The angry ghost of Steve Jobs must HAUNT Cupertino. Plug and Play is now Plug, install de-bloat software and multiple extensions to de-crappify your machine, then play.
I've bought several iMacs (2008, 2012, 2014, 2020) Anyway, it is frustrating once they aren't supported anymore. I think they are overbuilt, they are built to last forever but designed to be obsolete in 7 years. ChromeFlex has saved a few from recycling at our house (A chromebook with a retina display seems like such a waste)
I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a studio display instead (Equally well built but can be used almost forever). If you could only (easily) use them as monitors once they went out of support...
Agreed on the iMac, but disagree on the Studio Display.
I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point
I recently chose a Studio Display over the alternatives, because I wanted something with an integrated camera to use as the primary display. There are already too many devices on my desk, so anything that needs an extra cable or comes with a battery that must be charged feels like a poor choice.
And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.
I mean, to this point, my Logitech Brio sits atop my monitor, with a tightly cinched cable hanging down, plugging straight _into_ said monitor. It might not be the cleanest possible option, but it's not adding desk clutter.
I totally don't care about refresh rates above 60 Hz. I do not enjoy but can tolerate even 30 Hz.
What I care about is resolution, color fidelity, color gamut, viewing angles, (anti-)glare, even how quickly the monitor wakes up. I don't play competitive FPS games, I do coding, graphics, and video work on my monitors.
I dunno. Scrolling around at 120+hz on web pages can be hard to let go. I have a few monitors around my home running at 120 or better, and it's painful to go back to 60hz sometimes.
I have a few Huawei Mateview 27 monitors. No branding facing you, brushed Alu, slightly higher that 4k (as they’re 16:10 not 16:9 - bonus), very accurate and beautifully designed - as if they were made for the Mac.
Interesting, I have used Samsung 5K displays for a year or two with my Mac Studio, and recently bought an Studio Display after one died. I am SO much happier with the studio display, it powers on so much faster, the black is much more "black", etc. The built-in camera is also really good.
I'm almost considering getting rid of the other two Samsung displays and replacing them with Studio Displays because it's just so much better.
60hz on old CRTs used to give me headaches as the flicker was subtly perceptible. On modern displays it's fine for me (though I mostly look at text so there's not a lot of movement happening).
The studio display is priced like a ultra high end monitor but gets beat by $800-900 monitors all day. It's small, it has bottom of the barrel 60Hz, and it's only saving grace (the resolution plus the build quality) is made way less exciting by the fact it's not a modern OLED with amazing HDR.
Too many great options today to settle that overpriced undersized thing.
The older imacs at least had target display mode. That was pretty amazing so you could say least use it at a screen after it's useful life as a computer. Unfortunately they dropped it years ago. It wasn't very efficient on power and you had to use a key combo, I don't think you could make it boot straight into it every time. But at least it was there.
agreed! I am just one of several people in my circle who would have loved to keep using our 27" Intel iMacs as target mode displays. Within the Apple ecosystem, once the old 27" iMacs were discontinued there was no simple (again within there Apple ecosystem) inexpensive way of having displays larger than 24".
It's a real shame they got rid of target display mode. But then people would hold onto iMacs even longer.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
opendisplay - https://github.com/peetzweg/opendisplay - can make a old iMac's screen useful again. In my case, a 2015 27" iMac can be used as a monitor for my modern Mac laptop, connected via ethernet cable.
I've got a 2014 Retina iMac and a 2017 Retina iMac. Both of them run flawlessly but are now past Apple's support window. And third party software developers are mostly already adopting a "LOL we don't care" attitude about them. The hardware works impeccably, but software developers refuse to lift a finger to make their software run on them anymore. The Apple ecosystem is infuriating. With great sadness, I retired both of them a few months ago and am now running a boring Linux box with a pretty standard DPI monitor. I miss the Macs but their window of usefulness is way too short.
