Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Last Intel Mac VS The Osborne Effect!”.
Hey what’s up mkbhd here, so let’s talk max for a minute. So next to me here is the brand new 27-inch imac. You may have seen that announcement and this guy is essentially a spec bump, a refresh of a lot of really important pieces. Inside of the same design, imac we’ve always known, and first of all, i’ve already said like in previous videos, that i love that apple is doing more consistent updates to products, at least lately, because in my ideal world the tech just keeps getting updated over and over. Regardless of whatever cycle we’re on, whenever you buy a new piece of tech, it’s just the latest version available kind of like what tesla does, but computers don’t all work that way. So this is about as good as we’ll get. Thank you for keeping the imac updated apple.
That being said, because of the inevitable imac refresh the updated design, we’re expecting and the apple silicon transition for max looming on the horizon, it’s not such a straightforward answer to just recommend getting this or not. But let me just show you what’s new with this imac, because it’s actually a really nice update. All things considered, so it’s mostly the 27-inch imac, getting the good stuff and first of all, it’s updated to the latest 10th gen intel chips and radeon graphics. So this one i have here is actually spec’d pretty nicely with the highest end 10 core i9, and you can get it with up to 128 gigs of ram.
That is, thankfully, still user replaceable by this little door. Here, on the back of the 27 inch – and you have the new radeon 5000 series – gpus minus spec, as you can see – and i’ve only had it for a limited time about two days, but i have obviously had no performance issues on this brand new machine and Benchmarks show that it is a solid performance upgrade. There is a reason for this new chip, but i think the biggest change is actually that the hard drives are now gone from this lineup. Those fusion drives are also now gone. It is all ssds all the way through the line up to eight terabytes, which is sick. Now, honestly, this is kind of long overdue. Hard drives instead of ssds in premium machines in 2020 should basically be a niche thing. At this point, the price has come down. So much for fast ssds, which these are that it’s a no-brainer, so i’m glad to see ssds the one weird thing is: if you go spec out a 21.5 inch imac right now, you can still find a one terabyte fusion drive. I think that is the last hard drive shipping in an apple product right now at least default kill that apple.
But you know what makes me really happy to be able to say: they’ve improved the quality of the webcams. This is now the look of the new 1080p webcam in the imac. 27-Inch looks much better again. It’S not like some amazing thing, but it’s not just the resolution. 1080P. It’S a physically better sensor and, of course, you can see the image quality here. There’S also the microphone quality which you’re hearing, which now is these new studio quality mics, which again is a bit of an exaggeration. But there is one additional microphone around the back of the mac for better echo and noise cancellation. I guess it makes sense that they could upgrade the physical size of the webcam inside the imac, because there’s more room inside this bigger machine um, i’m still going to keep asking for a better webcam in their laptops. But again, when you put it in this this all in one, it makes it that much better of a media machine in these times, where we’re doing a lot more video conferencing and virtual work they’ve also improved the speakers at the bottom of the imac here.
So there’s now a dedicated audio controller on the t2 chip and personally, while i can’t really hear much of a max volume difference, i mean it’s already been pretty loud. I can attest for an improvement in the fidelity and just overall quality at most of the existing volume levels, which is always great because a lot of people who use imacs use these built-in speakers, but the feature i was most interested in when we saw this announcement. The other day is the new nano texture, matte glass, which conveniently enough this mac behind me actually has it’s hard to tell because there’s almost no reflections, but i think this is an option. First of all that i love and that i think a lot of people buying imacs will also love. So a lot of you probably remember the nano texture option. First appearing in the five thousand dollar pro display xdr from last year. It was a thousand dollar option, but generally it dramatically reduced glare, and now these things are an order of magnitude easier to work with in this well-lit studio environment. So having this same finish without having to change the color or anything about the bezels is great it massively cuts down on reflections, as you can tell, and now you can use the imac in rooms with windows behind you or lamps across the room or just any Other types of uncontrollable light that you just don’t have to worry about anymore. This is implemented super well. My only question is it’s a 500 option here on the imac, it was a. It still has a thousand dollar option on the pro display xdr. Why is this not available on the imac pro? If you know pros, will use it, because it’s on the pro display – and you know regular people love it because matt displays are everywhere and you put it on the imac.
Why not put it on the machine both pros and some regular people yet get? So i wouldn’t be surprised if we saw this eventually get added to imac pro so anyway, all that great stuff being said, you should still think very carefully about whether you should buy whatever you should spend starting at 17.99, whether you should spend that much money on A new machine right now at this point in 2020, because there are some things looming on the horizon, which are the inevitable imac redesign and the apple silicon transition see. The imac is long overdue for redesign and i’m not just saying that, because people like to just change for the sake of change they’ve been using essentially this same design for about eight years now since 2012, and it’s just dated now like look at the size of These bezels, where else in anywhere in apple’s lineup, do you see bezels this big, the chin? Being this big, even the port layout around the back this? This is generally a machine that could use a refresh, and so the rumor is apple’s been working on this. A sort of imac redesign that looks something like the pro display xdr or the ipad pro, with generally more squared off, edges, thinner, bezels and all that same great performance. That would feel a lot more worth the money whenever that happens. But even if let’s say you are fine with this design, there is also now the already announced transition of all macs to apple silicon that they announced at wwdc and that’s when we saw apple, get on stage and talk about the planned two-year transition period to start Moving all of their macs from intel’s x86 architecture to apple silicon, and there are some seriously impressive performance and efficiency and thermal promises that come from all the potential of moving to apple silicon and we’re all hoping this transition goes as smoothly as possible. But importantly, if you are a shopper considering getting an imac, there are a lot of unanswered questions, just in general about what will happen to intel max once this transition period is over and how long will it take before intel max slowly start to get treated? Like second class max and start to get less updates and just generally start to fade into the past, so in the case of this new imac update and every single intel mac update between now and that transition consider two things one: how immediately do you actually need To get a new computer and two, how long do you plan on keeping that mac like sometimes it can be kind of hard to know, but if you know generally you’re a pretty quick updater in like three or four years, you know you’ll, probably upgrade again or If you need a computer now – or let’s say you just like this design, then get it, because this is a pretty great mac in general, a lot of things that are great about it, like i talked about in the first half of this video, but because this Is such a solid, easy to recommend all-in-one, there’s a lot of buyers of imax that have their computer for that they want it to be good for seven, eight nine ten years, which is an incredibly long time to use a computer, but people keep their computers for A very long time when they buy imacs and not a lot of people watching this channel fall into that demographic.
But those people should probably wait another year or two for the inevitable transition to apple silicon or that imac redesign or maybe they both happen. At the same time, but that will make it feel much more worth the money then again a lot of those people, probably don’t care about apple, silicon or designs of imax. So maybe i’m just preaching to no one here, there’s something called the osborne effect which i’m sure a lot of apple users have considered, which is a social phenomenon of customers, canceling or deferring orders for a current soon-to-be obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company’s Announcing a future product prematurely, you can imagine applying that to this current situation, which is people deciding not to buy this pretty great imac. That would probably be fine for them because of the intel 2 apple silicon transition expected in about a year.
Maybe that’ll be a better one, and i think apple’s thought a lot about this and at the end of the day, this imac was still going to come out anyway, because apple’s relationship with intel is is a long time coming, and these products have just been road. Mapped for years now, so it was going to happen anyway, but i think if you’re a potential customer just take that extra beat to think about whether you need a computer now or if you can wait a year or two for what will probably be a bit More future proof, anyway, that’s my two cents. That’S been the video thanks for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace, .