Quite interesting that the 27" imac has a slower (base) gpu now - previously this was r9 m290x (pitcairn, 20 CU, 256bit gddr5), now it's r9 m380, which is bonaire, 12 CU, 128bit gddr5. The top option is the same apart from the name and possibly minor clock differences (both are Tonga with 32 CUs), the new middle option (r9 m390) is probably the same as the base option was.
Fair enough, since the new 27" base model is also cheaper than the old 5k 27" retina model was. Albeit that r9 m380 is indeed quite underpowered for that resolution, apart from desktop compositing you're probably not going to run anything 3d at native resolution...
So Apple is going wider than sRGB ? How long it will take to trickle down to the iPhone or the Apple Watch ? How does it influence power compustion ?
And then, it's not good Apple went with HD6200 and a 4K display... But there probably wasn't any Skylake part awailable. Still acording to Ars technica review the Intel HD 6200 is slower than the estimated GPU performance of an iPad Pro (2x faster than an iPad Air 2) and I find it laughable.
The 4K iMac has Iris Pro 6200... you know, the fastest IGP out there? It's more than 4x as fast as the GPU in the A8X. So even if the A9X is twice as fast as an iPad Air 2, the iMac still has more than 2x the GPU horsepower (plus a 65 W TDP) and is only pushing 70% more pixels.
It does not appear that Intel has any Skylake 4+4e parts available, which would be the only thing faster than Iris Pro 6200 short of a discrete GPU. Although with the TDP constraints of the 21.5-inch iMac, I'm not sure you could even do much better with a dGPU unless you gimped the CPU.
Absolutely correct repo, and on the money Skylake parts that'll for the TDP envelope of the iMac won't drop until Q1 or 2, 2016. It's not Apple's fault Intel flubbed their rollout --- and the Haswell iGPUs used on last year's initial run of 5K base iMacs 'worked' and worked well as a general purpose, 15 million pixel 27" AiO. The IP6200 is a step up from last ...I mean Haswell's 5000/5100/5200 packages which annihilated the Intel 4000 (which almost exactly three years to the date now has driven the 5 ½ million pixels on my 15" rMBP. Along with a feeble nVidia 650m. It's still a beast, after 25 years of computing - in 2012 when I bought the first one I'm talking about - I couldn't remember a purchase that made me so happy. Perhaps the 'age thing' has played out perfectly for me and my eyes ;) --- I'm 44, had 20/20 vision until later thirty something hit and it's dropped off a cliff since (reading ...everything else is fine!) and I've got a dozen 'cheaters' stashed throughout my life (reading glasses) That said, the 'retina' HiDPI revolution Apple began with the iPhone 4, iPad 3 and my 2012 rMBP was damn near perfect timing for my sore eyes! The clarity of text and incredible resolution density, along with the most accurate displays I've ever owned that didn't need calibration - phenomenal storage speeds ...even on the '12 non PCIe SSD I use daily, my wife has the new 15" with AMD GPU and the PCIe storage discussed briefly here, significantly more in the review hitting speeds near 2Gb/s reading, 1.5Gb/s writing ....these things are seriously fast. Install/uninstalling is no longer a task. It's just. Done. @GC2:CS ...I read the Ars 'get er on the web first' review as well. I don't recall reading the quote you're quoting --- however the iPad Pro if truly is as capable as the presentation suggested with 4GB of RAM essentially for the display and nothing else (it's a tablet, sure you can multi task but it's 4GB for nothing more than the SoC's ability to draw the display) other than the calls from the functioning app(s). As an iPad Air 2 owner, I can tell ya there's nothing but roses in that garden The Air 2 shames all earlier iPads with its triple core A8X and double the RAM, A9X is supposedly twice as fast (nearly) again, doubling the RAM My Air 2 is faster at EVERYthing I do in comparison with any laptop I owned through the core duo and core2 duo days ...with 5400 RPM HDDs (my only issue with the new release but then again, some just don't care ...), double the weight, 90 minutes of 'working' battery life, maybe two hours of browsing or a movie in its entirety. That was just less than a half decade ago, plenty of the 08/09/10/& 2011 machines are still chugging along just fine ...but my iPad Air 2 has faster storage, faster performance in all tasks I'm able to compare, is quintuple the efficiency off 110V I easily get a couple days use ...three or four hours each day of screen on time - instant screen on time with quadruple the resolution of the displays we were using in 2010 & 2011. 