Unpopular opinion no doubt but I think iMacs were way better with Intel chips. I still resent that my fantastic 2012 (yes) iMac finally became unusable due to software incompatibility. It was a beast of a machine. I actually did put Linux on it but it's not particularly satisfactory. If Apple were the 'eco-conscious' company they claim to be, they'd somehow make it so their machines lived forever...or longer. I'd love a new iMac but had to switch to Mac Mini/BenQ monitor after experiencing vertigo with the new gen iMacs.
I still lament buying a G5 PowerMac back in the day, top of the top spec, absolutely killer machine. Thousands and thousands of dollars. And it just ended up as ewaste while my freaking 486 is still chugging along.
The thing that makes older iMacs "disposable" is that the required cooling vents end up [mostly] blocked, within just a few years – then they thermally throttle, until death.
If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:
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My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).
My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).
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>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead
This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).
The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.
Yeah and the old ones are actually pretty easy to open up. You just take a suction cup and clip the screen off.
I mean even the newer ones aren't bad but cutting the tape, cleaning up and putting new tape is kinda annoying. They should have stuck with the magnets.
Your point about them being overbuilt and built to last forever is spot on. Another way to repurpose these machines is to install Linux. I think people will find they are still snappy and supported.
I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.
Does “support” really matter? My 2020 iMac still performs great, although I use Sequoia on it instead of Tahoe. It also runs Windows or Linux very well and was easy to upgrade to 128GB RAM.
My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.
It does, because everyone and their dog started releasing software that only runs on the latest version of macos. So if you are not running the latest macos, you can't use the latest software version.
For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.
The difference being that the M-series machines do not have good prospects in terms of running Linux well. As I would personally not want to run Windows for sure, this matters a lot.
Asahi Linux exists for ARM Linux and has Windows has no equivalent (since it’s closed source and Microsoft doesn’t want to support that). Linux also runs virtualized, that’s obviously irrelevant because daily driving a VM isn’t a great idea.
My desktop is still a 2017 iMac Pro and I’m holding out for a workstation-class machine with similarly excellent speakers & display, pitched at the same target market but contemporary spec main board. The standard iMac is not up to this level, and hard pass on the M5 Ultra Studio + Studio Display combo, I like the integrated form factor too much. In the meantime I work mostly on MBP. Fortunately, I am patient.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
I kinda agree with you but this is for people who don't want to think about it. That 24" monitor is incredible compared to anything sub 500.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
Recently bought a retina 32” screen (Japannext 6k 32”) for around $800. Pretty sure you can get a decent kb and mouse for under $100. But a “magic trackpad” alone is way more than that.
Looks like a cool monitor (900 euros here). I am happy to see that there are more and more of products in this category popping up. I wish they would chose better names though (Kuyon is pushing it, but Japannext is very Aliexpress coded).
I never cared about any of this until I had to help my wife with monitor shopping where colour accuracy & PPI is king, and spent some time testing these out. Hard to go back now.
I was using the 49" Samsung Ultrawide for years at work and now I feel like I can count the pixels.
That was my experience. The quality of the hardware is also superior. It happened the first time I used a touchpad after using my MBP for a while, it was just bad.
The old Studio Display still goes for $900 used for 27” so it’s definitely a component of the cost that’s valued by the folks who do end up buying these. The PC market very much wants to disregard the ‘high PPI, well-calibrated color by default, built-in webcam and virtual surround speakers’ aspect of the iMac display but that’s worth the entire cost of the device to someone who wants that out of the box (except at that price you get 27” for display only :) Gaming and very large monitor folks may have more nuanced preferences but I can plonk down this iMac for any generic Mac user and they will be satisfied enough to get work done, barring field-specific technical requirements (primarily in thermals or extreme ram/cpu) that exclude use of an iMac regardless of cost.
You’ll have to be more specific about the manner of your dislike to convey how it may have bearing here — is your monitor preference for Mac use? What’s uniquely great about it to you that Apple’s display lacks? etc.
I think it's obvious why someone would buy this and why Apples continues to slowly update them.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
The Eames Lounge Chair is a terrible example; you can buy near-exact clones for about 1/7th the price of a real one. There's one in the room with me right now. It's fantastic, and will probably last me decades.
Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
And it's almost impossible to find ones that get as bright as Apple monitors for less than Apple charges!
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
If you do creative work, including frontend development, you need to have a hidpi glass display because a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices.
Apple's solution to reflections is to overpower them. I use my MacBook in some bright public spaces and reflections have never been an issue. For an iMac which is more likely than a laptop to be used in an environment with controlled lighting, it's just a non-issue.
> a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices
Looks to me like it would be the opposite unless a majority of your users are on a Mac. MacOS has a 30% market share in the USA and only around 15% globally.
> you need to have a hidpi glass display because a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices.
That literally cannot be true, unless you're saying that your users are ALSO going to have a 218ppi desktop. If you're developing for phones, sorry, a 218ppi display is woefully inadequate for replicating what the phone looks like because phones (modern iPhones) have 450+ ppi, more than TWICE the ppi of the display you're using.
An apple display is nice. But it's absolutely NOT absolutely required for anything no matter the creative work you're doing, because there's nothing it matches except developing stuff for display on that exact display.
Fair point but do people really need high pixel density at 32"?
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I’ve got a 32” 4k monitor at work, and a 27” 5k at home (the rather problematic LG one; got it just as it was being taken off the market in Europe over emissions rules). The 27” is so much nicer.
"You can get the same thing for less money" has never been an effective criticism vs Apple computers. People will pay the extra $800 so they don't have to also buy a 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse... and they'll all be the same color.
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
My Mom had a 2008 20" iMac. When it got long in the tooth, we replaced it with an M1 in 2021 or 2022. She was disappointed she wasn't able to get a 20" screen again and had to get one with a huge 24" screen!
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
It's also built for people who need a reasonable desktop computer but don't want their living room to look like a 14 year old's bedroom, or a corporate office space.
I'm not one of them, but I think many of us have had to convince partners that the big clunky monstrosity of a setup is actually cool...
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
This. I worked as a network/computer guy for the architecture department at our university. They all had iMacs, which for me was quite a win because replacing/carrying them was super easy: disconnect power chord, carry to my desk - done. Fix or install whatever needs fixing, and simple carry back.
They even put the (optional, by default it's wireless only) 2.5G Ethernet socket in the external power brick. This pattern seems to have been introduced with the M1 iMac. The 2.5G upgrade is new.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
iPhones have great cameras. Get a MagSafe mount for on top of the monitor and stick the camera to it. The feature is called "continuity camera", and it works with any Mac app that would use a USB webcam.
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
I've got one. It can be a bit annoying because I have a Samsung TV in the same room, and turning the TV off with its remote sometimes also turns the monitor off.
DELL too, bought a 4k 24" conference monitor off a second hand site for £80. It's got a good quality pop-up webcam, too.
Usb hub, hdmi/dp ports, Ethernet on the back. Connects and powers the laptop with a single thunderbolt usb-c cable.
Not sure about ppi and stuff, but works great for me.
any specific model you had in mind? when I'm looking at the Lenovo offering, the "built-in" webcams are protruding and if I pair it with 4k resolution I quickly end up at 1300 dollars (yoga pro)... for $1600 you get the 5k apple Studio Display.
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
What about Dell's UltraSharp series? I have a 1440p 27" one and the only complaint I have is that that particular model has a bit of inverse ghosting. Not egregiously so but compared to my ugly MSI gaming monitor right next to it it's a bit noticeable.
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
Most I've seen are just used to RDP into a Windows box anyway, so probably not. That does make it a little strange that no one seems to design a nice looking terminal PC.
No, but if you're on a 3-5 year refresh cycle and this is your year, it'd be lame to not have the latest chip!
It's simpler and better for both hardware makers and buyers to just keep refreshing instead of trying to get clever about who deserves the current series of chips in their form factor, assuming the refreshes are of similar cost, utility etc.
Try to find a good monitor with a good integrated webcam, speaker, microphone and usb-hub. You simply won't find any except Apple Studio Displays which start at $1500.
Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine.
Do... people drag a full iMac to a public workspace like that? I feel like this would be ridiculed since even most co-working spaces provide monitor hookups. But if I saw you order a single coffee at a tiny shop and are set-up with an all-in-one desktop then me and everyone else will be giving you a side-eye
Slightly less worse would be one of those fold-out multi-monitor attachments that I've never seen in the wild either
To a certain extent, yes. But you could apply that same logic to people who do indecent exposure. At some point, if you're setting up for 4+ hours in a tiny coffee shop with a laptop replacement and you're not buying more than just a cup of joe, you're doing a net-bad for your community by making that coffee shop and thus cheap community spaces less viable.
If you want to do it in a Panera or SBux go ahead but not in a local shop. Being conscientious is actually a good thing, believe it or not.
There are plenty of local shops that are large, have plenty of seating, and don't mind you staying for several hours. It's up to the shop to enforce rules if it doesn't want people camping or using laptops or if it wants to require purchase.
That seems really great, though. If you showed up with an ancient retro PC, you're asking for other nerds to chat you up and ask you what you're tinkering with.
Nobody's going to want to talk to you if you show up with a full iMac setup.
> Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
Nothing personal, but the increasing amount of people setting up their work desk in coffee shops or lunch diners makes me not want to go there anymore. If I want to be surrounded by people working I'll go and eat at the office. It disturbs the vibe of the place a bit for me personally.
Apple will happily sell you the Mac mini for that setup too. Or the Mac Studio if you want something beefier.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
Well, I got M4 iMac because I wanted a screen on my workbench with minimum cables and must be VESA mounted. I also needed a mac to build iOS apps. iMac was perfect fit.
The price put upon "I don't have to go figure out what a good monitor is and what are good input devices".
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
I'm pretty sure it relies on Mac APIs like Metal and ScreenCaptureKit but it's worth reaching out to the developer. He was very responsive when I requested features, and it may be a lot easier to build a windows application that adheres to the protocol using agentic development.
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
I have 4K at 32". It's pretty sharp but at 6K the pixels would be significantly less visible, and I could run it at an even 200% so that older programs don't have scaling issues.
You need to increase UI scaling, not turn down the resolution. All modern desktops support this in some form. I would only lower the resolution if the GPU can't keep up in games after exhausting all other options such as AI upscaling.
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
There are countless non-5k iMacs. I never said it had to be that. I had a beautiful 27” 2.5k display from 2011 I could’ve put to work.
There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.
When 5K iMacs first came out in 2014, they were mostly limited to displayport 1.2, which was unable to support 5K without either dropping to 45Hz or using chroma subsampling. So the 2014 version is excused, and we can excuse the 2015 version too.
But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.
And they've left it out ever since.
Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!
Yes the previous iMacs sent a signal. Their current computers don’t receive the signal. This is not about the 5K display, you’re missing the core problem. It stopped working when the silicon line came out. You can’t get any iMac to work in target display mode on silicon Macs.
That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
You cannot grab an iMac, plug it into a silicon Mac, and get a picture on the iMac (without 3rd party software). This is incorrect. Please go look this up. The feature stopped working when silicon Mac’s came out. It only works on Intel Macs. 5K iMac or not.
Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.
I have already explained that and it’s not the same as native support any more than display link means one can claim M1’s run 2 external monitors (Mac mini excluded). I wrote this multiple comments ago:
> It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
Dense models are not well suited to this. Depends on your system, but most inference engines let you put the KV cache on the host. They should let you use "Q8" KV cache format as well which takes half the storage of bf16, the default format. You essentially are stuck at having to fit the entire dense model into VRAM because it must compute across the entire model every token. Without it being in VRAM it is slow. MoE models such as Qwen 35B with 3B active parameters are much friendlier to limited VRAM systems. This is why you see systems with 16GB of VRAM running something like DeepSeek Flash if they have a bit of spare system RAM. Usually not at any good token rate, but tolerable.
