I've bought several iMacs (2008, 2012, 2014, 2020) Anyway, it is frustrating once they aren't supported anymore. I think they are overbuilt, they are built to last forever but designed to be obsolete in 7 years. ChromeFlex has saved a few from recycling at our house (A chromebook with a retina display seems like such a waste)
I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a studio display instead (Equally well built but can be used almost forever). If you could only (easily) use them as monitors once they went out of support...
Agreed on the iMac, but disagree on the Studio Display.
I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point
I totally don't care about refresh rates above 60 Hz. I do not enjoy but can tolerate even 30 Hz.
What I care about is resolution, color fidelity, color gamut, viewing angles, (anti-)glare, even how quickly the monitor wakes up. I don't play competitive FPS games, I do coding, graphics, and video work on my monitors.
I have a few Huawei Mateview 27 monitors. No branding facing you, brushed Alu, slightly higher that 4k (as they’re 16:10 not 16:9 - bonus), very accurate and beautifully designed - as if they were made for the Mac.
I recently chose a Studio Display over the alternatives, because I wanted something with an integrated camera to use as the primary display. There are already too many devices on my desk, so anything that needs an extra cable or comes with a battery that must be charged feels like a poor choice.
And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.
Interesting, I have used Samsung 5K displays for a year or two with my Mac Studio, and recently bought an Studio Display after one died. I am SO much happier with the studio display, it powers on so much faster, the black is much more "black", etc. The built-in camera is also really good.
I'm almost considering getting rid of the other two Samsung displays and replacing them with Studio Displays because it's just so much better.
The older imacs at least had target display mode. That was pretty amazing so you could say least use it at a screen after it's useful life as a computer. Unfortunately they dropped it years ago. It wasn't very efficient on power and you had to use a key combo, I don't think you could make it boot straight into it every time. But at least it was there.
agreed! I am just one of several people in my circle who would have loved to keep using our 27" Intel iMacs as target mode displays. Within the Apple ecosystem, once the old 27" iMacs were discontinued there was no simple (again within there Apple ecosystem) inexpensive way of having displays larger than 24".
I still lament buying a G5 PowerMac back in the day, top of the top spec, absolutely killer machine. Thousands and thousands of dollars. And it just ended up as ewaste while my freaking 486 is still chugging along.
It's a real shame they got rid of target display mode. But then people would hold onto iMacs even longer.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
The thing that makes older iMacs "disposable" is that the required cooling vents end up [mostly] blocked, within just a few years – then they thermally throttle, until death.
If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:
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My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).
My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).
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>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead
This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).
The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.
Yeah and the old ones are actually pretty easy to open up. You just take a suction cup and clip the screen off.
I mean even the newer ones aren't bad but cutting the tape, cleaning up and putting new tape is kinda annoying. They should have stuck with the magnets.
Your point about them being overbuilt and built to last forever is spot on. Another way to repurpose these machines is to install Linux. I think people will find they are still snappy and supported.
I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.
Does “support” really matter? My 2020 iMac still performs great, although I use Sequoia on it instead of Tahoe. It also runs Windows or Linux very well and was easy to upgrade to 128GB RAM.
My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.
It does, because everyone and their dog started releasing software that only runs on the latest version of macos. So if you are not running the latest macos, you can't use the latest software version.
For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.
The difference being that the M-series machines do not have good prospects in terms of running Linux well. As I would personally not want to run Windows for sure, this matters a lot.
My desktop is still a 2017 iMac Pro and I’m holding out for a workstation-class machine with similarly excellent speakers & display, pitched at the same target market but contemporary spec main board. The standard iMac is not up to this level, and hard pass on the M5 Ultra Studio + Studio Display combo, I like the integrated form factor too much. In the meantime I work mostly on MBP. Fortunately, I am patient.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
I kinda agree with you but this is for people who don't want to think about it. That 24" monitor is incredible compared to anything sub 500.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
Recently bought a retina 32” screen (Japannext 6k 32”) for around $800. Pretty sure you can get a decent kb and mouse for under $100. But a “magic trackpad” alone is way more than that.
