Imac with retina 4k display
Nearly two years after its debut, the 4K Retina iMac gets the extra power it always deserved, but those looking for compact 4K gaming will have to search elsewhere
The 4K iMac is back! But does more power equal better?
When the iMac with Retina 4K display first came out, it was a bit of an odd machine. For a lot of people, it should be a nearly ideal desktop choice: you get a fantastic, highly detailed display for viewing photos or working, quad-core processor power and the advantages of a desktop, such as lots of connection ports and big storage options.
But while it was a pretty good machine, it didn’t really reach that potential, thanks to some specific disappointments. First among them was that it came with a slow 1TB mobile hard drive, instead of a Fusion Drive (Apple’s name for mixing a small SSD with a large hard drive for making Macs feel fast and offer big storage, but without the expensive cost of equivalent pure flash drives), which should always have been included as a minimum. The other main gripe was that its visuals were powered by Intel’s integrated graphics chips (rather than a dedicated GPU), which was okay for basic use, but didn’t give much headroom for intensive tasks that benefit a lot from a beefy graphics chip. It was half-baked.
However, with another 20 months in the oven, the 2017 models have risen to a much more impressive finish. For a start, you can now get a 4K model for cheaper than before… well, kind of.
When the 4K iMac launched in 2015, it cost £1,199, and it was the top-of-the-range 21.5-inch Mac model, with two non-4K models beneath it. But in late 2016, Apple responded to the devaluation of the pound by raising prices accordingly, and the cost of that 4K iMac model went up to £1,449. So, in the 2017 range, we have the equivalent top-of-the-line £1,449 model that we’re reviewing here, but there’s also a new £1,249 4K model, which is technically cheaper than the previous model, but happens to be more expensive than what you might have paid if you bought the previous model at launch. Erm, is that all clear?
There’s also a cheaper-still £1,049 non-4K model in this new line-up, which is only dual-core, and features Intel integrated graphics instead of the AMD Radeon graphics in the other two. Maybe even more importantly, it only offers a Full HD 1920x1080 non-wide-colour screen, which just seems antiquated at this point. Given all that, we strongly recommend spending the extra £200 on getting a 4K model.
So what do you get for your money in this Mac? Front and centre is still the gorgeous 4K display. At 4096x2304 pixels, it’s actually slightly higher resolution than the Ultra HD 4K broadcasting standard (which is 3840x2160). This doesn’t mean much in practice, though it’s nice for videographers working in the Cinema 4K video format, which is 4096 pixels wide (some common DSLRs record this, so it’s not that obscure a thing to care about… just pretty obscure).
The important thing is that it’s super-crisp for viewing your photos on, can provide a huge amount of working space for documents and windows if you tweak the settings for how macOS is sized, supports the P3 wide colour gamut for making compatible images (including those taken on an iPhone 7) look more realistic than other screens, and the display is now brighter than before. This helps improve the reflectivity of the screen
– these are among the best Apple has made for cutting down on reflections from windows or flourescent lights – and is actually just generally impressive at making everything look super-vibrant. Colours really shout and pop on the iMac’s display, and with the sheer number of pixels in the space, it’s just brilliant for viewing your photos. Most of its all-in-one rivals pack 4K into a 27-inch screen, which can be a bit of a monstrous size on small desks (and Apple’s own 27-inch iMac ups the detail to 5K, of course).
Next up is the processor, which is a 3.4GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core chip here, compared to a 3.1GHz quad-core unit in the previous model (the £1,249 model gets a 3.0GHz quad-core chip). As is often the case with these generational updates, the difference between the speed of the previous model and this one looks small, and practical results bear this out.
In Geekbench, the improvement is a little under 10 per cent, and when we run a real-world test of a difficult video encode, we see the same 10% improvement. So, nothing ground-breaking, but then processor power was never a slouch here anyway. You get stronger performance than the Dell machine listed below, though the HP Envy has the iMac beaten on serious multi-core tasks, due to its Core i7 quad-core processor being HyperThreaded, so it acts like eight cores. Still, this is a strong performer.
The area in which we’re really expecting big improvements from the previous 4K iMac is graphics. Apple has gone from using Intel’s thoroughly middling GPU in the 2015 model to a much beefier dedicated chip from AMD. This is obviously a step up for games, but it’s great elsewhere, too – apps from consumer-level stuff like Photos to pro software like After Effects use the graphics chip for a lot of tasks. Skimping on its performance meant skimping on the capability of these apps, but that’s all changed with the Radeon Pro 560 here.
First thing’s first – it’s a big step up for gaming. Macs generally still have performance issues with games, and using weak GPUs in the past hasn’t helped. The difference in this model compared to the previous one is huge. Running Tomb Raider’s benchmark at 1920x1080 on High settings, we got 49fps compared
to 29fps in the last one – a 66 per cent improvement. Set to the screen’s native 4096x2304 resolution, the difference was a colossal 92 per cent – though we still only got 12.3fps on this test in the new model, so don’t expect complex games to be playable at 4K with bells and whistles.
Even with those improvements, it’s still not exactly blockbuster power for a £1,449 machine, though we should say that other all-in-ones aren’t really any better equipped for gaming (other than Windows being generally superior for it than macOS) – if you want 4K graphics performance, get a tower, basically.
Fusion reaction
The big fix other than the GPU is that you get a Fusion Drive as standard in this iMac. It’s a 1TB model, and the use of flash storage alongside a big hard disk makes an absolutely massive difference compared to just a hard drive. Macs store the operating system and your most-used files and apps on the flash (and use it for file transfers), so it mostly feels as if you’re just using an SSD. Less-used files get shifted to the hard dive automatically, but it all acts just as one big batch of storage. Obviously, all-flash storage is better, but it’s also punishingly expensive for 1TB or more, and what you want in a desktop is probably plenty of room to keep your photos and videos, and files going back years. That’s what you get here, but with a giant speed boost for day-to-day stuff. You can configure to all-flash for a handsome fee, of course.
That said, we kind of can’t believe that the £1,249 model only comes with a 1TB hard drive – no Fusion Drive. Apple, this is a premium machine, and a little 32GB stick of flash storage is not breaking your bank. Just throw it in. (You can configure the £1,249 model to have a 1TB Fusion Drive for £90, but that’s ridiculously steep – you’d be much better off paying the extra £110 to get the top model’s other upgrades.)
You get 8GB of RAM here, which is just fine for most people, though if you’re delving into editing photos from a DSLR, or like to edit video, springing for the 16GB or even 32GB upgrade is wise, since you can’t add more RAM yourself later like you can on most PCs (though, again, not all all-in-ones). Apple’s RAM upgrades are really expensive, but you don’t have a lot of choice.
The new iMac comes with Apple’s updated Magic Keyboard 2, which has a more crisp response to the keys. It won’t win over classic mechanical keyboard lovers, but we like it. That said, we’re surprised to not see Touch ID included in this day and age – if you’ve used a new MacBook Pro, this will feel like a big backwards step. The Touch Bar we’re less bothered about, but it’d definitely be nice to have.
And we have to say, it really feels like it’s time for an iMac design refresh, cutting back on the bezels that Apple has slimmed down elsewhere. And can we not have options for other colours, like the MacBooks and MacBook Pros?
Still, the important thing is that the 4K iMac gets the internal performance to match its fantastic screen – making this a great all-inone desktop pick.