence teases those Mac Pro owners wanting a retina display for their Macs. It's not a display. It's an integrated computer, with laptop-style parts that will likely suffer premature heat death on the GPU, after a few years of pro-level use of GPU and CPU, if recent history MacBooks are any example. Not interested.
You mean like my bulletproof 2009 iMac i7 which has never failed after being on 18 hours a day since I got it?
Right, but did you abuse the GPU and CPU professionally, or just in an amateurish kind of way?
Regarding the people who say that they can "barely see a difference" between this and non-retina displays, I think it's simply a matter of how important it is to you and what you are used to. Some people just don't care. They don't look for pixel density or color accuracy or a subtle color shift when off axis.
When I supported business customers several years ago, I would often see people using their 17-inch monitors at 1024x768. I would set it to the correct resolution (1280x1024) and enable dpi scaling then exclaim "Look how much better it looks now -- it's much less blurry!" The response, invariably, was "I can't see any difference".
For people who have excellent vision and care a lot about the visual quality of things, I have no doubt that doubling the pixel density of sub-200 dpi displays makes an immense difference. One of the biggest differences that I personally notice is that when looking at a solid white screen on a retina MacBook Pro, it looks smooth and white. On a non-retina display, I experience a grittiness from the tiny separation between pixels and from the subpixels. That alone makes a huge difference to me. Having crisp, smooth text and highly detailed images is also incredibly pleasing for me.
I suspect that people who suffer from poor vision wouldn't immediately notice a big difference between retina and non-retina resolutions but there is a side-benefit for such people: Retina displays do a great job of scaling to different sizes. For people with poorer vision, one could dial down the resolution (increasing the size of display elements) and still have very crisp text and images displayed while making absolutely everything larger.
In a few years all of this will be largely a moot point. By then, any reasonably good display will have pixels too small to be seen from a regular viewing distance. It always cool to see Apple pushing the envelope on this now, as the rest of the PC industry doesn't quite seem ready for it just yet.
Regarding the people who say that they can "barely see a difference" between this and non-retina displays, I think it's simply a matter of how important it is to you and what you are used to. Some people just don't care. They don't look for pixel density or color accuracy or a subtle color shift when off axis.
When I supported business customers several years ago, I would often see people using their 17-inch monitors at 1024x768. I would set it to the correct resolution (1280x1024) and enable dpi scaling then exclaim "Look how much better it looks now -- it's much less blurry!" The response, invariably, was "I can't see any difference".
For people who have excellent vision and care a lot about the visual quality of things, I have no doubt that doubling the pixel density of sub-200 dpi displays makes an immense difference. One of the biggest differences that I personally notice is that when looking at a solid white screen on a retina MacBook Pro, it looks smooth and white. On a non-retina display, I experience a grittiness from the tiny separation between pixels and from the subpixels. That alone makes a huge difference to me. Having crisp, smooth text and highly detailed images is also incredibly pleasing for me.
I suspect that people who suffer from poor vision wouldn't immediately notice a big difference between retina and non-retina resolutions but there is a side-benefit for such people: Retina displays do a great job of scaling to different sizes. For people with poorer vision, one could dial down the resolution (increasing the size of display elements) and still have very crisp text and images displayed while making absolutely everything larger.
In a few years all of this will be largely a moot point. By then, any reasonably good display will have pixels too small to be seen from a regular viewing distance. It always cool to see Apple pushing the envelope on this now, as the rest of the PC industry doesn't quite seem ready for it just yet.
I wouldn't say the rest of the PC industry isn't quite ready for it, 4K is the newest and greatest resolution, 5K is nice but just a novelty at this point and how long did it take for Apple to even release a 4K monitor for their Pro series where something like a 5K resolution would have made more sense, oh wait they don't have one yet, their still using a Sharp in which they charge an extra $500 on top of retail for, heck the MacBook Air is still stuck at 1366 x 768. So yes Apple pushes the envelope on certain products where no one asked for it, leaving their Pro series and best selling notebook high and dry, I would like too see them get the rest of their line to parity first before pushing the envelope on just one model, especially when the industry standard of 4K would have been more than enough, headlines is all that a 5k monitor on a consumer computer is good for, at this point.
