APPLE CHOICE Mac hardware
The one thing that looks old
about the iMac is its thick bezel.78 | MACFORMAT | JUNE 2018 macformat.com @macformatA
lmost two years since its
last update, the iMac returns
with refreshed components,
including ninth-gen Intel Core i9
processors and AMD Radeon
Vega 48 graphics. Those optional
high-end parts contribute to the big
price at the top of this review, which
is for the souped-up spec we tested.
You might be tempted to rush into
looking at the new Intel and graphics
processors’ capabilities to help decide
which new iMac to buy, but let’s first talk
about the one component that every buyer
ought to upgrade for performance reasons:
storage. All 27in iMacs come with a Fusion
Drive: 1TB in the base and mid-range models,
2TB in the top one. This tech is meant to offer
some of the benefit of an SSD’s speed without
sacrificing the large capacity of a hard disk.
Our tests showed that the latest Fusion
Drives sometimes – too often, in fact – deliver
disappointing performance compared to the
specifications Apple used back in 2012. There
are specific details on what’s going on in the
box on page 81, but the one thing to take away
from our testing is that you’d be sensible to
pay extra for a pure SSD so that you aren’t left
frustrated by Fusion Drive performance.
On each of the three stock 27in iMacs,
the least costly SSD upgrade adds
£90 to the price and means reducing
the internal storage to 25% of normal.
Buy the largest capacity within your
budget and that fits your needs.You may need to buy an external hard
drive to give you space to archive files you
won’t need soon. You’ll then have to take on
the overhead of organising things manually,
but day to day your Mac will enjoy the
responsiveness it and you deserve in 2019.The core question
All three stock configurations are equipped
with a six-core processor. In the £1,749 and
£1,949 models, you get an eighth-gen Intel
Core i5, both featuring Intel’s Turbo Boost
tech, which can raise the clock speed of active
cores when some of the total number are idle.
The top 27in iMac is a slightly different
proposition to all other iMacs because it has
a ninth-gen processor, also from the Core i5
family. However, the iMac we tested was an27-inch iMac
(Early 2019)
From £ 1 ,749 (£3,284 model tested) FROM Apple, apple.com/uk
DISPLAY 5120x2880-pixel Retina display PROCESSOR 3.6GHz Intel Core i9
MEMORY 16GB STORAGE 512GB SSD GRAPHICS AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48
8GB CONNECTIVITY 2x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 4x USB-A ports, SDXC card
reader, Gigabit Ethernet, 3.5mm headphone jack, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2Apple’s big desktop Mac gets hot new
processors – but retains some old tech
Reviewed by ALAN STONEBRIDGE
The iMac’s current design is more than
six years old, but it’s still very elegant.