We sat down to watch the Apple presentation from San Jose today in glorious HD on our Apple TV. Mac Mini and iPad Mini were no big deal for us, we were completely sold on the new iMac. From December this could be the fastest Final Cut Pro X machine you can buy.
How life has changed. We can remember watching Apple presentations back before the iPhone release. Nobody knew what you were looking at and to be honest they thought you were a bit sad for being glued to a laptop for an hour making fuuny ooh and ahh noises. Now we can watch the presentations live in HD on Apple TV and then get the highlights rebroadcast to us on the nightly news.
Watch the Apple Special Event Video from the 23rd October.
Our eyes lit up when Tim Cook invited Phil Schiller up for 'the Mac news' which to us meant more than one product. A new updated Mac Mini, Mac Mini server and the 13" Retina MacBook Pro were the hors d’œuvre to the iMac entrée. No MacPro desert unfortunately.
When Phil took the covering off the new iMac, was it there? The edge of the display is only 5mm. Although it's thicker in the middle, that is one thin machine.
It's the inside that is going to count and that doesn't disappoint.
27-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560-by-1440 resolution with support for millions of colours.
3.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz) with 6MB L3 cache. Configurable to 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz).
8GB (two 4GB) of 1600MHz DDR3 memory; four user-accessible SO-DIMM slots Configurable to 16GB or 32GB.
1TB (7200-rpm) hard drive Configurable to 3TB hard drive, 1TB or 3TB Fusion Drive, or 768GB of flash storage.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Configurable to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
Also the usual connectivity you would expect on an iMac
SDXC card slot
Four USB 3 ports
Two Thunderbolt ports
Mini DisplayPort output with support for DVI, VGA, and dual-link DVI (adapters sold separately)
10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)
One feature that we noticed instantly was the option of the SSD/HD hybrid drive. Apple call it a'Fusion Drive' and FCP.co regulars might recognise a similar concept in the rather aptly titled article we ran recently.
Until the new promised MacPros are released, (WWDC in June possibly?) a high spec iMac is going to be the fastest machine for FCPX. Our current iMac which is under a year old is fast with FCPX, but it won't be as fast as this new model.
What it doesn't have is a retina display. If it did, would we be able to play pixel perfect 4k media?