Relic you know full well there's no 5k thunderbolt display because the dp 1.3 standard is not yet ready to drive it. Simple as that. As soon as it becomes available in a couple of months or so the tb display is out the door.
Also how is the industry ready for 4k when windows scaling is still a mess, while apple's excellent pixel doubling and drawing on a 4x canvas to scale the whole ui down works excellently.
I wouldn't say the rest of the PC industry isn't quite ready for it, 4K is the newest and greatest resolution, 5K is nice but just a novelty at this point and how long did it take for Apple to even release a 4K monitor for their Pro series where something like a 5K resolution would have made more sense, oh wait they don't have one yet, their still using a Sharp in which they charge an extra $500 on top of retail for, heck the MacBook Air is still stuck at 1366 x 768. So yes Apple pushes the envelope on certain products where no one asked for it, leaving their Pro series and best selling notebook high and dry, I would like too see them get the rest of their line to parity first before pushing the envelope on just one model, especially when the industry standard of 4K would have been more than enough, headlines is all that a 5k monitor on a consumer computer is good for, at this point.
There you go again looking for Apple to release on matching specs, not on the user experience. If you don't understand why the iMac is 5K and not 4K you won't understand why there is no 5K Thunderbolt display or why the MacBook Air's processor and display haven't been updated yet. As usual, the answer is to look at the bigger picture, not just at the spec sheet.
So, I just bought one of these. I got the base model because the main thing I wanted it for was the screen, and that is the same on all models. I wasn't concerned about getting an updated CPU or GPU because I have a separate PC for gaming or long running compute jobs.
And, wow, what a screen. No dead pixels which is good, but I asked the guy at the Apple Store if I could return it if there were any, and he said yes. Photos look amazing but I've actually taken to using famous oil paintings (e.g. Vermeer) as my wallpaper which looks great too.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
The other thing that is surprisingly impressive is the Fusion drive. I have a Macbook Pro which is pure SSD and was worried about going back to a spinning disk, worried about the noise and to a lesser extent the speed. But the noise is almost non-existent. I don't know what brand of drive they are using (Disk Utility just says "Fusion Drive") but all you occassionally hear is something that sounds like water dripping in the case and that's the drive access! No rattling and grinding like drives I've had in the past.
Anyway highly recommend this computer. But only if you really want that screen, in other aspects it's probably going to be largely like the existing Mac which you may already own.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
Perception of resolution is a bit more complicated than whether you can perceive individual pixels, but it's high enough that aliasing is a non-issue. Font smoothing attempts to compensate for aliasing. With resolution high enough to eliminate detectable aliasing, font smoothing is pointless.
So, I just bought one of these. I got the base model because the main thing I wanted it for was the screen, and that is the same on all models. I wasn't concerned about getting an updated CPU or GPU because I have a separate PC for gaming or long running compute jobs.
And, wow, what a screen. No dead pixels which is good, but I asked the guy at the Apple Store if I could return it if there were any, and he said yes. Photos look amazing but I've actually taken to using famous oil paintings (e.g. Vermeer) as my wallpaper which looks great too.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
The other thing that is surprisingly impressive is the Fusion drive. I have a Macbook Pro which is pure SSD and was worried about going back to a spinning disk, worried about the noise and to a lesser extent the speed. But the noise is almost non-existent. I don't know what brand of drive they are using (Disk Utility just says "Fusion Drive") but all you occassionally hear is something that sounds like water dripping in the case and that's the drive access! No rattling and grinding like drives I've had in the past.
Excellent post on both topics touched, precisely. Fusion drive is a great idea done right, the fact that you can implement it to older macs, minis in particular is absolutely great too, although word to the wise, my yosemite beta must have somehow broken some compatibility with the fusion mechanism and I had to take it apart again and refuse it so to speak. I always marvel when taking a mini apart for the amount of engineering that has gone into this small computer, and since I am on my third disassembly seems like a piece of cake right now to put it back together. If the millimetre sizes are right I am eyeing a wd ssd and hd and a super fast ssd to fuse, through in a server mini from a couple of years ago, and you got a stellar device.