2012, late In the year ...like this time of the year is when the originals dropped - and IMHO along with the wickedly quick storage and OS X/iOS updates have turned owning a computer into enjoying 'a friend'. Bad analogy maybe but these latest iPads, MacBooks and now iMacs are insanely great ...even with the Intel 4000/Ivy Bridge iGPU. Obviously it's got the discrete 650m for muscle when needed but the new IP 6200 from the charts I read on Ars looked to be in parity with the 650/750m. Just a generation and a ½ removed from discrete GPU performance Intel, working with Apple has made some HUGE leaps in graphic performance integrated with their core 'i' generational updates. And Skylake is possibly another 20-40% increase in performance, decrease in energy and update to The Bizarre Broadwell overlap. Thought I'd throw that out there GC2 as you seem very ill informed when it comes to the last coup,e years worth of improving iGPU technology on CPU packages from Intel* (select chips) While my iPad Air 2 isn't quite 4K, it's damn close and half the performance of the iPad pro coming next month. Doubling compute and graphic power ...especially when it's already 'fast enough' without latency, choking, chugging or actually crashing while being used constantly isn't real easy for me to understand ...I've a hard time figuring out how I could use my A2 any faster or complete tasks any quicker (it's much faster than my Air 1 though, so in a way I can ...) as its the pinnacle of iOS today along with the A9 iPhone. The developers are shooting for the masses not the minorities. iPad 4, Mini 2, Air 1 and iPhone 5s ...the A5 generations are still fully functional devices albeit a dread to use if used to newer hardware. And the iPad Pro will be nearly a hundred times as fast/powerful as the iPhone 5 or iPad 2/3!!! ( if we're genuinely talking exponential increases in horsepower) Sorry. Found your comment laughable. Discrete GPUs are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the focus nVidia is putting on their Tegra/mobile division and development or nearly ANY laptop you'll buy today including some very nice HiDPI units like the Surface 3 & 4s lacking discrete cards where most consumers shop for their rigs (Best Buy, Walmart, Target) --- the writing is on the wall. I can spend half the amount of the Titan and get a fully equipped current console with the graphic power to run games on my living room display. Pay the same and get both consoles. Without the other crap one must deal with building rigs, tinkering or buying through boutique shops without local or easily accessible support ...really the only machines I'm seeing these days WITH discrete cards are in my Maximum PC edition I still subscribe to (it's about the same price now on my iPad for the year as it cost per month in the magazine rack days!). And they're incredibly cool, over the top expensive and run 1500 watt power supplies with radiator (water) cooled loops integrated with fan cooling to attempt to get the heat out --- and for what? They're measuring some of these rigs now that can exceed 200fps on their 'bench' software ...for what? We have TVs and displays that have for years refreshed at 60 cycles. Do 60fps well, and discrete is still working its way there, as not even the Titan is capable of sustaining 60Hz @ 4K gaming resolutions continuous. I'd rather see attention paid to sustained performance at 60fps than jump from 110-->150 peak, as the minimum didn't drop below 80! I, too, find it laughable. Your comment that is
A display that happens to show DCI 4K natively pixel for pixel and paired with a DCI-P3 gamut, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. Occasionally Apple still throws the professional market a bone, there's plenty other offers targetting photographers.
The iMac is a much better device for photo editing than it is for video editing purely due to the processing power available. If I had to choose one way or the other I would have opted for AdobeRGB.
Semi-seriously, Apple might have just preferred the colour space that didn't require them to put "Adobe" in all their marketing material.
More seriously, aren't iPhones the most popular photo and video cameras in terms of amount of content produced? Adobe RGB may be the most popular wide gamut colour space right now, but that usage is probably still a small fraction of sRGB. If Apple put DCI-P3 cameras and screens in the next iDevices and enabled them by default and other smartphone makers followed it wouldn't be long before DCI-P3 becomes the default wide gamut standard for photography.
Nothing stops anyone from taking the raw images (devoid of any color space) and bringing them into DCI-P3, except that no website or commercial printer will use it. It'll just get converted to sRGB anyway.