I think it's obvious why someone would buy this and why Apples continues to slowly update them.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
And it's almost impossible to find ones that get as bright as Apple monitors for less than Apple charges!
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
Fair point but do people really need high pixel density at 32"?
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
"You can get the same thing for less money" has never been an effective criticism vs Apple computers. People will pay the extra $800 so they don't have to also buy a 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse... and they'll all be the same color.
My Mom had a 2008 20" iMac. When it got long in the tooth, we replaced it with an M1 in 2021 or 2022. She was disappointed she wasn't able to get a 20" screen again and had to get one with a huge 24" screen!
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
They even put the (optional, by default it's wireless only) 2.5G Ethernet socket in the external power brick. This pattern seems to have been introduced with the M1 iMac. The 2.5G upgrade is new.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
iPhones have great cameras. Get a MagSafe mount for on top of the monitor and stick the camera to it. The feature is called "continuity camera", and it works with any Mac app that would use a USB webcam.
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
What about Dell's UltraSharp series? I have a 1440p 27" one and the only complaint I have is that that particular model has a bit of inverse ghosting. Not egregiously so but compared to my ugly MSI gaming monitor right next to it it's a bit noticeable.
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
Try to find a good monitor with a good integrated webcam, speaker, microphone and usb-hub. You simply won't find any except Apple Studio Displays which start at $1500.
Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine.
Do... people drag a full iMac to a public workspace like that? I feel like this would be ridiculed since even most co-working spaces provide monitor hookups. But if I saw you order a single coffee at a tiny shop and are set-up with an all-in-one desktop then me and everyone else will be giving you a side-eye
Slightly less worse would be one of those fold-out multi-monitor attachments that I've never seen in the wild either
> Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
Nothing personal, but the increasing amount of people setting up their work desk in coffee shops or lunch diners makes me not want to go there anymore. If I want to be surrounded by people working I'll go and eat at the office. It disturbs the vibe of the place a bit for me personally.
Apple will happily sell you the Mac mini for that setup too. Or the Mac Studio if you want something beefier.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
Well, I got M4 iMac because I wanted a screen on my workbench with minimum cables and must be VESA mounted. I also needed a mac to build iOS apps. iMac was perfect fit.
The price put upon "I don't have to go figure out what a good monitor is and what are good input devices".
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
I have 4K at 32". It's pretty sharp but at 6K the pixels would be significantly less visible, and I could run it at an even 200% so that older programs don't have scaling issues.
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
SSD token caching (like oMLX does) goes a long way for prefill. Typical miss rates are under 5% in long coding sessions, which is mostly the output of a turn's tool use.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Srouji is killing it on whatever he has on mind or is asked to do. Everyone is riling up on GPU and Cloud AI costs. 99.99% of what people use AI for today already processes fine on an M1 from 5 years ago.
I guess this means I’ll be hanging onto my M1 Pro for another year and seeing what M7 has to offer.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.
And if you really want, you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
I agree with you, but Apple's monitor situation is letting everybody down. Not having a 32" monitor for professionals is frustrating. I am glad I bought my Pro Display XDR.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small.
My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
That's because the design hasn't been significantly revised for years, and Microsoft and HP copied its design language long ago. Also, total desktop sales are 14 % of all Macs, so the iMac is maybe 5% and understandably not a priority.
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
In 7 years, either the screen or the built in computer inside this iMac will be obsolete. I’d rather buy a separate mac mini and a wide curved screen. The mac mini is simply so small and fast that buying an iMac makes no sense.
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small.
My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that.
(Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
My M1 Max MBP has 64 gig, still runs well. I understand memory has skyrocketed in price, but Apple has been hamstringing the max ram in their MBPs it seems for awhile.
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.
If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.
Haha, you may be a bit outdated. The sad part is you can go cheaper and still get a Mac. Thats why it feels like a scam - the price is so far from what you’re getting it’s borderline criminal.
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
I kind of missed the point when they've decided not to make 27" I guess.
My mother is still using my old iMac 2013 (the sceen is literally seprated from the body and the damp thing has an issue that sometimes make system task go 1000% of CPU)
The screen was always the selling point. Who even needs a 24" overpriced monitor?
