Editors’ Note: This version of the Apple iMac 27-Inch With Retina 5K Display has been updated. A full review of the most current Apple iMac 27-Inch With Retina 5K Display can be found here.

Often, Apple unveils a new product to great fanfare and collective fawning over the hot new thing—even when the hot new thing is just a repackaged version of an old thing. But with the latest iMac, Apple wows with a feature no one else has matched thus far, bringing the Retina display to the desktop with a dazzling 5K resolution. The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display ($2,499 as tested) is not only impressive from that standpoint alone, but solid performance and an uncharacteristically affordable price round out the package. The latest iMac easily earns our Editors’ Choice for high-end all-in-one desktops. It’s the system to get for video, photography, and graphics.

A Brilliant View
Let’s start with the most prominent feature—the display—since it overshadows pretty much everything else. The Retina 5K display isn’t just good, it’s overwhelming. The 27-inch screen with 5,120-by-2,880 resolution blows past 4K (3,840-by-2,160), packing an unheard-of 14.7 million pixels. Compared with the 2,560-by-1,440 screens in the Editors’ Choice Apple iMac 27-inch (Intel Core i5-4670) and the HP Z1 G2 all-in-one workstation, the difference is night and day.

To test the display, I loaded up the new iMac with several 4K nature videos. The tiniest stars in a night sky rendered themselves as pinpricks of light; nooks and crannies in stone and wood showed up in minute detail. I also streamed House of Cards in 4K, and seeing Kevin Spacey’s every pore and follicle was enough that meeting the actor in person might feel like a letdown. Whether viewing videos or still images, colors are bright and vibrant, and darker tones are rich, with very deep blacks. Even when performing more mundane tests, like gray-scale testing, image quality remains stellar, without a sign of the crushed near-blacks or washed-out whites I’ve seen on other displays. Text is impeccably rendered, with perfect readability at even the smallest font sizes.

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When the Retina iMac was announced, a lot of time was spent discussing things like the new timing controller (TCON), which Apple had to redesign to handle the bandwidth required by so many pixels. And the photo alignment processes and organic passivation architecture that had to be reconfigured to allow all of those pixels to combine seamlessly without cross-talk muddling the detail or losing contrast. In reality, the technical details matter little, as long as picture and the video quality are good, and the Retina 5K display delivers. The result is a screen with resolution high enough to let you run 4K video at full size, at full resolution, with room to spare. Let me rephrase that: There’s room to work. That extra screen space is ideal for the toolbars and timelines used in video editing. That’s what the iMac with Retina is all about—working with high-resolution video and other visual media.

One thing the display doesn’t deliver is touch capability. While you’ll find touch-capable displays on all sorts of Windows systems, like the Dell XPS 27 Touch All-in-One (2720)($500.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) or the HP Z1 G2, Mac OS X doesn’t support touch input—for that, you’re stuck with iOS devices like the iPad Air($389.99 at eBay)(Opens in a new window).

Design and Features
Aside from the upgraded display, the iMac design is relatively unchanged. In fact, with the display turned off, the new iMac can sit side-by-side with the old model and two are impossible to tell apart, without even a change in port labels to indicate which is which. The sleek aluminum design is still extremely thin, just 5mm at the edges, with a bulge in the back to accommodate larger components and the hinge for the L-shaped stand.

One of the few complaints I have about the design is that the single-hinge stand lets you adjust the angle of the display, but not the height. But while some all-in-one designs, like the HP Z1 G2, use a dual-hinge stand to add height adjustment, the majority do not, like the easel-backed MSI AG270 Gaming All-In-One (2PC-006US). In the back, there’s a small access panel—opened with a button that’s hidden when the desktop is plugged in—that provides the only user access inside the chassis. Open it up and you’ll find four SO-DIMM slots for RAM. Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM (two 4GB RAM sticks filling two of the four slots), but you can add more for up to 32GB total.

As with past iMacs, all of the ports are found on the backside of the display, including a headphone jack, an SDXC card slot, four USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. While the rear-mounted position of the ports is sometimes inconvenient, they are never more than arm’s length away. Unlike other iMacs, however, there is no option to use the Retina 5K display as an external monitor for another Mac. Inside, the iMac has 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 for wireless connectivity.