It's not a move that was designed to serve the pro audience (if it was it would have been Adobe RGB). It caters purely to improving the display quality for their standard consumer. I think Apple made the right call here, although I have mixed feelings about them running off and doing their own thing yet again.
I use a calibrated Adobe RGB display daily for photo and other media work. Most photos I take do not reach into the very upper registers of green gamut. While certainly they are in excess of sRGB, the section of greens not covered by DCI-P3 are not the most critical day to day greens. However, a much larger number of photos I work with have deep reds/yellows which are better represented by DCI-P3. Further P3 is simply a larger gamut, not by much, but by a bit. These are simply my experiences, perhaps you work with lots of far reaching greens.
However, the DCI spec also calls for a gamma of 2.6. I must assume Apple has stuck to 2.2 native and are simply using the P3 color space.
The CPU is no slouch though, it's not like you *need* a dual socket machine or more than 4 cores for video editing. And it has potentially extremely fast I/O.
I have a hard time comprehending how anyone could tolerate a HDD at whatever RPM in these otherwise high-end machines. I think I am typical in being accustomed to SSDs in all my machines--even budget ones, and even in the laughable 2011-era ultrabook they give me to use at work.
A very good point. The 21" 4K iMac should have come standard with a fusion drive. Actually, I'd like to see Apple remove spinning disks from their whole line-up. If I need slow mass storage, I'll hang a USB Drive off the back or buy a NAS.
I wouldn't buy that low end iMac (not cost effective vs moving up to the 27") - but they've gotten rich mostly from iOS devices, which are always reviewed at or near the top in most categories (as are Macs as well overall)...
Without the progression of hard drives in the Mac line up. there would not seem to be reason to buy anything but the bottom model for most buyers. And that means selling fewer high end models than they do now. And interestingly, this approach leads to happier customers. Because those other parts like graphics or bigger screens are things that are hard to sell initially, impossible to install afterward, but often make people happier in the long run with their computer.
The experts are the ones that go online and order BTO.
Broadwell in the 21-inch. OK, kinda expected that. Skylake in the 27-inch, but still no Thunderbolt 3 or USB Type-C. And after AMD rolled out the R9 Nano, I was really hoping Apple would offer a 27-inch with Fiji. Stupid Apple.
Apple never uses outdated components to save costs. Their choice of components is dictated almost entirely by either engineering or supply chain decisions. The lack of 4+4e CPUs, Alpine Ridge and Fiji in this round of iMacs strongly suggest that Intel and AMD don't have sufficient yields to supply Apple with those parts.
"I would definitely just stick with the standard HDD if I were buying the base model 27" iMac."
That only makes sense if you intend to upgrade the HD yourself. Despite the price, non-hybrid drives cause WAY too much pain for everyday use. It's absolutely not worth it to forego even the 24GB Fusion, even for $100. Just upgrade to 2TB if you're that concerned about value.
"it's hard to stomach paying $100 for 24GB of NAND, and I would definitely just stick with the standard HDD if I were buying the base model 27" iMac."
I'm sorry but this is an utterly idiotic comment that shows an utterly idiotic view of looking at the world. You have two choices: $1500 for a Mac with a slow hard drive or $1600 for a Mac with a fast hard drive. And you think the $1500 is the sensible choice???
It is IRRELEVANT what the cost of flash is. The point is the value to you that is delivered by the product. If you don't think a "fast hard drive" is worth $100 more than a "slow hard drive" might I suggest that you haven't actually used a pure hard drive in a while.
You can, of course create your own Frankensystem. You can buy an external USB-3 SSD and boot the OS off that. (I am doing that right now with my 3yr old iMac whose internal HD has started failing). You can even set up a fusion drive between a small external USB SSD and the internal HD (I have that booting my 2007 iMac). But these are not the setups most people want when they initially buy the system; they're the setups people drift into when the system has become old and you're trying to keep it alive for a few more years to extract maximal value.
"I am doing that right now with my 3yr old iMac whose internal HD has started failing"
I don't think you're helping to dismiss the notion that any type of a spinning disk locked away in the sealed-architecture of the iMac is a very bad idea.