People buy these instead of mac minis because of the pretty design. That's it. Consumers are a lot more irrational than most people give them credit for.
These were cool back when you could also use them as monitors - outside of that, I’d rather have a laptop and a nice monitor - way better bang for your buck imo
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
I've bought several iMacs (2008, 2012, 2014, 2020) Anyway, it is frustrating once they aren't supported anymore. I think they are overbuilt, they are built to last forever but designed to be obsolete in 7 years. ChromeFlex has saved a few from recycling at our house (A chromebook with a retina display seems like such a waste)
I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a studio display instead (Equally well built but can be used almost forever). If you could only (easily) use them as monitors once they went out of support...
Agreed on the iMac, but disagree on the Studio Display.
I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point
I totally don't care about refresh rates above 60 Hz. I do not enjoy but can tolerate even 30 Hz.
What I care about is resolution, color fidelity, color gamut, viewing angles, (anti-)glare, even how quickly the monitor wakes up. I don't play competitive FPS games, I do coding, graphics, and video work on my monitors.
I have a few Huawei Mateview 27 monitors. No branding facing you, brushed Alu, slightly higher that 4k (as they’re 16:10 not 16:9 - bonus), very accurate and beautifully designed - as if they were made for the Mac.
Real shame they discontinued them.
I recently chose a Studio Display over the alternatives, because I wanted something with an integrated camera to use as the primary display. There are already too many devices on my desk, so anything that needs an extra cable or comes with a battery that must be charged feels like a poor choice.
And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.
Interesting, I have used Samsung 5K displays for a year or two with my Mac Studio, and recently bought an Studio Display after one died. I am SO much happier with the studio display, it powers on so much faster, the black is much more "black", etc. The built-in camera is also really good.
I'm almost considering getting rid of the other two Samsung displays and replacing them with Studio Displays because it's just so much better.
I work with 30hz and cannot tell the difference. Mind it's mostly iTerm work.
They also have fans in them, that's not necessarily good for longevity. Thermally, yes, until the fans clog up or start making noise.
Yes, but does your LG monitor have an Apple logo on it?
why doesn't 60 hz work for you?
The older imacs at least had target display mode. That was pretty amazing so you could say least use it at a screen after it's useful life as a computer. Unfortunately they dropped it years ago. It wasn't very efficient on power and you had to use a key combo, I don't think you could make it boot straight into it every time. But at least it was there.
I really loved target display mode. It made me so happy
agreed! I am just one of several people in my circle who would have loved to keep using our 27" Intel iMacs as target mode displays. Within the Apple ecosystem, once the old 27" iMacs were discontinued there was no simple (again within there Apple ecosystem) inexpensive way of having displays larger than 24".
I still lament buying a G5 PowerMac back in the day, top of the top spec, absolutely killer machine. Thousands and thousands of dollars. And it just ended up as ewaste while my freaking 486 is still chugging along.
Some of the old iMacs could just be displays natively.[1] it was just an odd ball feature no one used.
[1] <https://support.apple.com/en-us/105126>
It's a real shame they got rid of target display mode. But then people would hold onto iMacs even longer.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
I think this disappeared with Retina displays.
I'm still using a 2019 iMac 27" and starting to think about Linux again.
The thing that makes older iMacs "disposable" is that the required cooling vents end up [mostly] blocked, within just a few years – then they thermally throttle, until death.
If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:
----
My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).
My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).
----
>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead
This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).
The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.
Yeah and the old ones are actually pretty easy to open up. You just take a suction cup and clip the screen off.
I mean even the newer ones aren't bad but cutting the tape, cleaning up and putting new tape is kinda annoying. They should have stuck with the magnets.
I agree, the 7 years is way too short and it's very frustrating.
Your point about them being overbuilt and built to last forever is spot on. Another way to repurpose these machines is to install Linux. I think people will find they are still snappy and supported.
I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.
Does “support” really matter? My 2020 iMac still performs great, although I use Sequoia on it instead of Tahoe. It also runs Windows or Linux very well and was easy to upgrade to 128GB RAM.
My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.
It does, because everyone and their dog started releasing software that only runs on the latest version of macos. So if you are not running the latest macos, you can't use the latest software version.
