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  • dagamer34 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    My guess is we'll see updated Thunderbolt displays next year.
  • EnzoFX - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Did this newest one lose this functionality?
  • coder543 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    I'm curious too.
  • frostyfiredude - Saturday, October 27, 2012 - link

    The old 21.5 does have the upgrade possible, sure is goofy that the new one doesn't.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    This is the best value of anything that's come out of Apple today imho. The thinner design is nice, if not groundbreaking since they did remove a large optical drive and taper the edges a bit while the bulge in the middle remains. But in terms of performance per dollar for all in ones, the iMac was always pretty good and this keeps it there. 8GB as a baseline is a nice touch.

    Funny, their "new" hybrid SSD solution sounds just like Intels chipset supported SSD caching though.
  • Kodongo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    I'm with you in thinking that the hybrid SSD is just a souped up version Intel's Rapid Store Technology.
  • epobirs - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link

    It almost certainly has its origins there but Apple has made some interesting improvements on the concept that I'd hope Intel brings to the Windows world. (The new features may be Intel's 2.0 version and Apple paid for a period of exclusivity on it before it shows up elsewhere, ala Thunderbolt.)

    Because it operates at the file level rather than the sector level, it can be smarter about not having duplicate copies of items on both drives. So you get the full combined capacity of the two drives rather than having the SSD capacity be invisible tot he user. So, rather than a 1 TB drive with an SSD cache, you get a 1.2 GB drive that offers two performance levels depending on how frequently a file is accessed.

    This will hopefully be less flaky than the SRT setups I've tried to use.
  • Zoomer - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link

    Yeah, more like ZFS.
  • tookitogo - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link

    That's incorrect, it's not file-level. It operates on Core Storage blocks. (Which aren't the same as drive blocks, by the way.)
  • web2dot0 - Saturday, October 27, 2012 - link

    Who cares if it's a "souped up" version of RST. The question is, is it better than RST and better than other implementations out in the market.

    That's the bottom line.

    Looks like their approach is sound and very interesting. If things go well, we are looking at a major breakthru in this whole "SSD caching" scheme.

    Vast majority of consumers are still running 5400pm or 7200rpm on their PCs/MACs.
    Imagine their disbelieve when they go to the Apple Store and see the iMac with Fusion drive in action with Ivy CPU. No brainer upgrade.

    A average consumer will be blown away by the speed increase that power users have enjoyed over the last few years. It may actually find SSD a practical on the desktop that all competitors have failed to do so with any mass deployment scenario.

    So to diminish Apple's accomplishments is petty and makes you look like sad.

    Let's see what the reviewers say and let the market speak before dismiss it as a after thought.
  • tookitogo - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link

    It's not. It's a function of Core Storage, a filesystem-level technology.
  • GenSozo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    What will Apple invent next?
  • GoodBytes - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Simple,
    - Slap an ultrabook internal inside without the battery instead of a laptop
    - no more dedicated graphic card
    - use the metal back a heatsink extension for the processor like some ultrabook, and high end laptops,
    - make the power supply external

    This will allow them to make the monitor even thinner.

    They can also use a laptop monitor instead of a desktop, remove the color processor of the IPS panel (dropping it down to an eIPS panel), and make it even thinner.

    They can also, adapt MacOS for ARM processors, like Windows 8, and then they put the iPad internal inside, and make it even thinner.. more thin than the iPad due to the lack of need to have a battery.

    There is just so much they can do, and I expect to see that. Thinnest makes people impressed, and it's great marketing. It reminds me of computer monitor and TV that are "super thin", where they are nothing more than a bare-bone panel, and the plugs are put horizontal instead of vertical, so your DVI/HDMI cable sticks out like tumor, and not on defeats the entire purpose (not to mention that the stand still consume the same amount of space), but also make it look ugly. Anyway.
  • epobirs - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link

    My first thought was that the new MacBook Air was really big. Like the Osborne suitcase of MacBooks.

    Makes me wonder if a portfolio sized portable like that would be a viable product.
  • web2dot0 - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link

    You are about as misinformed as you can get.

    To dismiss Apple's innovation is like saying MacBook Air is not the father of Ultrabook. Get used to it.

    It's not a laptop. It uses a DESKTOP CPU, and desktop HDD.
    It has the makings of a laptop, but it's not. That's why iMac is so interesting.
    It's a hybrid laptop/desktop designed to suit the needs of non-power users .. which is like 99% of the population.

    Otherwise, why don't we all just buy a souped up Eurocom Laptop and call it a iMac? Please don't simplify the problem because it makes you look misinformed.

