For the past few years, Apple has kept the iMac on the sidelines, instead choosing to focus the spotlight on its portable and mobile offerings.
The iPhone remains Apple's cash cow, and the fervor is palpable every time a new version is released. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina Display are two ultra-slender notebooks that impress with both their design and their performance. And the iPad, which debuted all the way back in 2010, has some wondering if the notebook is even necessary anymore. As each of these products was unveiled, the current iMac design – originally introduced in 2009 – routinely underwent quiet upgrades. It was barely mentioned at Apple's splashy media events.
Not this time – when Apple debuted the new iMac alongside the iPad mini and a newer Retina display iPad at its media event last October, it was the iMac that turned the most heads. Sure, the iPad mini was the hot item of the day going in, but the stunningly thin iMac generated more buzz than we were expecting. It certainly made the jaded digerati leap to Twitter with excitement.
This is a damn sexy piece of machinery – at its edges, the iMac measures a mere 5 millimeters thick.The design, an impressively slender all-metal case capped by edge-to-edge glass, garners wows. But the fact that Apple managed to pack in a real computer – in my tester, a 3.1 GHz quad-core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1TB Fusion Drive running OS X Mountain Lion – is just as commendable. This thing doesn't just look good, it knows how to work it, too.
From the front, the new iMac is almost indistinguishable from the last iteration. It has the same folded-metal base, and beneath the black-edged display is the same silver "chin" with a shiny black Apple logo in the center. It's not until you spin the thing to the side that you notice its almost unfathomable slenderness and gentle curves.
Some people hate it when you refer to a consumer electronics product as "sexy," but ... this is a damn sexy piece of machinery. At its edges, the iMac's thickness measures a mere 5 millimeters. That's so thin, Apple couldn't use traditional manufacturing methods to bond the front and rear aluminum pieces together. It instead had to employ a method called friction stir welding, which creates a completely seamless, aerospace-quality juncture. It's only that thin at the edges though. It gently tapers to a modest bulge at the center rear – you've got to fit those hardware guts in there somewhere.
It's a little weird that you can't enjoy all the thin when you're actually using the iMac, unless you have mirrors placed on each side of your workstation. And if you're having to swivel your desktop around to periodically admire its design, you'll get odd looks from your coworkers.
My test machine has a 21.5-inch panel with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080. It's extraordinarily bright. The colors are natural and rich, and images and text seem to float right at the surface of the display rather than feeling buried beneath layers of glass. Indeed, the LCD panel is 45 percent thinner than the previous generation's display, and this was accomplished largely because the cover glass has been directly laminated to the LCD. It's technically not a Retina display, and frankly, that's fine. Yeah, when you smoosh your face within 8 inches of the display you can see all those abhorrent little pixels, but are you really going to sit with your face that close to your desktop monitor?