For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.
The difference being that the M-series machines do not have good prospects in terms of running Linux well. As I would personally not want to run Windows for sure, this matters a lot.
Trying using a Mac on which you cannot install latest Firefox and see how your statement holds.
That's one thing Windows is generally much better at.
It matters because AI is finding more security vulnerabilities than ever.
I was happy but all of a sudden my VPN refuses to release versions for Sonoma
My desktop is still a 2017 iMac Pro and I’m holding out for a workstation-class machine with similarly excellent speakers & display, pitched at the same target market but contemporary spec main board. The standard iMac is not up to this level, and hard pass on the M5 Ultra Studio + Studio Display combo, I like the integrated form factor too much. In the meantime I work mostly on MBP. Fortunately, I am patient.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
I kinda agree with you but this is for people who don't want to think about it. That 24" monitor is incredible compared to anything sub 500.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
Recently bought a retina 32” screen (Japannext 6k 32”) for around $800. Pretty sure you can get a decent kb and mouse for under $100. But a “magic trackpad” alone is way more than that.
Disagree. I like my S3425DW (and my oled laptop) much more than whatever my colleague's macs
I think it's obvious why someone would buy this and why Apples continues to slowly update them.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
Yes. Design sells.
"Why would anyone get Eames Lounge Chair? I can buy similar enough kit for a 20th of the price".
Since many of us are sort of keen on products this would be really, really good to remember :)
Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.
This 100%.
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
Totally different markets.
This. Cables suck. Imagine if cars were like this and you had to haul the engine or battery around on trailer.
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
And it's almost impossible to find ones that get as bright as Apple monitors for less than Apple charges!
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1v87f6i/moni...
[2] https://kuycon.us/monitors/P20
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
A glass front is a negative. Reflections always get in the way, and they therefore don't comply with worker safety rules in some countries.
Fair point but do people really need high pixel density at 32"?
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I feel like 1440p is already the sweet spot.
A 6K 32 inch from LG like $1200. You can get a 5K for $800 now, although it might be Asus.
"You can get the same thing for less money" has never been an effective criticism vs Apple computers. People will pay the extra $800 so they don't have to also buy a 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse... and they'll all be the same color.
My Mom had a 2008 20" iMac. When it got long in the tooth, we replaced it with an M1 in 2021 or 2022. She was disappointed she wasn't able to get a 20" screen again and had to get one with a huge 24" screen!
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
And sometimes having something that looks nice and clean and colorful brings you joy. That’s who this is for.
It is a design piece. No wires besides the single power chord. Yet webcam and speakers working.
Yeah this thing is built for desk reception
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
They even put the (optional, by default it's wireless only) 2.5G Ethernet socket in the external power brick. This pattern seems to have been introduced with the M1 iMac. The 2.5G upgrade is new.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
iPhones have great cameras. Get a MagSafe mount for on top of the monitor and stick the camera to it. The feature is called "continuity camera", and it works with any Mac app that would use a USB webcam.
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
I've been happy with Samsung's 27" 5k which has a decent clip-on camera: https://www.samsung.com/us/monitors/flat/27-viewfinity-s9-5k...
Lenovo sells such a display. Built in mic, cam and speakers.
It’s also a usb c dock with a Ethernet port
Just get the iMac, come on.
Apple used this picture in 2007 (!): https://64.media.tumblr.com/ddfe45456996d1244d65373ff9b6fd73...
I still think it captures the ethos of why fairly well.
> _antiquated 24" monitor_
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
I love my 24, though a second monitor. Larger and you have to move your head around too much.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
Thanks!
What about Dell's UltraSharp series? I have a 1440p 27" one and the only complaint I have is that that particular model has a bit of inverse ghosting. Not egregiously so but compared to my ugly MSI gaming monitor right next to it it's a bit noticeable.
Edit: For posterity the model I have is a U2724D.
kuycon has a basically Apple display clone.
Huawei mateview is also quite eye-candy.
Have you tried Samsung? They have designs that mimic Apple, though probably plastic.
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
People need (!) this type of devices in representative settings, eg the reception of a boutique hotel.