You completely misunderstood his comment. He says while it's hard to stomach the $100 on the 21" he would do it, but the second part of his comment is about the 27" iMac, with the 7200 RPM drive. I would personally even avoid that, but in any case you still completely misunderstood him. Although the way it is worded is a little bit confusing at first.
The non-Retina 21-inch models got the Broadwell treatment as well, so the CPU options are: Core i5-5250U, Core i5-5575R, Core i5-5675R and Core i7-5775R for the 21.5-inch and Core i5-6500, Core i5-6600 and Core i7-6700K for the 27-inch.
24 GB of flash for the 1 TB Fusion drive sucks. There really is zero excuse for shipping the non-fusion version at that point, and $100 for the upgrade is absolutely insulting.
Even tho I bought a specific Skylake mobo because it had USB Type C, I fail to see how it's very relevant on a desktop system now or even a few years down the line...
Even if it were included it's basically be for data transfer only as I'm assuming many pic the alt modes will require different controllers and future drives that may be incompatible with current hardware.
And besides, couldn't you just use a normal A to Type C cable for almost everything on a desktop? It's a different story on a laptop where space is at a premium and there may be device charging concerns...
isn't power delivery 2.0 is for usb-c to usb-c only?
i'm not saying you couldn't make it work without USB-c, but why have to workaround a limitation on a skylake high end desktop? imagine all the ports they have, and an extra usb-c port or two... what would be the downside?
What is relevant to desktop Skylake systems now and in the future is Alpine Ridge. Which = Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, external GPU support and all of it over USB Type-C. It's most of the significant new technologies that Intel managed to deliver for this platform, technologies that have generally been championed by Apple, and yet not present here. That sucks, because it's unlikely Apple will refresh the iMac line for another 12 months or whenever Skylake Refresh (a.k.a Kaby Lake) finally trickles out.
Gonna get my parents to upgrade to this. Their old 17" 2006 iMac is starting to show it's age(still, it works pretty well considering it's rarely turned off)
Until NVIDIA updates their display controller, that won't happen. Apple needs the support for 6 display streams and the ability to create an 8-lane eDP link that can drive a 5K display as a single tile.
The 'high end' 27" does not have the 4.0 Ghz i7, it only has the i5, not even an SSD and the ram upgrade to 32GB is $600, I'm used to them charging full price of the new component without reducing the price of one it's replacing but his is over double that. You would need to pay at least $3000 for a decent config. A fully specced out machine would set me back almost 5000 euro.
I find that Apple's pricing has gotten out of hand lately, the base configs are sub par giving a bad experience to people who don't know better (5400 rpm drives, really?). The premium to make it a decent config are insane, I have the same problem with the retina mbp. With windows 10 being good enough I am seriously considering switching back not that my 4+ year old 17" mbp is starting to fail
If I would buy a 27" iMac that's probably what I would do. But than you would still have the drive to deal with, yes it can be done but it's clearly not meant to. If Apple insists on making their machines non-serviceable (I can accept their reasons) I would prefer that didn't sell gimped base configs with insane premiums for the upgrades. In the small iMac and the macbook pro (I most likely would go for a laptop again) upgrading the ram yourself isn't even an option anymore.
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xthetenth - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Intel calls it the iMac with 4K Retina displayI don't think Intel's deciding the branding for Apple.
mczak - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Quite interesting that the 27" imac has a slower (base) gpu now - previously this was r9 m290x (pitcairn, 20 CU, 256bit gddr5), now it's r9 m380, which is bonaire, 12 CU, 128bit gddr5. The top option is the same apart from the name and possibly minor clock differences (both are Tonga with 32 CUs), the new middle option (r9 m390) is probably the same as the base option was.gsalkin - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
To be fair, the base 5K iMac is replacing the old non-5K 27" model. That one had a GT 755M, which the M380 outpaces a fair bit.mczak - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Fair enough, since the new 27" base model is also cheaper than the old 5k 27" retina model was. Albeit that r9 m380 is indeed quite underpowered for that resolution, apart from desktop compositing you're probably not going to run anything 3d at native resolution...Brandon Chester - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
The base iMac 5K was actually dropped to the R9 M290 without a Fusion Drive, while M290X became the mid model.Brandon Chester - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Indeed they are not. Thanks for pointing that out.alexmckay - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
^^^^^AgreedGC2:CS - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
So Apple is going wider than sRGB ? How long it will take to trickle down to the iPhone or the Apple Watch ? How does it influence power compustion ?And then, it's not good Apple went with HD6200 and a 4K display... But there probably wasn't any Skylake part awailable.
