The New iMACS: Literal Game-Changers

Console yourself.... But not with a Playstaion. 

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

Apple has made a lot of impressive announcements relating to sweeping changes of its iMac line. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company revealed that Valve’s Steam VR platform was set to hit Apple’s desktop computers. It even showed, running on one of the recently-released new iMacs, a VR demo of an official Star Wars experience where, with HTC Vive accessories, TIE fighters were controlled and Darth Vader was summoned.

It’s fair to say that, historically, Macs have tended to fall behind the Windows competition for gaming in general, let alone VR experiences. Last year, Palmer Luckey, who founded the Facebook-owned VR headset purveyor Oculus Rift, complained that Macs of the time weren’t powerful enough to support Oculus Rift VR experiences. However, Apple hs packed a staggering amount of power into the new iMacs that it recently unveiled on the WWDC stage.

Those new computers include the iMac Pro which will start in price at $4,999 and, when it is released this December, be the most powerful Mac available. It will feature AMD’s fresh Radeon Vega graphics and a CPU the cores of which can number as many as 18. Apple also refreshed the standard iMac for the first time since October 2015 - though, of the new models, only those integrating the most advanced AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics chip will support VR.