How is an all-in-one better than a mini attached to the back of a monitor, or better yet locked in a cabinet for security?
A boutique hotel needs a 27” version. They arent gonna switch from a windows all in one to a smaller mac aio.
Good point, but do these settings need the latest M-series chip then, too?
That would be a 4K 32", and I don't understand who would buy such a low-res monitor. A "very nice" 5K or 6K monitor is way more than $800 alone.
Try to find a good monitor with a good integrated webcam, speaker, microphone and usb-hub. You simply won't find any except Apple Studio Displays which start at $1500.
You forgot Retina pixel density.
Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine.
Do... people drag a full iMac to a public workspace like that? I feel like this would be ridiculed since even most co-working spaces provide monitor hookups. But if I saw you order a single coffee at a tiny shop and are set-up with an all-in-one desktop then me and everyone else will be giving you a side-eye
Slightly less worse would be one of those fold-out multi-monitor attachments that I've never seen in the wild either
> Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
Hold on, you do what now?
Have you ever tried using an iMac at a Starbucks?
I mean, this seems like a dream but in a bad sense: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/imacs...
Nothing personal, but the increasing amount of people setting up their work desk in coffee shops or lunch diners makes me not want to go there anymore. If I want to be surrounded by people working I'll go and eat at the office. It disturbs the vibe of the place a bit for me personally.
Apple will happily sell you the Mac mini for that setup too. Or the Mac Studio if you want something beefier.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
Gotta say they do look amazing in hotel check ins, shop desks, retail etc.
A single object to hand your kid for their dorm that will move every 8 months is much nicer than a bunch of parts and wires.
No, that's called a laptop.
bringing a stationary desktop to the dorms has never been the correct decision
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
But why not just buy a Macbook at that point?
I agree. In the case of the older 27" iMacs-- you couldn't really get a 5K screen of that quality for any reasonable cost. It made it actually useful.
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
But they aren't Apple.
No, most of them aren't 6k.
Deployments to organizations like .edu that strongly appreciates there's less hassle per seat (and gets them for under wholesale a lot of the time).
Well, I got M4 iMac because I wanted a screen on my workbench with minimum cables and must be VESA mounted. I also needed a mac to build iOS apps. iMac was perfect fit.
Some here claim that the design, but I think the iMac looks ugly. The bezels are ginormous. It looks like a 15 year old product.
The price put upon "I don't have to go figure out what a good monitor is and what are good input devices".
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
Anyone who cares about those things you listed is not the intended audience, and instead the intended audience will buy these.
1. Social signalling
2. Aesthetic
3. Pretty colors
4. Nostalgia
Do you ever talk to non-technical people about the computers they use?
same reason people buy any new device, form factor. we have one in our kitchen and love it, it gets spun around like an ipad .
They are, in fairness, quite nice monitors.
It starts at $1500 not $1700
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.
I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?
Why is antiquated?
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Used to have a 27" iMac and loved it. If they made a decent iMac "Pro" with a 27" again, I would seriously consider getting one!
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
[0] https://www.retinarelay.com/
Cool, I suppose it doesn’t work with windows? To use a 5k iMac as monitor to my windows desktop?
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
I have 4K at 32". It's pretty sharp but at 6K the pixels would be significantly less visible, and I could run it at an even 200% so that older programs don't have scaling issues.
And I don't need to run games at full resolution.
6K at 32" would be the same density as 5K at 27"
4k stretched to 32 is awful. screen door very visible. honestly it’s not even quite enough for 27.
Oh to be young again. I use a 43" Samsung TV at 4K. That works for me. The 32" 4K monitor next to it I run at 2560x1440, you know, so I can read it...
If you use a 27" 5K iMac its impossible to go to 32" at 4K. It looks terrible.
Apple have never released a 32" version of the iMac; even the iMac Pro was only available as a 27" model.
Completely agree.
iPad docking station too
To me, it doesn't make sense, I would go a Mac Studio with multiple screens instead a big 32, but some people love working with one monitor.
Thats my setup - Mac Studio with two 32” monitors.
Would just be nice if I could buy the monitors from apple too.
