Redesigned Apple iMacs Available This Friday
Apple's iPad Mini and iPad 4 have been available for a while now, but we're still waiting on some of the other products Apple announced at its October event. This week, Apple announced that the new, redesigned iMacs would become available starting this week. Cupertino revealed that those hoping to get their hands on the new 21.5-inch model will be able to buy one starting November 30. If you're holding out for the 27-inch model, you'll be waiting into December, as Apple still hasn't announced a formal release date for that version.
The 21.5-inch iMac is available with a 2.7 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.2 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M and 8GB of 1600 MHz RAM. Alternatively, you can upgrade to a 2.9 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. Pricing for the 21.5-inch iMac starts at $1,299.
The 27-inch iMac comes with a 2.9 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M for a suggested retail price of $1,799. You can also bump the specs in this one, pushing it to a 3.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX. Both models also come with Apple's new Fusion drive, which combines HDD and SSD technolgoy in a single storage drive.
Of course, the iMac didn't just receive a specs bump. Apple redesigned the AIO from the outside, too. The skinniest iMac yet, the all-in-one carries over that razor thin aesthetic from the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines and measures just 5mm thin at its edge. Apple says it was able to shrink the depth of the new iMac by re-imagining how the entire machine is put together. For one thing, they laminated the glass. Another alteration was the elimination of the optical drive, which used to be on the right side of the machine. Now, customers will have to invest in an external USB optical drive if they really want that functionality.
Well, looks like the world just divided itself by zero.
Maybe he is too busy refreshing the play store for his secret nexus 4
And pull the optical drive, too. Those things cost us, what, 6 dollars a pop? That's an easy 6 bucks right there.
Well, looks like the world just divided itself by zero.
Maybe he is too busy refreshing the play store for his secret nexus 4
sums this up, lets shrink the edge and keep the middle the same thickness, then sell it as thinner!
And pull the optical drive, too. Those things cost us, what, 6 dollars a pop? That's an easy 6 bucks right there.
Makes it thicker. They are a frustrating mechanical point of failure in an otherwise already difficult to repair form-factor. You can add a USB CD/DVD drive if it makes you happy...
Honestly, optical media can't die fast enough...
No-one needs a thin desktop anyway.
While it's hard to say who needs what type of configuration, I would argue that schools in particular may have a lab of computers used running on the Apple platform.
Seriously, when did you have the last CD/DVD drive fail?
I do not recall ever having one fail on me and I work on half a dozen computers 7 days a week (and that even includes an Apple Notebook /shame/ for Website testing).
Another Apple first.................
Its thinker in the middle than the old Imac's........ Guess they forgot to mention that.
Between the lens getting so dirty/scratched it can't read disks and the motors failing on laptop drives, for both the head and the rotator, it is a common enough issue for a commonly not used component that it makes more sense to use an external drive when it is needed, and easily, cheaply replaced when they fail, rather than an internal component on a mac (which are notoriously difficult to fix anyways).
And my hate for optical media is directed more at the media itself rather than the noisy slow drives (issues I can live with if it worked). Even the act of inserting a CD can cause the spindle area of the disk to crack. Even tiny hairline, imperceptible scratched can cause the media to fail, and rewritable media is so unstable that even a disk burned and verified 10 minutes earlier can degrade to the point of producing cyclic redundancy errors... People should be discouraged from using such a poor medium. If you need it, you can USB it.
Of course, apple probably does it better than an ultrabook... using it's ultra new SATA II configuration.
*Cough* *Cough*
If you like apple so much... make a hackintosh.
As of a year ago, I'm anticipating CD/DVDs to be replaced by SD cards. Smaller, holds more data and has the potential to be as fast as SSDs with USB 3 technology. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for this change.
The Fusion drive and the hybrid drive offer similar benefits but they're not exactly the same technology.