Still acording to Ars technica review the Intel HD 6200 is slower than the estimated GPU performance of an iPad Pro (2x faster than an iPad Air 2) and I find it laughable.
repoman27 - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
The 4K iMac has Iris Pro 6200... you know, the fastest IGP out there? It's more than 4x as fast as the GPU in the A8X. So even if the A9X is twice as fast as an iPad Air 2, the iMac still has more than 2x the GPU horsepower (plus a 65 W TDP) and is only pushing 70% more pixels.It does not appear that Intel has any Skylake 4+4e parts available, which would be the only thing faster than Iris Pro 6200 short of a discrete GPU. Although with the TDP constraints of the 21.5-inch iMac, I'm not sure you could even do much better with a dGPU unless you gimped the CPU.
akdj - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link
Absolutely correct repo, and on the moneySkylake parts that'll for the TDP envelope of the iMac won't drop until Q1 or 2, 2016. It's not Apple's fault Intel flubbed their rollout --- and the Haswell iGPUs used on last year's initial run of 5K base iMacs 'worked' and worked well as a general purpose, 15 million pixel 27" AiO. The IP6200 is a step up from last ...I mean Haswell's 5000/5100/5200 packages which annihilated the Intel 4000 (which almost exactly three years to the date now has driven the 5 ½ million pixels on my 15" rMBP. Along with a feeble nVidia 650m.
It's still a beast, after 25 years of computing - in 2012 when I bought the first one I'm talking about - I couldn't remember a purchase that made me so happy. Perhaps the 'age thing' has played out perfectly for me and my eyes ;) --- I'm 44, had 20/20 vision until later thirty something hit and it's dropped off a cliff since (reading ...everything else is fine!) and I've got a dozen 'cheaters' stashed throughout my life (reading glasses)
That said, the 'retina' HiDPI revolution Apple began with the iPhone 4, iPad 3 and my 2012 rMBP was damn near perfect timing for my sore eyes! The clarity of text and incredible resolution density, along with the most accurate displays I've ever owned that didn't need calibration - phenomenal storage speeds ...even on the '12 non PCIe SSD I use daily, my wife has the new 15" with AMD GPU and the PCIe storage discussed briefly here, significantly more in the review hitting speeds near 2Gb/s reading, 1.5Gb/s writing ....these things are seriously fast.
Install/uninstalling is no longer a task. It's just. Done.
@GC2:CS ...I read the Ars 'get er on the web first' review as well. I don't recall reading the quote you're quoting --- however the iPad Pro if truly is as capable as the presentation suggested with 4GB of RAM essentially for the display and nothing else (it's a tablet, sure you can multi task but it's 4GB for nothing more than the SoC's ability to draw the display) other than the calls from the functioning app(s). As an iPad Air 2 owner, I can tell ya there's nothing but roses in that garden
The Air 2 shames all earlier iPads with its triple core A8X and double the RAM, A9X is supposedly twice as fast (nearly) again, doubling the RAM
My Air 2 is faster at EVERYthing I do in comparison with any laptop I owned through the core duo and core2 duo days ...with 5400 RPM HDDs (my only issue with the new release but then again, some just don't care ...), double the weight, 90 minutes of 'working' battery life, maybe two hours of browsing or a movie in its entirety. That was just less than a half decade ago, plenty of the 08/09/10/& 2011 machines are still chugging along just fine ...but my iPad Air 2 has faster storage, faster performance in all tasks I'm able to compare, is quintuple the efficiency off 110V I easily get a couple days use ...three or four hours each day of screen on time - instant screen on time with quadruple the resolution of the displays we were using in 2010 & 2011. 2012, late In the year ...like this time of the year is when the originals dropped - and IMHO along with the wickedly quick storage and OS X/iOS updates have turned owning a computer into enjoying 'a friend'. Bad analogy maybe but these latest iPads, MacBooks and now iMacs are insanely great ...even with the Intel 4000/Ivy Bridge iGPU. Obviously it's got the discrete 650m for muscle when needed but the new IP 6200 from the charts I read on Ars looked to be in parity with the 650/750m. Just a generation and a ½ removed from discrete GPU performance Intel, working with Apple has made some HUGE leaps in graphic performance integrated with their core 'i' generational updates.
