2017 27″ Apple iMac Review (Kaby Lake). Finally An Awesome iMac

WWDC 2017 revealed a vast amount of new shiny gear in the 2 hours 30 minutes of the keynote see our Essential Apple Podcast 45: A Right Cornucopia for our thoughts on this) to finally tempt people to upgrade their equipment without the fear of buying something new thats actually three years old.

Since 2015 we haven’t had a new iMac which is an eternity in the world of computing but where we are, we finally have a new iMac in 2017.
There are many complaints when it comes to what Apple’s been doing with the MacBook Pro lately especially of the astronomic pricing and that price jump over night for us in here in the UK.

Yet with the iMac the pricing stayed about the same and you get better and better internals, notably when they start introducing the 5K display which is now standard on the 27” iMac.

You’ve got AMD graph cardsalong with AMD lately but the AMD Radeon Pro 500 series that’s in your is perfectly good for pro apps and Apple never positions themselves as making gaming product is pretty good stuff. If you look at anything comparable in Windows land with these kind of specs you’re looking at about the same price I don’t have complaints about the pricing here, it’s justifiably priced I think.

In the box you get the wireless keyboard, sadly not the extended version ,which comes with the Pro iMac, but still it’s small, light and has relatively low trouble and Bluetooth pairs up automatically when you boot up as you know if you are a mac owner you don’t have a traumatic setup experience ever. yet to be fair Windows has gotten a whole sight better recently as well and should keep that momentum with Windows S (laugh being stifled).

You get the magic mouse to the kind you can touch and pet you scroll by rubbing your finger across the top surface that sort of thing.

The design is unchanged from late 2015 model and you know it still looks pretty gorgeous I can’t think of anything that they should do, it’s still relatively very this and it still bows in the back its thickest in the middle on the back.
What has changed over the generations is it gets cooler and quieter and looking. Say you are upgrading from a three or four-year-old iMac this one is going to be noticeably cooler and quieter when you’re pushing which is nice.

Another port addition besides all the ports that are in the same places always on the back which is a little bit inconveniently, you get an ST card slot, multiple USB 3.0 ports, headphone jack you now have two thunderbolt reports on the back. Right now there’s not a lot of thunderbolt peripherals its not like you needdock because as a desktop it’s got an enough ports but for using external GPUs in the future this is a really night addition and if you really want dot suprer this in the future to get it going for 8K video whenever 8K videos become standard you know there’s a possibility of doing that so I like that a lot.

iMac 2017 Pricing and Specifications

Configurations run from $1799 to $2299 of course you can build to order and you can get more RAM , larger SDD all that sort of thing.

Unless you’re a real novice and you’re afraid of doing anything to a computer do not pay Apple for the RAM upgrade. One thing that’s stupid kind of insulting is all the base models start with eight gigs of DDR4 2400 MHz RAM, that parts not insulting something that’s nice, they are SoDimms which is the small form factor like using gaming laptop.

Apple charge charge crazy amount of money to upgrade like $200 to go from 8 to 16 gigs just. Just go to a store or check on Amazon two 8 gig modules for $99. You can install yourself via the yourself visible door in the back. A simple push button release to insert and remove memory, it really is easy and you can about the sixty four gig still thats pretty nice still.

You start out with a Fusion drive as Apple calls it which is a hard drive with a large cache so that speeds the OS so that speeds the OS load time some key application launch times it feels faster than it did from the original fusion drives four years ago or so not to be as fast as an SSD tho. 1TB is the standard option going up to 3TB in total which obviously isn’t going to be as fast as SSD but acceptable but if you can, so SSD.

A 256 gig SSD will set you back a $100 up charge. If you want to go up to 512 gig SSD that’s $300 and you know it it’s gonna make the machine feel faster for load times and that sort of thing so that that is nice of course.