The system also comes with Apple’s Fusion Drive, a branded twist on drives that pair spacious hard disk storage with a smaller, but faster, solid-state drive (SSD). The option for Fusion Drive isn’t new, but the 1TB (1TB hard drive + 120GB SSD) is standard issue here.

Software and Support
The new iMac comes with the latest version of Apple’s OS X Yosemite. The tenth version of OS X, the new operating system has numerous tweaks and refinements over the previous Mavericks, from a new flattened look to deep integration with iOS 8. Our reviewer Edward Mendelson calls it “the most thorough upgrade ever of Apple’s desktop and laptop operating system, and also the most technically spectacular.” There isn’t space here to delve too deeply into Yosemite’s improvements and features, so check out our full review for more.

You also get iLife (which includes iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand) and iWork (which consists of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), along with apps like FaceTime, Safari, and iTunes. Apple covers the iMac with a one-year warranty, plus 90 days of free phone support. AppleCare is available for purchase (three years for $169) for longer-lasting coverage.

Performance and Pricing
While the display marks this iMac as the video or photo editors desktop of choice, in most other respects, the standard configuration is more in line with a decidedly consumer-level desktop. The system is outfitted with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-4690 processor and 8GB of RAM. The graphics muscle behind all of the high-resolution video and images is an AMD Radeon R9 M290X with just 2GB of dedicated memory. While the processing hardware is competent, and the GPU is high-end (for the moment), this system can’t hold a candle to the workhorse Apple Mac Pro or even the HP Z1 G2. Editing 4K videos is pretty strenuous for any PC, but for faster editing, or rendering animation at that resolution, you’ll definitely need to step up to a workstation.

That said, this iMac can still pull its weight, falling only slightly behind workstations. When tested in Photoshop CS6, a timed test that stresses the processor by running a photo through about a dozen filters, the iMac with Retina cranked through in 3 minutes 8 seconds. This was slightly faster than the MSI AG270 (3:09), but a bit behind the Apple Mac Pro (3:03), and further behind the Dell XPS 27 Touch (2:58), the previous Apple iMac 27-inch (Intel Core i5-4670) (2:55), and the HP Z1 G2 (2:51).

The use of a discrete AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card means that not only does the iMac have the graphics chops for 5K video, it can also handle gaming (albeit, nowhere near 5K resolution). In Heaven, the iMac produced 67 frames per second (fps) at basic 1,366-by-768 resolution and medium detail settings, and 21fps at higher detail and 1,920-by-1,080 resolution. It fared slightly better in Valley, where it produced 81fps at lower resolution and detail settings, and a just-playable 29fps at full HD and high detail. By comparison, the MSI AG270 Gaming All-In-One (2PC-006US) scored slightly ahead in all gaming tests, finishing Heaven with 80fps (medium resolution and settings) and 27fps (high resolution and settings), and completing Valley with 101fps (medium settings) and 36fps (high settings). While the iMac isn’t intended to be a gaming machine, you’ll find that it will play current AAA titles at playable frame rates, provided you keep the resolution below 1080p and back off the detail settings.

And finally, no discussion of an Apple product would be complete without a mention of the price. The base configuration with the Retina Display iMac is $2,499, a healthy step up from the highest-non-Retina version, which starts at $1,999. Tweak the standard iMac configuration to match the Retina model (with a similar Core i5 processor, 1TB Fusion drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M) and the price comes up to a very similar $2,349. That $150 spells the difference between a standard iMac and this new Retina-equipped model is nothing short of astonishing. For a better idea of how much Apple could be charging for this system, Dell recently announced a 27-inch UltraSharp monitor with that same 5,120-by-2,880 resolution, for $2,500—for the monitor alone. (Of course, a stand-alone display can be used with different systems, while the iMac cannot.) Apple has something of a reputation for prices that maintain a healthy profit margin, but this system appears to buck that trend.

Conclusion
It’s hard not to get caught up in the rhetoric whenever a new Apple system comes out, but the iMac 27-inch with Retina 5K display silences critics by offering something nobody else has: a potent all-in-one desktop with an unparalleled 5K screen. While there will surely be plenty of 4K and 5K displays coming along to compete with it, the iMac is there first, and at a price that’s surprisingly affordable. While touch enthusiasts will have to stick to Windows systems, and more demanding professionals will prefer a full-fledged workstation, for your video- and photo-editing needs, nothing matches the new iMac. As such, it’s our new Editors’ Choice for high-end all-in-one desktops.