And Skylake is possibly another 20-40% increase in performance, decrease in energy and update to The Bizarre Broadwell overlap.
Thought I'd throw that out there GC2 as you seem very ill informed when it comes to the last coup,e years worth of improving iGPU technology on CPU packages from Intel* (select chips)
While my iPad Air 2 isn't quite 4K, it's damn close and half the performance of the iPad pro coming next month. Doubling compute and graphic power ...especially when it's already 'fast enough' without latency, choking, chugging or actually crashing while being used constantly isn't real easy for me to understand ...I've a hard time figuring out how I could use my A2 any faster or complete tasks any quicker (it's much faster than my Air 1 though, so in a way I can ...) as its the pinnacle of iOS today along with the A9 iPhone. The developers are shooting for the masses not the minorities. iPad 4, Mini 2, Air 1 and iPhone 5s ...the A5 generations are still fully functional devices albeit a dread to use if used to newer hardware.
And the iPad Pro will be nearly a hundred times as fast/powerful as the iPhone 5 or iPad 2/3!!! ( if we're genuinely talking exponential increases in horsepower)
Sorry. Found your comment laughable. Discrete GPUs are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the focus nVidia is putting on their Tegra/mobile division and development or nearly ANY laptop you'll buy today including some very nice HiDPI units like the Surface 3 & 4s lacking discrete cards where most consumers shop for their rigs (Best Buy, Walmart, Target) --- the writing is on the wall. I can spend half the amount of the Titan and get a fully equipped current console with the graphic power to run games on my living room display. Pay the same and get both consoles. Without the other crap one must deal with building rigs, tinkering or buying through boutique shops without local or easily accessible support ...really the only machines I'm seeing these days WITH discrete cards are in my Maximum PC edition I still subscribe to (it's about the same price now on my iPad for the year as it cost per month in the magazine rack days!). And they're incredibly cool, over the top expensive and run 1500 watt power supplies with radiator (water) cooled loops integrated with fan cooling to attempt to get the heat out --- and for what? They're measuring some of these rigs now that can exceed 200fps on their 'bench' software ...for what? We have TVs and displays that have for years refreshed at 60 cycles. Do 60fps well, and discrete is still working its way there, as not even the Titan is capable of sustaining 60Hz @ 4K gaming resolutions continuous.
I'd rather see attention paid to sustained performance at 60fps than jump from 110-->150 peak, as the minimum didn't drop below 80!
I, too, find it laughable. Your comment that is
Kjella - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
A display that happens to show DCI 4K natively pixel for pixel and paired with a DCI-P3 gamut, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. Occasionally Apple still throws the professional market a bone, there's plenty other offers targetting photographers.Brandon Chester - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
The iMac is a much better device for photo editing than it is for video editing purely due to the processing power available. If I had to choose one way or the other I would have opted for AdobeRGB.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Semi-seriously, Apple might have just preferred the colour space that didn't require them to put "Adobe" in all their marketing material.More seriously, aren't iPhones the most popular photo and video cameras in terms of amount of content produced? Adobe RGB may be the most popular wide gamut colour space right now, but that usage is probably still a small fraction of sRGB. If Apple put DCI-P3 cameras and screens in the next iDevices and enabled them by default and other smartphone makers followed it wouldn't be long before DCI-P3 becomes the default wide gamut standard for photography.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Nothing stops anyone from taking the raw images (devoid of any color space) and bringing them into DCI-P3, except that no website or commercial printer will use it. It'll just get converted to sRGB anyway.Spoony - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
It's not a move that was designed to serve the pro audience (if it was it would have been Adobe RGB). It caters purely to improving the display quality for their standard consumer. I think Apple made the right call here, although I have mixed feelings about them running off and doing their own thing yet again.I use a calibrated Adobe RGB display daily for photo and other media work. Most photos I take do not reach into the very upper registers of green gamut. While certainly they are in excess of sRGB, the section of greens not covered by DCI-P3 are not the most critical day to day greens. However, a much larger number of photos I work with have deep reds/yellows which are better represented by DCI-P3. Further P3 is simply a larger gamut, not by much, but by a bit. These are simply my experiences, perhaps you work with lots of far reaching greens.