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
You can't continue to support Target Display mode when the connectors and cables of the day don't yet support 5k displays.
If you have an older 5k iMac, there is an inexpensive third party hardware kit to convert it into a display with modern connectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VXQu0fAc8s
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
If you have a 27" iMac with the Retina display then you can get a kit to transform it into a monitor.
The strangest thing is that with Thunderbolt 4+ you could easily do this in software only I suppose?
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
SSD token caching (like oMLX does) goes a long way for prefill. Typical miss rates are under 5% in long coding sessions, which is mostly the output of a turn's tool use.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
These M7 rumors and that they're skipping the M6 Pro/Max rumors are really making me try to stretch my M1 Pro until next year.
I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
They've been saying the $LATEST_CHIP is better for AI since at least the M3.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Srouji is killing it on whatever he has on mind or is asked to do. Everyone is riling up on GPU and Cloud AI costs. 99.99% of what people use AI for today already processes fine on an M1 from 5 years ago.
Apple killed M6 Pro, M6 Ultra and M6 Max to focus on AI chip, so yeah that'd be a more sensible option.
I guess this means I’ll be hanging onto my M1 Pro for another year and seeing what M7 has to offer.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Will local AI eventually pull the proverbial rug out from under the big providers and the huge sums invested in building out data centers?
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
Interesting. I have the same machine w/ same specs. I find it sluggish. I think it depends on what you're doing.
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.
And if you really want, you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
Most people don't run their own LLMs, let alone install GPUs themselves.
I'm one of those Mac users, but I do have a linux tower for remote dev work and LLMs.
..really useful on a Mac. FTFY
I'll wait for the M7 iMac with OLED and then never buy it
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
>or a reception desk at a business
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
Laptops are bad because you have to crane your neck down.
If you need portability, you have your phone already.
I agree with you, but Apple's monitor situation is letting everybody down. Not having a 32" monitor for professionals is frustrating. I am glad I bought my Pro Display XDR.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
Too relatable.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
All while complaining about the OLED price.
Wait until the ProRes version comes out before you sleep on it permanently.
it will cost a kidney + Apple would remove the keyboard and sell it back to you for 499$.
They'll sell the kidney or the keyboard back to you for $499?
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
it is a piece of furniture though, so aesthetics matter
Effectively yeah, it’s a desk lamp.
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
Look at that thick base of the iMac. That's where they should put the CPU. Bring back the G4 iMac you cowards!
You can get it with a VESA mount instead of the base.
>meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever
"And we’re just getting started."
It is an Apple machine, yes.
Still 24 inch screen in 2026. You can get a 27 inch panel for far less than a stick of ram these days. Why not give us a decent sized screen!
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
And receptionists! Don't forget receptionists. :)I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
It's 24" 4k display with perfect 2x scaling. Good luck finding something similar. 24" != 24" HiDPI perfect 2x scaling.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small. My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
Because then they can't sell you their overpriced 27" screen.
Waited for it so long but.... still no memory option for more than 32GB. It would be nice to have some kind of a pro model.
32GB max memory is ludicrous today. We've regressed as a technological society.
Did you know Moore had two not-as-famous cousins with their own laws? Sam and Leslie.
Sam predicted price-per-transistor-per-square-inch density would asymptote, while Leslie predicted it would level off and then regress.
Leslie's Law is in full effect, it seems.
It's a fairly realistic lower-bound for professional macOS work, if you don't want to thrash the SSD with zram writes.
the laptop has up to 128G as an option, but also pushes towards 10k for a laptop, insane
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
They’re looking for an iMac Pro. Sorry if you didn’t catch that, but M5 Pro / Max are not available in iMac form.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
0: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
But where would you put post-it notes? :P
Makes the angle very easy to adjust.
I used to put post-its on mine too.
What a boring looking device. It looks like it could have been made by HP or Microsoft. What has happened to Apple?
That's because the design hasn't been significantly revised for years, and Microsoft and HP copied its design language long ago. Also, total desktop sales are 14 % of all Macs, so the iMac is maybe 5% and understandably not a priority.
It exactly like their last dozen iMacs but with slightly less rounded corners.
