Review: Apple iMac (2012)

For the past few years, Apple has kept the iMac on the sidelines, instead choosing to focus the spotlight on its portable and mobile offerings.

The iPhone remains Apple's cash cow, and the fervor is palpable every time a new version is released. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina Display are two ultra-slender notebooks that impress with both their design and their performance. And the iPad, which debuted all the way back in 2010, has some wondering if the notebook is even necessary anymore. As each of these products was unveiled, the current iMac design – originally introduced in 2009 – routinely underwent quiet upgrades. It was barely mentioned at Apple's splashy media events.

Not this time – when Apple debuted the new iMac alongside the iPad mini and a newer Retina display iPad at its media event last October, it was the iMac that turned the most heads. Sure, the iPad mini was the hot item of the day going in, but the stunningly thin iMac generated more buzz than we were expecting. It certainly made the jaded digerati leap to Twitter with excitement.

This is a damn sexy piece of machinery – at its edges, the iMac measures a mere 5 millimeters thick.The design, an impressively slender all-metal case capped by edge-to-edge glass, garners wows. But the fact that Apple managed to pack in a real computer – in my tester, a 3.1 GHz quad-core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1TB Fusion Drive running OS X Mountain Lion – is just as commendable. This thing doesn't just look good, it knows how to work it, too.

From the front, the new iMac is almost indistinguishable from the last iteration. It has the same folded-metal base, and beneath the black-edged display is the same silver "chin" with a shiny black Apple logo in the center. It's not until you spin the thing to the side that you notice its almost unfathomable slenderness and gentle curves.

Some people hate it when you refer to a consumer electronics product as "sexy," but ... this is a damn sexy piece of machinery. At its edges, the iMac's thickness measures a mere 5 millimeters. That's so thin, Apple couldn't use traditional manufacturing methods to bond the front and rear aluminum pieces together. It instead had to employ a method called friction stir welding, which creates a completely seamless, aerospace-quality juncture. It's only that thin at the edges though. It gently tapers to a modest bulge at the center rear – you've got to fit those hardware guts in there somewhere.

It's a little weird that you can't enjoy all the thin when you're actually using the iMac, unless you have mirrors placed on each side of your workstation. And if you're having to swivel your desktop around to periodically admire its design, you'll get odd looks from your coworkers.

My test machine has a 21.5-inch panel with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080. It's extraordinarily bright. The colors are natural and rich, and images and text seem to float right at the surface of the display rather than feeling buried beneath layers of glass. Indeed, the LCD panel is 45 percent thinner than the previous generation's display, and this was accomplished largely because the cover glass has been directly laminated to the LCD. It's technically not a Retina display, and frankly, that's fine. Yeah, when you smoosh your face within 8 inches of the display you can see all those abhorrent little pixels, but are you really going to sit with your face that close to your desktop monitor?

Like older iMacs and Cinema Displays, it's got a glossy screen, but glare has been noticeably reduced. Apple says it's been able to minimize reflected light by up to 75 percent, and that seems pretty much on par with my experience using it in the office over the past month and half. My desk sits in an area where there's a mix of sunlight and overhead fluorescent lights (and occasional camera flashes).

One feature that's noticeably absent – but not necessarily missed – is an optical drive.One feature that's noticeably absent – but not necessarily missed – is an optical drive. Apple's decision to abandon any sort of DVD drive doesn't come as a huge surprise. The company first trimmed the hardware feature from the ultra-thin MacBook Air, then from the slim MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The company also only ships software through the App Store or, certainly begrudgingly, on USB sticks. But while ditching DVDs makes sense in mobile computers, it's still downright strange to see a desktop workstation without an optical drive. So for now, if you need to rip a CD to iTunes or burn a DVD, you'll have to plug in an $80 USB Superdrive into one of the iMac's four USB 3.0 ports.

When I learned this iMac loaner wouldn't have an optical drive, I wasn't surprised. I just plugged in Apple's matching brushed-aluminum USB optical drive... and then completely forgot about it. In the weeks I've spent reviewing the computer, I never needed to throw in a CD or DVD. I was probably in high school the last time I bought a CD, and my DVD collection has been whittled down over the years to a single Star Wars original trilogy collectors' edition box set. If you've got a tremendous Criterion Collection library, you'll be disappointed. But of course, Apple needed to ditch the drive in order to achieve that you've-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it slenderness.

For those lugging their purchase home from the Apple Store, or for those who constantly find themselves rearranging their desktops, you'll be pleased to learn the new iMac weighs a full 8 pounds less than its predecessor. Even my wimpy noodle arms could handle its 12.5-pound heft with relative ease.

Performance? When putting our specced-out unit through the paces, no amount of multitasking, photo-editing, audio and video streaming, or general workingness threw it for a loop. In addition to an Adobe app or two, I regularly have multiple Google Chrome windows open, each filled with a seriously ungodly number of tabs. Where my older 2010 iMac started choking, the 2012 iMac just breezed on quietly.

Our loaner iMac included a 1-terabyte Fusion Drive, a hybrid drive with both 128GB of Flash storage and a traditional, spinning 1TB HDD. All of this is optimized at the system level in OS X Mountain Lion. Your workflow gets optimized on the fly – frequently used apps and files get pushed to the SSD, where they earn blazing fast read and write speeds, and things you use less often get pushed onto the hard disk. But it comes at a price: the Fusion Drive option is an extra $250 tacked onto the base $1,500 model. The standard-issue quad-core processor and 8GB of memory should be adequate for most, though I'd recommending upping the RAM to at least 16GB for professional users. Note: If you're buying the 21.5-inch version, you have to buy the RAM at the time of purchase, as there's no way to upgrade the memory yourself. The 27-incher has a small door to access the SO-DIMM slots.

Apple's likely not going to refresh this iMac design for another few years yet, so if you recently grabbed a 2010 or 2011 iMac, there's no urgent need to rush out and upgrade to a new one. However, if you are in the market for a new desktop and have a couple grand to drop, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything out there this slick and satisfying. Just be sure to rip all your CDs before you make the leap.

WIRED Beautiful, vibrant display. Solid performance out of the box, and expandable out the wazoo at the time of purchase. Head-turning industrial design. Plenty of I/O ports for your accessory needs: four USB 3.0, two Thunderbolt, Ethernet, SDXC card slot, digital/analog headphone jack. Comes with Apple keyboard, and either a Magic Mouse or a Magic Trackpad.

TIRED Pricey. Built-in speakers are loud, but lack bass. No optical drive could be a total downer for some. On the 21.5-inch, there's no way to upgrade the memory yourself, and the standard (non-Fusion) hard drive is only capable of 5,400 rpm. 27-incher gets user-accessible RAM and a faster, 7,200-rpm drive.