It's All About The Details

Nearly Two Years After Its Debut, the 4k Retina Imac Gets the Extra Power It Always Deserved, but Those Looking for Compact 4k Gaming Will Have to Search Elsewhere

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When the iMac with Retina 4K display first came out, it was a bit of an odd machine. For a lot of people, it should be a nearly ideal desktop choice: you get a fantastic, highly detailed display for viewing photos or working, quad-core processor power and the advantages of a desktop, such as lots of connection ports and big storage options.

But while it was a pretty good machine, it didn’t really reach that potential, thanks to some specific disappointments. First among them was that it came with a slow 1TB mobile hard drive, instead of a Fusion Drive (Apple’s name for mixing a small SSD with a large hard drive for making Macs feel fast and offer big storage, but without the expensive cost of equivalent pure flash drives), which should always have been included as a minimum. The other main gripe was that its visuals were powered by Intel’s integrated graphics chips (rather than a dedicated GPU), which was okay for basic use, but didn’t give much headroom for intensive tasks that benefit a lot from a beefy graphics chip. It was half-baked.

However, with another 20 months in the oven, the 2017 models have risen to a much more impressive finish. For a start, you can now get a 4K model for cheaper than before… well, kind of.

When the 4K iMac launched in 2015, it cost £1,199, and it was the top-of-the-range 21.5-inch Mac model, with two non-4K models beneath it. But in late 2016, Apple responded to the devaluation of the pound by raising prices accordingly, and the cost of that 4K iMac model went up to £1,449. So, in the 2017 range, we have the equivalent top-of-the-line £1,449 model that we’re reviewing here, but there’s also a new £1,249 4K model, which is technically cheaper than the previous model, but happens to be more expensive than what you might have paid if you bought the previous model at launch. Erm, is that all clear?