Hands On: Apple’s iMac With Retina 5K Display

At today’s Apple event, Tim Cook and Phil Schiller introduced the new Apple iMac 27-inch with a Retina 5K display. We got a chance to look at the system after the keynote, and these are our first impressions.

The new iMac is physically no larger or smaller than the previous iteration, which is a boon for companies that need to move them around. The same anvil shipping cases you already use will work with the new system with 5K Retina display. The chassis is still mostly aluminum and glass, with a 5mm edge, which is thinner than an iPhone 6 ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window).

That said, the middle of the chassis still bows out a bit for the stand mounting point, cooling vent, and standard three-prong power cord. You can add memory using the access door in the back, and it still has the trick release hidden in the power port. The device comes with 8GB of memory, but you can go all the way up to 32GB.

The new 5K Retina display is the meat of the upgrade, and it is a beaut. It has 5,120-by-2,880 native resolution with an IPS screen that displays excellent color balance and detail in high contrast areas of photos, like shadows. As pointed out in the keynote, Final Cut Pro users can view 4K (Ultra HD) videos natively while surrounding the video view window with toolbars for editing, library lookup, and scrubbing through your video project. Likewise, 5K photos display natively in iPhoto and other photo-editing apps that have been updated to support Retina displays.

The pioneering work done to support Retina displays on the two MacBook Pro (13- and 15-inch) models carry over to the iMac. App developers who already have high-resolution UI elements in their programs will see the same art and text scale to the new 5K Retina display in the iMac. This means that as long as your apps are up to date, you’ll be golden. Otherwise, apps will show the same low-resolution mode seen on the MacBook Pro laptops.

Apple’s Fusion Drive is now standard, the new iMac 27-inch with 5K Retina display boots and launches apps quickly, with a full 1TB of hard drive space for your files. CTO buyers will be able to upgrade to a 3TB Fusion drive or choose 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB pure Flash Storage (SSD). In any case, the storage is less of a performance bottleneck than in hard drive-based iMacs.

The new iMacs come with Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) pre-installed, so you won’t have to worry about upgrading the OS later, as has happened with hardware launches in the past. Yosemite is flatter than Mavericks, with icons that have the same look and feel as those in iOS 8. We didn’t have a chance to try out Continuity features, but the keynote demo showed how easy it is to switch from the iMac to your iPad and iPhone while working on projects, answering emails, and corresponding via FaceTime and Messages. All of these functions are mediated through iCloud and iCloud Drive.

We couldn’t run any of our performance benchmark tests on the hands-on units, but rest assured that we will do so once we have the new iMac at PC Labs. For more, check out the video below and stay tuned to PCMag.com for more on the new set of iPads for the 2014 holiday season.