Apple iMac 27in (2020)
The new iMac is a sumptuous thing to behold, but if you can wait a year for Apple Silicon then seriously consider delaying
“To a certain extent, Apple can charge what it likes: few serious rivals exist for the 27in iMac outside of the iMac Pro”
PRICE As reviewed, £2,333 (£2,799 inc VAT) from apple.com
If you were hoping for a radical overhaul to this year’s iMac, I have bad news. In fact, Apple hasn’t significantly altered the design of the iMac for years – it’s still the slender, silver all-in-one we purred over back in 2012.
Perhaps the chassis will change next time, to accompany Apple’s switch from Intel’s chips to its own Silicon, but, for now, the iMac is the same as it ever was. How fortunate for Apple that it remains one of the most attractive and powerful all-in-ones you can buy.
What’s new?
There are subtle changes. A new “nano-texture” anti-reflective glass option reduces glare in bright rooms and it’s the first iMac with Apple’s “True Tone” display tech (covered later). Plus, the audio and webcam have also received an upgrade.
Otherwise, the new 27in iMac focuses on the performance increases brought about by the introduction of Intel’s tenth-generation Core chips and AMD’s Radeon Pro 5000 series graphics, plus new options to upgrade the RAM and storage to the giddy heights of 128GB and 8TB.
It’s also notably the first generation of iMac not to offer a Fusion Drive in any of its default configurations. All of the new 27in iMac models include faster solid-state storage as standard.
The price you pay
The base configuration costs £1,799 and bags you a 3.1GHz six-core Intel Core i5-10500 processor with 8GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro 5300 GPU with 4GB of GDDR6 RAM and a 256GB SSD – plus that glorious 27in 5K IPS display. The nano-texture, anti-glare glass costs £500 extra.
Prices rise steadily from this point as you go up the range. Further CPU options include the six-core i5-10600, octa-core i7-10700K and the ten-core i9-10910. Memory options run from 8GB all the way up to 128GB. Fancy 8TB of storage? No problem, as long as you’re willing to pay an extra £2,400 (versus the 512GB option).
For graphics, you can choose the AMD Radeon Pro 5300, the 5500XT (8GB GDDR6), the 5700 (8GB) or the 5700XT (16GB). To give you an idea of how that affects prices, moving from the 5500XT to the 5700XT costs £500, and if you pimp it out fully this iMac will end up costing you £8,799. For this review, I was sent something slightly less expensive: the Core i7-10700K model with 8GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro 5500XT and a 512GB SSD. Available to buy for a tidy £2,799.
To a certain extent, Apple can charge what it likes: few serious rivals exist for the 27in iMac outside of the iMac Pro. Dell offers the 27in Inspiron 27 7000 all-in-one, but it uses a mobile Intel CPU and Nvidia MX110 graphics, which are no match for the components favoured by Apple. Microsoft’s Surface Studio 2 ( see issue 296, p46) is another option and comes with a lovely touchscreen, but Microsoft hasn’t updated the spec for a while (the CPU is only seventh generation) and prices are high, starting at £3,549.
The HP Envy 32-a0012na appears to be a better alternative, with a larger 4K screen, a Core i7-9700 CPU, Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics, 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s a better spec than our review iMac for similar money, but sadly HP hasn’t made any samples available for review in the UK.
Elegance incarnate
When it comes to the sheer elegance of design, there’s still nothing out there
that can beat the iMac. Its anodised silver finish, one-piece L-shaped stand and gently bulging rear tapering to ultra-thin 5mm edges will cut a dash on any desk.
Yes, the broad 27mm bezels look dated, and Apple should have added height adjustment by now. Yet there is no denying that, despite its age, this remains an iconic piece of design.
The only things that have changed slightly over the years are the ports. This iMac (like the 2019 version) has two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports to replace the original’s Thunderbolt ports. It also now has a faster SD card reader, boosting it from SDHC to SDHX, which enables support for faster UHS-II cards. Customers can also now upgrade from Gigabit Ethernet to 10-Gigabit Ethernet at the point of purchase for £100. It’s disappointing, though, that Apple hasn’t taken the opportunity to upgrade the iMac’s wireless communications: you’re stuck with 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
The iMac’s other new features all reside inside. First, is the introduction of the T2 chip, a feature that’s trickled down from the MacBooks and iPads. Among its various jobs, the T2 chip acts as a DSP/ISP, improving audio quality with adaptive EQ and processing the video feed from the webcam, adjusting exposure and tone mapping on the fly. It can even do certain video rendering tasks, including the encoding and decoding of HEVC video files, freeing up your CPU and GPU to carry on with other jobs while your projects render in the background.
The new iMac has an improved 1080p FaceTime HD webcam and similar “studio quality” microphones to the 16in MacBook Pro. Both, given the number of people now working at home, are welcome improvements.
That display…
One of the biggest upgrades is the nano-texture anti-glare display, so it’s a real shame that Apple didn’t include it on our review unit. The idea is to etch a matte finish into the screen glass instead of adding an extra layer, thus cutting glare without damaging the overall image quality.
It’s also the first time Apple’s True Tone tech has made its way onto an iMac display and it works just as well as it does on the iPads and iPhones. It matches the white point of the display to the ambient light in the room, so your eyes don’t have to do as much readjustment when looking away from the screen and back at it.
The quality of the 27in 5K IPS display is unimpeachable. The resolution is a super-sharp 5,120 x 2,880 with a pixel density of 218ppi and it’s calibrated in the factory to the wide Display P3 colour gamut.
Colour accuracy is great within that colour space, with a measured average Delta E of 0.81. It’s bright too, achieving a measured peak of 533cd/m², while its contrast ratio is a solid 1,046:1. Although it doesn’t strictly support HDR content, movies and games still look beautifully vibrant. It’s a fabulous display.
Speed demon
Apple has a habit of squeezing extra power out of its core components than rival manufacturers, and it’s no different with the eight-core Intel Core i7-10700K in this machine. Although far from the fastest chip in Intel’s new series, its performance matches 2019’s top-end iMac CPU, the Core i9-9900K. It’s also faster than the Intel Xeon W-2140B CPU in the iMac Pro we tested in
2018 ( see issue 284, p50). If you need a machine for heavy-duty video rendering and 3D modelling, you can extract even more oomph from the 27in iMac by specifying the ten-core, tenth-gen Intel Core i9 CPU. As you can see from the graphs, our test iMac performed at or above the level of 2019’s machine, with overall better performance than the 2018 iMac Pro, especially in the graphics-heavy Unigine Valley and Heaven tests. The SSD’s performance is strong, with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reporting 2,312MB/sec and 2,342MB/sec for sustained read and write speeds.
“Performance is better than last year and the 27in iMac can be specified with huge amounts of RAM and SSD storage now”
Aye, Mac?
The 2020 27in iMac is an impressive machine. If your preference is for something minimalist that will also serve your heavy-duty video rendering or 3D design requirements, it’s a very good choice.
Performance is better than last year and it can be specified with huge amounts of RAM and SSD storage now – albeit at rather high prices. The display is something special and the addition of the nanotexture option and True Tone as standard make it that much better. There’s now a 1080p webcam and improved microphones for good measure too.
The one thing that would give me pause as an iMac fan is the proximity of the big change from Intel silicon to Apple’s own ARMbased chips in the near future. The first Macs based on the new CPUs are expected to be released by the end of 2020 and Apple says it will complete this transition in around two years.
With that in mind, and no matter how good this iMac is, it might be wise to delay spending such a significant sum of money on an Intel-based model and wait to see what transpires later this year.