I bought one of these iMacs, but with an i7 starting at 4 GHz and 32 GB memory, and SSD disk.
It is awesome in all aspects except GUI performance! Here it is really bad, and I'm not even playing video. Using the desktop in general is sluggish. Switching between desktops is far from smooth, and sometimes it gets stuck halfway between desktop spaces. The "Mission Control" function is very slow. Trying to change order of desktop spaces in "Mission Control" mode is very slow (lags when being dragged).
Responsiveness in application GUIs are also slow, especially in Java GUIs (I'm a Java developer), my IDE (IntelliJ Idea) lags when typing in editor, but only on this machine.
When using Skype the rest of the machine becomes unusable until call is terminated. It is difficult to switch desktop at all then or even changing focus to another window.
So I'm starting to think that the Gfx card does not have the full performance needed for this screen size.
Just like the Mac Book Pro with Retina screen, this can also in Display settings use a higher resolution (upsize less and get more screen space, but everything smaller). I'm using the highest setting possible on my MacBook Pro, but going any higher than the default setting on the iMac 5K makes it too sluggish to be able to use the machine.
And do note that CPU-wise I have a faster machine than the one tested here. But then again it is not CPU that is the problem, its the graphics performance that sucks.
Comments
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
And hope being quoted makes you a little less sad.
Why do folks poo-poo every new thing as "just incremental". These are the folks that basically invent or create nothing but think they are hot shit writing on computers across the internet invented by other people.
I would still say that the march of technology is still VERY fast regardless of these naysayers. The last 15 or 100 years of history will show this to be the case..
We also have no idea how Apple's "incremental" products have contributed to the advance of other people's ideas and technologies. I would imagine the effect is HUGE.
Or maybe I'm just a fanboi.
I understand your frustration.
I think it's a question of looking at the big picture. My iPad Air 2 is a transformed experience compared to my iPad 2. It's still only an incremental improvement, even though all those increments have added up to vastly improve the experience.
We see incremental as meaning slight, small, minor. I don't see it that way, but as purely an improvement to an existing category (as Solip corrected me), no matter how big an improvement. But when the iPad becomes replaced with something else, or a new form is created, that becomes more than an incremental improvement.
You could say that the Apple Watch is a new category for Apple. I just don't think it'll be a successful one.
Just got my 5K iMac last Friday. I was actually more interested in the ability to review spreadsheets, architectural plans and other technical diagrams as opposed to video or photo work.
I must say, I am really impressed. Text is amazing. AutoCAD looks freaking awesome. I kept my old computer with 24" 1920x1200 display turned on while I was setting up the iMac and I'm already at the point where I can barely stand to look at the 24". Everything looks so fuzzy on the 24" now.
I'm not quite sure why some posters criticized the off-axis viewing. I did detect some very minor brightness fall-off, but it does not show at all in any normal viewing position. Who looks at their screen off-axis anyway? So far as brightness, I work in a well lighted office with a window and even with all the ambient light, I found that It was actually better to lower the screen brightness a bit. Having 27" of retina class screen real estate is truly a sight to behold.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
And hope being quoted makes you a little less sad.
Yep! A couple of reasons to be happy!
You could say that the Apple Watch is a new category for Apple. I just don't think it'll be a successful one.
Indeed. I give two years before the Apple Watch goes the way of the iPod Hi-Fi.
Look at the ad carefully, and see how much attention to detail there is there, and how forward looking the device is. Apple watch will be iPod all over again, mark my words. It's wearable tech at it's finest.
First sentence teases those Mac Pro owners wanting a retina display for their Macs. It's not a display. It's an integrated computer, with laptop-style parts that will likely suffer premature heat death on the GPU, after a few years of pro-level use of GPU and CPU, if recent history MacBooks are any example. Not interested.
You mean like my bulletproof 2009 iMac i7 which has never failed after being on 18 hours a day since I got it?
Right, but did you abuse the GPU and CPU professionally, or just in an amateurish kind of way?
The shipping time in the online Apple Store has slipped from 7-10 business days to 2-3 weeks. Must be popular.