However, the DCI spec also calls for a gamma of 2.6. I must assume Apple has stuck to 2.2 native and are simply using the P3 color space.
blackcrayon - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
The CPU is no slouch though, it's not like you *need* a dual socket machine or more than 4 cores for video editing. And it has potentially extremely fast I/O.id4andrei - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
OSX still can't do 10 bit and neither can their displays, DCI enabled or not.magreen - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
I have a hard time comprehending how anyone could tolerate a HDD at whatever RPM in these otherwise high-end machines. I think I am typical in being accustomed to SSDs in all my machines--even budget ones, and even in the laughable 2011-era ultrabook they give me to use at work.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
A very good point. The 21" 4K iMac should have come standard with a fusion drive. Actually, I'd like to see Apple remove spinning disks from their whole line-up. If I need slow mass storage, I'll hang a USB Drive off the back or buy a NAS.nerd1 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
It's almost 2016 and 5400rpm HDD in $1499 device? Do they even have m2 slot at all? LOLFunBunny2 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Remember, Apple's gotten rich off selling lipstick covered pigs to folks with more money than brains.blackcrayon - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
I wouldn't buy that low end iMac (not cost effective vs moving up to the 27") - but they've gotten rich mostly from iOS devices, which are always reviewed at or near the top in most categories (as are Macs as well overall)...Shiitaki - Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - link
Without the progression of hard drives in the Mac line up. there would not seem to be reason to buy anything but the bottom model for most buyers. And that means selling fewer high end models than they do now. And interestingly, this approach leads to happier customers. Because those other parts like graphics or bigger screens are things that are hard to sell initially, impossible to install afterward, but often make people happier in the long run with their computer.The experts are the ones that go online and order BTO.
repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Broadwell in the 21-inch. OK, kinda expected that. Skylake in the 27-inch, but still no Thunderbolt 3 or USB Type-C. And after AMD rolled out the R9 Nano, I was really hoping Apple would offer a 27-inch with Fiji. Stupid Apple.lilo777 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
It is very common for Apple to use outdated components to save costs. Nothing new here. Outdated hardware at high price.repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Apple never uses outdated components to save costs. Their choice of components is dictated almost entirely by either engineering or supply chain decisions. The lack of 4+4e CPUs, Alpine Ridge and Fiji in this round of iMacs strongly suggest that Intel and AMD don't have sufficient yields to supply Apple with those parts.osxandwindows - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
So intel 6400k is outdatedciparis - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
"I would definitely just stick with the standard HDD if I were buying the base model 27" iMac."That only makes sense if you intend to upgrade the HD yourself. Despite the price, non-hybrid drives cause WAY too much pain for everyday use. It's absolutely not worth it to forego even the 24GB Fusion, even for $100. Just upgrade to 2TB if you're that concerned about value.
name99 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
"it's hard to stomach paying $100 for 24GB of NAND, and I would definitely just stick with the standard HDD if I were buying the base model 27" iMac."I'm sorry but this is an utterly idiotic comment that shows an utterly idiotic view of looking at the world. You have two choices:
$1500 for a Mac with a slow hard drive or
$1600 for a Mac with a fast hard drive.
And you think the $1500 is the sensible choice???
It is IRRELEVANT what the cost of flash is. The point is the value to you that is delivered by the product. If you don't think a "fast hard drive" is worth $100 more than a "slow hard drive" might I suggest that you haven't actually used a pure hard drive in a while.
You can, of course create your own Frankensystem. You can buy an external USB-3 SSD and boot the OS off that. (I am doing that right now with my 3yr old iMac whose internal HD has started failing). You can even set up a fusion drive between a small external USB SSD and the internal HD (I have that booting my 2007 iMac).