I wish they would put these colors on laptops.
For me it's the other way round. I wish they would offer a space-gray or black option like they have on their laptops
Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
The old aluminum imacs look so damn good too. Actually feels pro instead of borrowing one of the CareBear's computers.
I do think they should offer that for iMacs as well.
Agreed; they're super cute. Cuteness-factor is one of the reasons I ended up with the Framework Laptop 12
they put some on macbook neos ... But one thing for sure, Apple reserve those flashy colors for entry levels models (Ipad 10/11th gen, Macbook Neo).
The design, especially with those colors is gorgeous, yes.
Why does one have to choose BETWEEN stand or vesa mount?!
Why can't we buy the colored magic keyboard as standalone product?
I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
> £700/£800 buys you a 24" display
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
In 7 years, either the screen or the built in computer inside this iMac will be obsolete. I’d rather buy a separate mac mini and a wide curved screen. The mac mini is simply so small and fast that buying an iMac makes no sense.
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small. My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that. (Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
24” and 60hz…
It’s intentional product segmentation. Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary.
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Perfect for the target audience!
My wife used to mock me for being adamant about 120hz+ monitors, until the day I had her try my 200hz monitor for an entire day.
Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
They are _still_ featuring magic mouse on the promo photos for the iMac
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
I also find Apple keyboards terrible. The keyboards we have today feel worse than the ones from 20 years ago.
Same. I'm also a Magic Mouse person.
It's still the standard Apple mouse, no? Why wouldn't they include it in the promo photos?
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
The 27” iMac was the perfect computer. Why would they just stop making it? 24” is too small.
My M1 Max MBP has 64 gig, still runs well. I understand memory has skyrocketed in price, but Apple has been hamstringing the max ram in their MBPs it seems for awhile.
It's like a 24" MacBook Pro with no keyboard and less portable?
If it were back to 27" and hidpi screen again it might make sense
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
No.
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Waiting for 512 GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra still. I guess they are rolling things out now, it has been expected for late October.
The M5 Ultra with 256GB went from a early Dec estimated delivery to Feb now. I wonder what the 512GB lead time will be.
I'm still dreaming of 30" iMac that is reasonably priced. Don't need crazy specs but the screen real estate in retina PPI would be so nice
I just modded a Macmini from 2006 to make music with an Akai Mini and GarageBand. It's been fun!
I wish they built an iMac Mini with a square display while being bigger than the HomeView. It's a niche category but a nod to the Macintosh Classic.
Looks like they it still comes with a "magic mouse", of course the only thing "magic" about it is having a worse sensor than a $5 Logitech.
Looks like its an easy $40-60 to be made listing it on ebay if you don't want it. That can get you a nice logitech mouse. I like my G305.
The problem with getting a new Mac is then you're stuck with macOS 27 with Liquid Glass.
27 is fine, fixed a lot of the issues in 26.
macOS 27 is pretty good. They walked back a lot of the poor changes from 26
24" only! Why not offer 27" iMac that Apple used to make before?
I love these things. Never going to buy one. But I love what they are doing with them.
Available at 1829 euros for the basic configuration, nah.
The title text animation is really cute, props to whoever made this!
24" and not 27" monitor?
Would have bought one otherwise.
This is starting to feel like a scam. I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.
If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.
Haha, you may be a bit outdated. The sad part is you can go cheaper and still get a Mac. Thats why it feels like a scam - the price is so far from what you’re getting it’s borderline criminal.
Do people still actually buy iMacs?
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
That’s the crazy thing, not everything has to be for you.
I kind of missed the point when they've decided not to make 27" I guess.
My mother is still using my old iMac 2013 (the sceen is literally seprated from the body and the damp thing has an issue that sometimes make system task go 1000% of CPU)
The screen was always the selling point. Who even needs a 24" overpriced monitor?
People buy these instead of mac minis because of the pretty design. That's it. Consumers are a lot more irrational than most people give them credit for.
These were cool back when you could also use them as monitors - outside of that, I’d rather have a laptop and a nice monitor - way better bang for your buck imo
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
I want one and I don't know what I'd do with it
That motherfucking display sill runs at only 60hz?!??
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