2020 27-inch iMac Review: A Classic Mac for the End of an Era

It’s an early time to be in the market for a new Mac. Earlier this summer, Apple announced that it would begin rolling out Apple Silicon – its own designed riff on ARM processors, as seen earlier in the iPhone and iPad – to the Mac product line. This marks a seismic shift toward the Mac.

But the company also said it will release new Macs in the future that use Intel’s CPUs – the more traditional choice for desktop and b laptop computers – and will support Intel-based Macs for years to come.

Introducing the new 27-inch iMac, announced just a few weeks ago. It’s the first new Mac product since Apple Silicon’s announcement, and it’s a refresh for one of the company’s most iconic and popular products – one that’s been behind the rest of the Mac lineup for a while now. fell.

With a demonstrably gigantic leap for the Mac, this new release is just an incremental step for the iMac. It has the usual updates: faster processors, better RAM and storage options, and better graphics processing. It also has a new webcam and better microphones.

But it is generally not a radical change. After all, the new iMac represents a subtle refinement of one of the best (though most expensive) computers in the world. It’s the calm for an upcoming storm.

Sometimes, however, you want the thing you are already familiar with, especially if it costs several thousand dollars. So if you’re in the market for a new Mac but are not ready to bet the farm on the first generation of a whole new architecture, is the 2020 27-inch iMac update worth buying?

Let’s find out.

Table of contents

Specifications

Apple iMac (27-inch, 2020)

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Starting at $ 1712 at AmazonStarting at $ 1799 at Apple

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All 27-inch iMacs have a 5,120 x 2,880 display with a maximum brightness of 500 nits and a refresh rate of 60Hz. It’s a superb screen that is tuned to near perfection – so good that it’s hard to find secondary monitors to pair with that look equally balanced next to it.

More than anything else, it is this screen that you pay for when you buy the new iMac. It’s probably worth it if you’ve worried about working on a large screen with high resolution. Of course, not everyone does that, and there are many cheaper options out there for those who do not. Nor is anything new here. As far as I could tell, it is the same screen as included in the previous model.

Each 27-inch iMac also has stereo speakers, an array of three microphones (which is better than the previous model), and the following ports:

• 3.5 mm headphone jack
• SDXC card slot (UHS-II, up from UHS-I in latest model)
• Four USB-A
• Two Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C
• One gigabit Ethernet (upgrade to 10Gb for $ 100)

The big upgrade here is probably the webcam, which has gone from 720p to 1080p. The computer team of every computer maker packs beautiful webcams in the pandemic environment of endless Zoom calls, so this is right up for grabs right now.

Still, it’s a nice camera. I actually do no more than three or four Zoom calls a week, myself, but I could appreciate the difference. I would like to see this upgrade at some point in the MacBook Pro.

Apple has also brought the T2 chip (first introduced in the iMac Pro, but now seen across the Mac line) to the iMac. It offers a number of security features that we’ve discussed in previous Mac reviews. In this case, the T2 chip manages EQ for the audio, face detection on the camera, and Hey Siri, among others. It is also used to speed up video transcoding.

Configuration options

There are three standard configurations at $ 1,799, $ 1,999 and $ 2,299. The lowest end ($ 1,799) features a 3.1 GHz 6-core 10th-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB DDR4 at 2666MHz, a Radeon Pro 5300 with 4GB of GDDR6 video memory, and 256GB of SSD storage.

Up to $ 1,999, you bulge that 6-core i5 to a clock speed of 3.3 GHz and you double your SSD storage to an almost adequate 512GB. Finally, the $ 2,299 spec shifts to an 8-core Intel Core i7 CPU at 3.8GHz and a Radeon Pro 5500 XT GPU with 8GB GDDR6.

Unfortunately, even the top specification only offers 8GB of RAM and 512GB of solid state storage. Both are a bit low for some of the use cases that Apple marks these devices for. That means that, despite fast CPUs and GPUs, the basic specs are only good enough for workers at home at offices who do standard office-y things, but this thing is terribly expensive for that low-impact situation. Most of that money goes to the (presumably inaccessible) screen, as mentioned above. If you want to do video editing, game development, or music production with more than a few tracks and plugins, you will at least want to spend a little more on RAM.

What optional upgrades are available? Now, that $ 2,299 spec can get a boost to a 3.6 GHz 10-core Intel Core i9 CPU for an extra $ 400, as well as a faster Radeon Pro 5700 GPU with 8GB GDDR6 ($ 300 over the 5500 XT) or a even faster 5700 XT with 16GB ($ 500 over the 5500 XT).

Our review unit came equipped with the 5700 XT, and it offers solid performance – almost similar to my Nvidia GTX 1070 in my mid-range desktop gaming PC, actually. That’s great for an all-in-one, though it’s quite expensive for that kind of performance compared to what you could get in a Windows tower.

The quiet but big news here is that Apple’s Fusion Drive, this hybrid solution, has combined flash storage with a traditional hard drive. Now, like the rest of the Mac product line, the iMac is solid-state through and through.

You can upgrade the SSD to 1TB ($ 200 over 512GB), 2TB ($ 600), 4TB ($ 1,200) or 8TB ($ 2,400). The 1TB option seems to me personally like the sweet spot, but your needs may vary. Some people need very little storage space, while others may never have enough. There are options here for the full range, even if they are not cheap.

Finally, you can go above this 8GB RAM to 16GB ($ 200 more), 32GB ($ 600), 64GB ($ 1,000), or a whopping 128GB ($ 2,600). It is worth noting that unlike many other Macs you can actually replace the RAM in the iMac itself, and there are much cheaper options than buying from Apple.

So while I normally recommend stacking the RAM when purchasing when buying a Mac to counter future frustration, I do not in this case. You can get as much as you need now and add later as needed. Wild concept, that!

The last thing you can add when purchasing (besides a 10Gb Ethernet upgrade – and if you’re the one who needs it, you already know everything you need to know) is the nano-textured glass option that is light-free view promises without sacrifice in appearances. That costs a spit-take-inducing $ 500 over the price of the base machine, and we’ll investigate further if it’s worth it a little later.

Listing image by Samuel Axon