- #Imac 27 late 2013 review upgrade#
- #Imac 27 late 2013 review pro#
- #Imac 27 late 2013 review Pc#
- #Imac 27 late 2013 review Bluetooth#
Whether or not you find the pricing reasonable, the iMac's closed nature tends to turn off upgrade-happy enthusiasts, and the new glued-together models are the most difficult iMacs yet to get into. Substituting a 3TB Fusion Drive for the 768GB SSD would knock $900 off the sticker price, bringing it down to an easier-to-swallow $2,749. The hardest component to swallow is the SSD, but removing that and its $1,300 price from the picture brings the price into more reasonable territory. There's still some "Apple tax" in the price, but it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable. Components like the SSD and the GPU are at least so far unavailable outside of Apple, though you can trawl eBay for 768GB SSDs pulled from MacBook Pros, which use the same part. Taking all this into account, the 27-inch iMac does indeed cost more than if you parted an equivalent box together yourself, but you can't really part together an equivalent box. Apple also needs to make some money somewhere the component prices above have some margin figured into them, but there's an overall margin component, too. Then there's the cost of the aluminum enclosure, along with associated manufacturing costs.
#Imac 27 late 2013 review Bluetooth#
From that, you'd subtract the custom Ivy Bridge motherboard (which includes a pair of Thunderbolt controllers at $20-30 each), along with the remainder of the innards (HD webcam, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, speakers). For that, we're getting a Kepler-based mobile GPU (with no real pricing available for this specific model, but we'll say $300 based on pricing for other Kepler models), a fast CPU ( about $300), and 8GB of RAM (let's say $40). If we figure the SSD's price to be "fair" (since it's difficult to find an SSD to compare it to with the same speed and capacity), and then add on $1,000 for the display, that cuts the rest of the components' aggregate cost down to $1,349. Comparable IPS-panel 27- to 30-inch LCD displays are not cheap, coming in at anywhere between $800 and $1,300, depending on size and brand. The built-in screen, too, adds significantly to the cost.
OWC sells a 2.5-inch Electra with 960GB of capacity for $1,200, but it's only a SATA II part. Newegg lists a few SSDs with capacities greater than 512GB, but nothing directly equivalent to the 768GB SSD in the iMac. However, though SSD prices are falling and are typically lower than $1/GB even on high-quality drives, it's difficult to find a consumer SSD with the same capacity as this one in order to directly compare prices. After that, the $1,300 768GB SSD seems to be the biggest price outlier.
#Imac 27 late 2013 review Pc#
It's steep, but is it unreasonable, considering the bill of materials? Building a PC with comparable specs doesn't really get you too far off from the iMac's price the most inflated item in the computer would be Apple's RAM, which we didn't spring for. Our 27-inch beast came out to $3,649 before tax, which harkens back to how much computers typically cost twenty-plus years ago. We bolted our build-to-order options onto the up-rated model. The base 27-inch configuration costs $1,799, and the up-rated model starts at $1,999.
#Imac 27 late 2013 review upgrade#
Though we didn't tick every single box on this computer's configuration, we did upgrade everything except the RAM. Apple has indicated that Fusion Drive keeps the OS X system files pinned to the SSD side of the volume, so Fusion Drive-equipped Macs will boot just as fast as all-SSD Macs and should provide a very speedy subjective experience. We figure most folks will go for the Fusion Drive storage option, which means that they ought to get SSD speeds during daily usage except in rare cases when accessing cold data.
#Imac 27 late 2013 review pro#
Applications, even big ones like Aperture or Final Cut Pro, launch with a single bounce (though we found Final Cut Pro occasionally taking two). The SSD means that you won't be encountering very many disk-related bottlenecks during daily use. As soon as the CPU and GPU dropped back to near-idle, the fan began to spin down, and the computer was near-silent again within about 30 seconds. During a multihour gaming session, the fan stayed spun up at a constant level, but the noise was still less than the previous-generation 27-inch iMac under load. The fan spun up a bit during benchmarking, but it didn't make very much noise-it was the loudest thing in the room, but my office is pretty quiet. There's only a single fan inside, and the lack of a mechanical hard disk drive or any other moving parts makes for a near-silent desktop. The 27-inch iMac looks sharp-metaphorically and physically-and it's very, very quiet.