All three of those base configurations have a quad i5, that’s a four core, four thread desktop CPU 65 W on a mobile CPU good times with them and if you want to go up to a core i7– 7700 K then you can do that as well so you got good a selection CPUs there.
Honestly I think the core i5 unless, you know who you are if you really need more it can be adequate probably for most people there for doing professional photo editing it will be perfectly fine in fact tasked with doing some 4k editing it’s pretty darn adequate but if you do a whole lot of motion work that sort of thing you probably want to think about the i7 option

There has been a minor refresh to AMD Radeon Pro 500 series graphics so that’s about 10% faster than the 400 series a bit faster obviously then we are looking out for the 300 series. The middle configuration comes with the Radeon Pro 570 and only has 2 GB GDDR Vram. The middle one one the 575 with 4 GB of GDD or 5B RAM is a pretty nice sweet spot configuration and you can go up tot the the 580 with 8 GB of the ram inside.
Performance like I said where you’re looking about 10 to 20% performance improvement from the previous generation in terms of graphics performance. Its more than a tiny increment of Polaris but its al because the iMacs graphics previous generation was a little bit older out of date compared to say the 2016 MacBook Pro.

For those who really really have high demands the iMac Pro is coming in December that’s the black aluminum which will feature Intel Xeon CPUs up to 18 cores and AMD Vegas top end GPU which is really competitive with around the Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU were such that it starts at $5000 that’s a whole other can of worms available December
The 5K display is 5120 x 2880 pixels just last gen 5K despite of this change is it is brightness. Apple claims 500 nits and for something thats going to be used solely indoors that’s pretty searingly bright.

Monitors supports the P3 color gamut and the color gamut of this is excellent this is just a treat to use. Ih you’re upgrading from one of the older 2K iMac’s you are really going to like this
Itt’ SRGB, 92% of Adobe RGB, 88% of NTSC it’s all good here. contract is pretty decent on its own all all in all I mean if you’re getting a 4K video producer, if you doing photo editing professionally this is fantastic and not to mention Netflix and YouTube 4K is going to look nice

Now in terms of performance I know there some of you who Apple would go back to Nvidia because you want to play your steam library on listing at the maximum performance.

It it does better for pro apps than it does for gaming. This is fine for Diablo 3 and the usual Tomb Raider test that sort of thing. It’s fine for overwatch actually to.
The benchmarks on this fall it depends on the test you run on this. For example the Eugene heaven never does real great on this for example and it scores around GTX 1050 equivalent on unity in heaven but if you take a look at Cinebench art 15 which is a little bit more real world Pro apps kind of looking it does quite well you can see the score right there and that’s similar to actually it going close to a GTX 1070 .

It really depends on what you doing with this and again anything prolapse related is going to be stronger and anything that Apple makes is going to run better because they do a lot of optimizations for AMD which means that you can see was running both Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro you can have the fastest export times and the best performance though with Apple’s own Final Cut Pro.

on this so that’s the 27 inch iMac for 2017 with Intel seventh generation KB Lake inside and AMD 500 series Radeon Pro GPUs .

There’s a lot all the ones out there and the iMac originally made it a thing and we all know you know and they come in all price ranges.
Obviously Apple deals in the high and even the 21” iMac is pretty high and I’m actually stoked to see things like the 4K display and having the options of having dedicated graphics .
The 2” still remains go to products for those who are doing photo and video editing and particularly 4K video editing because its powerful enough to knock on the doors of workstation level performance . They’re not super high with the graphics card is oriented towards Pro apps not as much gaming for example, strong quad core CPUs inside and that 5K display which really helps justify the price.
If you look at other old ones in the world of Windows you’ll notice that you know they start out as cheap is for
$500 and the specs are pretty poor a lot of them have mobile CPUs inside no dedicated graphics. When you look at something like the XPS 27 from Dell or Lenovos Y910 the gaming 27 inch all in one you start to get the specs are like this a but at $2000 and you still not getting a display a good like this.

Whilst I may have a lot of complaints about the MacBook Pro series these days and whether it’s worth it but I would still say if you’re looking for something with high-end performance, hi and display and a still a beautiful design and lovely quality that the iMac is still where it’s at.