But these are not the setups most people want when they initially buy the system; they're the setups people drift into when the system has become old and you're trying to keep it alive for a few more years to extract maximal value.
foxtrot1_1 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
If you disagree with someone, perhaps just express that disagreement instead of personally attacking them.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
"I am doing that right now with my 3yr old iMac whose internal HD has started failing"I don't think you're helping to dismiss the notion that any type of a spinning disk locked away in the sealed-architecture of the iMac is a very bad idea.
extide - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
You completely misunderstood his comment. He says while it's hard to stomach the $100 on the 21" he would do it, but the second part of his comment is about the 27" iMac, with the 7200 RPM drive. I would personally even avoid that, but in any case you still completely misunderstood him. Although the way it is worded is a little bit confusing at first.repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
The non-Retina 21-inch models got the Broadwell treatment as well, so the CPU options are:Core i5-5250U, Core i5-5575R, Core i5-5675R and Core i7-5775R for the 21.5-inch and
Core i5-6500, Core i5-6600 and Core i7-6700K for the 27-inch.
24 GB of flash for the 1 TB Fusion drive sucks. There really is zero excuse for shipping the non-fusion version at that point, and $100 for the upgrade is absolutely insulting.
repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
And what's up with the Skylake 27-inch models listing DDR3-1867 SDRAM? I thought only DDR4 was supported at 1867 MHz.8steve8 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
no usb-c?that's pretty disappointing.
Impulses - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Even tho I bought a specific Skylake mobo because it had USB Type C, I fail to see how it's very relevant on a desktop system now or even a few years down the line...Even if it were included it's basically be for data transfer only as I'm assuming many pic the alt modes will require different controllers and future drives that may be incompatible with current hardware.
And besides, couldn't you just use a normal A to Type C cable for almost everything on a desktop? It's a different story on a laptop where space is at a premium and there may be device charging concerns...
8steve8 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
isn't power delivery 2.0 is for usb-c to usb-c only?i'm not saying you couldn't make it work without USB-c, but why have to workaround a limitation on a skylake high end desktop? imagine all the ports they have, and an extra usb-c port or two... what would be the downside?
repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
What is relevant to desktop Skylake systems now and in the future is Alpine Ridge. Which = Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, external GPU support and all of it over USB Type-C. It's most of the significant new technologies that Intel managed to deliver for this platform, technologies that have generally been championed by Apple, and yet not present here. That sucks, because it's unlikely Apple will refresh the iMac line for another 12 months or whenever Skylake Refresh (a.k.a Kaby Lake) finally trickles out.osxandwindows - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
thunderbolt 3 and usb c will be a mac redesignBring back map 17
osxandwindows - Monday, October 19, 2015 - link
mbp17*Laxaa - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Gonna get my parents to upgrade to this. Their old 17" 2006 iMac is starting to show it's age(still, it works pretty well considering it's rarely turned off)Morawka - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Please for the love of god and rainbow furries, Please stop using AMD GPU's in your high end.. Or at the VERY LEAST, offer a Nvidia BTOMy god, it's like they don't even care about GPU Perf per watt on Desktop anymore.
repoman27 - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Until NVIDIA updates their display controller, that won't happen. Apple needs the support for 6 display streams and the ability to create an 8-lane eDP link that can drive a 5K display as a single tile.seghersm - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
The 'high end' 27" does not have the 4.0 Ghz i7, it only has the i5, not even an SSD and the ram upgrade to 32GB is $600, I'm used to them charging full price of the new component without reducing the price of one it's replacing but his is over double that. You would need to pay at least $3000 for a decent config. A fully specced out machine would set me back almost 5000 euro.I find that Apple's pricing has gotten out of hand lately, the base configs are sub par giving a bad experience to people who don't know better (5400 rpm drives, really?). The premium to make it a decent config are insane, I have the same problem with the retina mbp. With windows 10 being good enough I am seriously considering switching back not that my 4+ year old 17" mbp is starting to fail
osxandwindows - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
Why don't you upgrade the ram your selfseghersm - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link
If I would buy a 27" iMac that's probably what I would do. But than you would still have the drive to deal with, yes it can be done but it's clearly not meant to. If Apple insists on making their machines non-serviceable (I can accept their reasons) I would prefer that didn't sell gimped base configs with insane premiums for the upgrades. In the small iMac and the macbook pro (I most likely would go for a laptop again) upgrading the ram yourself isn't even an option anymore.