When I supported business customers several years ago, I would often see people using their 17-inch monitors at 1024x768. I would set it to the correct resolution (1280x1024) and enable dpi scaling then exclaim "Look how much better it looks now -- it's much less blurry!" The response, invariably, was "I can't see any difference".
For people who have excellent vision and care a lot about the visual quality of things, I have no doubt that doubling the pixel density of sub-200 dpi displays makes an immense difference. One of the biggest differences that I personally notice is that when looking at a solid white screen on a retina MacBook Pro, it looks smooth and white. On a non-retina display, I experience a grittiness from the tiny separation between pixels and from the subpixels. That alone makes a huge difference to me. Having crisp, smooth text and highly detailed images is also incredibly pleasing for me.
I suspect that people who suffer from poor vision wouldn't immediately notice a big difference between retina and non-retina resolutions but there is a side-benefit for such people: Retina displays do a great job of scaling to different sizes. For people with poorer vision, one could dial down the resolution (increasing the size of display elements) and still have very crisp text and images displayed while making absolutely everything larger.
In a few years all of this will be largely a moot point. By then, any reasonably good display will have pixels too small to be seen from a regular viewing distance. It always cool to see Apple pushing the envelope on this now, as the rest of the PC industry doesn't quite seem ready for it just yet.
Regarding the people who say that they can "barely see a difference" between this and non-retina displays, I think it's simply a matter of how important it is to you and what you are used to. Some people just don't care. They don't look for pixel density or color accuracy or a subtle color shift when off axis.
When I supported business customers several years ago, I would often see people using their 17-inch monitors at 1024x768. I would set it to the correct resolution (1280x1024) and enable dpi scaling then exclaim "Look how much better it looks now -- it's much less blurry!" The response, invariably, was "I can't see any difference".
For people who have excellent vision and care a lot about the visual quality of things, I have no doubt that doubling the pixel density of sub-200 dpi displays makes an immense difference. One of the biggest differences that I personally notice is that when looking at a solid white screen on a retina MacBook Pro, it looks smooth and white. On a non-retina display, I experience a grittiness from the tiny separation between pixels and from the subpixels. That alone makes a huge difference to me. Having crisp, smooth text and highly detailed images is also incredibly pleasing for me.
I suspect that people who suffer from poor vision wouldn't immediately notice a big difference between retina and non-retina resolutions but there is a side-benefit for such people: Retina displays do a great job of scaling to different sizes. For people with poorer vision, one could dial down the resolution (increasing the size of display elements) and still have very crisp text and images displayed while making absolutely everything larger.
In a few years all of this will be largely a moot point. By then, any reasonably good display will have pixels too small to be seen from a regular viewing distance. It always cool to see Apple pushing the envelope on this now, as the rest of the PC industry doesn't quite seem ready for it just yet.
I wouldn't say the rest of the PC industry isn't quite ready for it, 4K is the newest and greatest resolution, 5K is nice but just a novelty at this point and how long did it take for Apple to even release a 4K monitor for their Pro series where something like a 5K resolution would have made more sense, oh wait they don't have one yet, their still using a Sharp in which they charge an extra $500 on top of retail for, heck the MacBook Air is still stuck at 1366 x 768. So yes Apple pushes the envelope on certain products where no one asked for it, leaving their Pro series and best selling notebook high and dry, I would like too see them get the rest of their line to parity first before pushing the envelope on just one model, especially when the industry standard of 4K would have been more than enough, headlines is all that a 5k monitor on a consumer computer is good for, at this point.
Relic you know full well there's no 5k thunderbolt display because the dp 1.3 standard is not yet ready to drive it. Simple as that. As soon as it becomes available in a couple of months or so the tb display is out the door.
Also how is the industry ready for 4k when windows scaling is still a mess, while apple's excellent pixel doubling and drawing on a 4x canvas to scale the whole ui down works excellently.
There you go again looking for Apple to release on matching specs, not on the user experience. If you don't understand why the iMac is 5K and not 4K you won't understand why there is no 5K Thunderbolt display or why the MacBook Air's processor and display haven't been updated yet. As usual, the answer is to look at the bigger picture, not just at the spec sheet.
