New iMacs go to 5K

Apple unveiled during its second event of the year the new iMac computers, with a 5K Retina display.

It turns out that the first desktop Retina display designed by the company has arrived not as a standalone monitor, but in the form of an iMac, keeping the extra-slim all-in-one factor and improving some of its internals.

The screen

Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing, announced it as the world’s highest resolution display: 5120 x 2880 with 217 PPI (compared to 220 on the MacBook Retina).

Its 14.7 million pixels are equivalent to:

• 7 times a standard 1080 HDTV screen
• 4 times the previous iMac display
• 67% more pixels than a 4K display

In order to control this display, Apple had to develop its own controller chip (TCON) with four times the bandwidth (up to 40Gbps) as the previous chip.

Other key technologies include a precision oxide TFT, which achieves constant brightness, and LEDs for energy efficiency.

The models

Within the internal structure we will find improvements in Haswell CPUs and AMD Radeon cards.

The entry-level Retina iMacs come in a configuration with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive (hard drive / hybrid flash) and AMD Radeon R9 M290X cards with 2GB of RAM, plus wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse.

The top of the line model is built on a 4GHz quad-core i7 processor (i7-4790K), 32GB of RAM and with 1TB of Flash storage.

All iMacs come with Thunderbolt 2 connection.

Here you can see a comparison between the new iMac and the Mac Pro. Also, I leave you a video from iFixit in which they have inspected the inside of the computer.

The design

Apple continues to care about design, so despite having significantly increased the resolution of the screen (with its corresponding technology), it has also narrowed it by 5mm around the edges.

It also uses almost one-third less energy than the 2013 model.

The prices

The price of these computers was another of the most surprising elements of the event, as the 27-inch model with Retina display can be obtained for €2,532.

The top model (described above and with i7, 32GB RAM, etc.) is priced at 4,427€.

The rest of the iMac lineup is unchanged, with an entry-level 21.5-inch iMac for €1,137 and the non-Retina 27-inch iMac starting at €1,832.

So far this is all the information we have for now; we will have to see how these screens perform compared to other high-end reference monitors.