    MacOS for ARM on a iMac? Makes no sense. ARM cannot compete with Intel in pure CPU performance. You think they have the resources to compete with i7? Plz ....

    iPad inside a iMac? I'm not even going to response to this non-sense.

    Thank god you don't work for Apple, because the stock price would drop to $0 if you were in charge.
  • Penti - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link

    It's practically the same power as a Mac Pro no, has extension via Thunderbolt for professional hardware so it's more then a consumer unit. It's actually used as a workstation at most places. Consumers would be happy with the performance in a MacBook Air 11 or Mac Mini with HD4000-graphics.

    ARM doesn't compete in the high-end at all, but it's not ARM that designs Apples ARM-ISA CPU's any more it's Apples guys in Texas/Cali. They won't compete in the high-end either. A A6 is already a 0.5B transistor chip or there about. Overclocked quad-core ARM "Swift" with Nvidia GTX 675MX makes no sense at all. Even at 3GHz it would be slower. Neither will it support more then 4GB of memory. ARMv8 is a few years of. Performance is a few years behind, but helped a lot by the companion hardware.
  • Camacho - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link

    Same power as some Mac Pro's. Not the 6-core on up. Ivy at 8 threads and 3.4GHz is fast but it still is not going to beat Westmere 24-threads at 3GHz. It'll score like 15000 on geekbench 64-bit. A W3680 Mac Pro scores 16300. 12-core's score 22000-26000. They will win most battles because most things are still heavily reliant on single threads and multi up to 4 core's. An Ivy iMac will not touch a Mac Pro in track count in Logic Pro or something. Depends on what you do but every year CPU's get better so still marginally impressed. They didn't do much. They removed much and asked you to thank them for it. Still not sure if I care that a desktop is .5" slimmer. They don't move around often. A desktop GPU would have been real nice for that 2560x1440 resolution.
  • Penti - Sunday, October 28, 2012 - link

    Actually you need the 6-core single or 2x4 dual cpu Nehalem/Westmere Mac Pros to match it most of the time. It is about as fast as a six-core or eight-core Westmere in many applications. It was so in the Sandy days. If you look at most other applications in benchmarks. An i7 mid-2011 SandyBridge iMac 27-inch beats six-core Westmere's Mac Pro in some pure synthetic benchmarks like speedmark some application benchmarks, though of course the six core Westmere does have more pure CPU performance which shows in benchmarks like Cinebench and geekbench. Which any ways means a 2.2k iMac matches a 3.3k screen-less mac pro fine. Of course it wouldn't match an all speced out workstation for 100k but nobody suggested that any way.

    Might not be desktop gpus, and never have been but they still hold their own against old HD5870 in Mac Pro. Might be low end workstation and mainstream gaming machines, but it's more than you get from most of the competition. It's not hard to imagine people sitting on a 27" iMac and MacBook Air to cover their computing needs and workflow. They won't miss out on anything from buying the lowest end Mac Pro. But of course now even the MacBook Pro's covers most workstation users.
  • name99 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    How hot does the panel run?

    In the past I've been amazed (and saddened) at how hot the iMac panels run, when it doesn't seem to be necessary. My crappy no-name brand 46" TV gives off no discernible heat, while my iMac (and newer ones I've tried in stores) are obviously throwing a ton of heat out the top. I'd like to think that, FINALLY, with this model Apple makes the transition to low-power LEDs for the diffuser.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Look like there's a new vent hole in the back, plus holes on the bottom, I think this means more direct cooling for a small visual tradeoff. I think it will be no worse than the last ones at least, plus Kepler and Ivb help.
  • slashbinslashbash - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link

    Does your 46" TV also have 75-100W of CPU, RAM, HDD, and GPU inside? I'm guessing not (most TV's have embedded processors similar to cellphone CPU's, maybe 10W max?). Not to mention, the heat from a 46" TV would be dissipated over a much wider area than even a 27" iMac, so the iMac would feel hotter even if the two devices produced the same amount of heat.
  • ImSpartacus - Sunday, October 28, 2012 - link

    I'd say the heat is even worse than 75-100W. You can get up to 77W on the CPU alone and at least 50W on the GPU (probably more). And the rest of the computer isn't exactly helping the heat situation.
  • tookitogo - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link

    What makes you think the iMacs are hot because of the LCD backlights? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

    What DOES make sense is that in that housing, there's an entire computer, including CPU, GPU, drives, and power supply. It's slightly more likely -- and by "slightly" I mean infinitely -- that those components are responsible for the vast lion's share of the heat produced in an iMac.

    The alternative is to stick a big fan in there which makes more noise. Seems like a pointless tradeoff to me.

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