So, I just bought one of these. I got the base model because the main thing I wanted it for was the screen, and that is the same on all models. I wasn't concerned about getting an updated CPU or GPU because I have a separate PC for gaming or long running compute jobs.
And, wow, what a screen. No dead pixels which is good, but I asked the guy at the Apple Store if I could return it if there were any, and he said yes. Photos look amazing but I've actually taken to using famous oil paintings (e.g. Vermeer) as my wallpaper which looks great too.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
The other thing that is surprisingly impressive is the Fusion drive. I have a Macbook Pro which is pure SSD and was worried about going back to a spinning disk, worried about the noise and to a lesser extent the speed. But the noise is almost non-existent. I don't know what brand of drive they are using (Disk Utility just says "Fusion Drive") but all you occassionally hear is something that sounds like water dripping in the case and that's the drive access! No rattling and grinding like drives I've had in the past.
Anyway highly recommend this computer. But only if you really want that screen, in other aspects it's probably going to be largely like the existing Mac which you may already own.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
Perception of resolution is a bit more complicated than whether you can perceive individual pixels, but it's high enough that aliasing is a non-issue. Font smoothing attempts to compensate for aliasing. With resolution high enough to eliminate detectable aliasing, font smoothing is pointless.
So, I just bought one of these. I got the base model because the main thing I wanted it for was the screen, and that is the same on all models. I wasn't concerned about getting an updated CPU or GPU because I have a separate PC for gaming or long running compute jobs.
And, wow, what a screen. No dead pixels which is good, but I asked the guy at the Apple Store if I could return it if there were any, and he said yes. Photos look amazing but I've actually taken to using famous oil paintings (e.g. Vermeer) as my wallpaper which looks great too.
But that said, text is the main reason to get it. In the past I have been critical of Apple's font rendering, which I think sacrifices readability for fidelity to the font design, resulting in text that is less clear than Windows. But with this display you can turn off "Use LCD Font Smoothing" in System Preferences and it just looks amazing (running a smoothing algorithm is actually detrimental when the screen has perceptually infinite resolution anyway).
The other thing that is surprisingly impressive is the Fusion drive. I have a Macbook Pro which is pure SSD and was worried about going back to a spinning disk, worried about the noise and to a lesser extent the speed. But the noise is almost non-existent. I don't know what brand of drive they are using (Disk Utility just says "Fusion Drive") but all you occassionally hear is something that sounds like water dripping in the case and that's the drive access! No rattling and grinding like drives I've had in the past.
Excellent post on both topics touched, precisely. Fusion drive is a great idea done right, the fact that you can implement it to older macs, minis in particular is absolutely great too, although word to the wise, my yosemite beta must have somehow broken some compatibility with the fusion mechanism and I had to take it apart again and refuse it so to speak. I always marvel when taking a mini apart for the amount of engineering that has gone into this small computer, and since I am on my third disassembly seems like a piece of cake right now to put it back together. If the millimetre sizes are right I am eyeing a wd ssd and hd and a super fast ssd to fuse, through in a server mini from a couple of years ago, and you got a stellar device.
It is awesome in all aspects except GUI performance! Here it is really bad, and I'm not even playing video. Using the desktop in general is sluggish. Switching between desktops is far from smooth, and sometimes it gets stuck halfway between desktop spaces. The "Mission Control" function is very slow. Trying to change order of desktop spaces in "Mission Control" mode is very slow (lags when being dragged).
Responsiveness in application GUIs are also slow, especially in Java GUIs (I'm a Java developer), my IDE (IntelliJ Idea) lags when typing in editor, but only on this machine.
When using Skype the rest of the machine becomes unusable until call is terminated. It is difficult to switch desktop at all then or even changing focus to another window.
So I'm starting to think that the Gfx card does not have the full performance needed for this screen size.
Just like the Mac Book Pro with Retina screen, this can also in Display settings use a higher resolution (upsize less and get more screen space, but everything smaller). I'm using the highest setting possible on my MacBook Pro, but going any higher than the default setting on the iMac 5K makes it too sluggish to be able to use the machine.
And do note that CPU-wise I have a faster machine than the one tested here. But then again it is not CPU that is the problem, its the graphics performance that sucks.
ditto