Dense models also don't like quantization as much and are less tolerant of it. There are some very interesting smaller models like https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Labs-Dory1.0-4... Dory that I would check out. You need system RAM or to stream a larger MoE model from disk and it won't be fast. You need to specialize the models some to get quality results if you have very limited system resources.
I asked Claude to come up with 7 problems to solve that were not part of any benchmarks. Besides speed, I asked it to put together a scoring that would reflect models that perform well on the 7 problems and in a reasonable time-frame (RWS, the definition is in the artifact). I valued models that produced good answers in a reasonable time better than models that had very high throughput but kept spitting useless stuff. Overall, IIRC most of them still had a >30% chance of producing wrong/non-working replies.
I then tested Strata ( https://github.com/niko1221/strata ) and the results are not even close. You can basically ignore everything in that table and use Strata instead, you can use bigger/less-quantized models and have way better results. Basically any otherwise-decent model degrades noticeably at Q < 5, and KV cache at Q4 also contributes a lot.
Still, a 20$/mo Claude subscription is way cheaper/more efficient if you code 2-3h in the evening than running stuff locally, unless you really have hardware than can hold models that get most things right at the first try. You can iterate way faster and cover a lot more ground in 2-3h using a Claude subscription, or OpenRouter if you prefer to change models. You get faster replies that are 99% correct at the first try, whereas using the local model you'd be spending 30% of your time fixing things that don't work and prompting it to do better.
Nowadays I use the local model to delegate tasks that would burn a lot of tokens, like sifting through big data archives for indexing and such.
QFN Q4 K XL Unsloth is basically identical to the bf16 model. It’s KL divergence is very very small. It is competitive with the full model. Also I benchmarked iq3 xxs on Strata for 3 days against deepswe and it scored better than the published benchnarks for the model. If the gsq rco quant prettain tasks fit well it is a great model quant. My data shows it takes 20% more tokens basically than q4 xl. A4 xl is within noise on all my repeated task benchmarks over the public model serving and my own runs of q8. I published the deeswe results. You have to be very specific about model choice and know these models and their quirks.
This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
> QFN Q4 K XL Unsloth is basically identical to the bf16 model.
Yes, but like original poster I have 16GB of VRAM and 64GB of RAM, I was referring to non-Strata benchmarks :)
I did quickly run a couple things on Strata but haven't gotten around yet to benchmark bigger models/customize them with Strata, but will do rather soon. So far Strata/Swift IQ2_XS performed really well compared to non-Strata/Qwen3.8 quantized variants.
> This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
Yep, totally get it, and to be honest getting to run ablated models sometimes can also be useful.
> Also YMMV in “faster” — I have less than 5K into my home AI lab shenanigans and it’s pretty fast :)
My rig is... ~1.5k, maybe 3k if we count the CPU and GPU upgrade since 2019 :-D I really wanted to grab one of the latest mini-PCs (Halo, Spark, and other minor assemblers) for local setup, but to be honest I can't justify a 6k+ purchase for me and my wife alone. Perhaps in 3 years these mini-PCs will get to the ~2k ballpark (perhaps used), and although older by then, I might be able to run things 24/7 locally as well.
With 32 GB more of RAM you can run ISTA GSQ RCO IQ3 XXS fast. You can make it work now but it is tight. You can stream experts from disk with builds now. You will get an okay token rate. Try it out if you have some disk space. It is a very good local model. I benched it at that quant. Sonnet 5 class at coding benchmarks.
Get a couple or V100S GPU. Figure out cooling. They will run it /fast/ with the right engine. :)
The easiest thing to do (takes 5 minutes) is to use LMStudio and then search for the model inside LMStudios UI.
It will show you on the model selection IF a model fits and if you use a "Qwen 3.8-35B-A3B" type of model, it should just work out of the box. A3B stands for Active which means you need a lot less fast ram.
You will run into issues fast though: If you have big tasks for it to do, your pc/mac will get warm very fast and noisy and you will cosume relevant more energy.
My setup is a Ryzen 3600, 90GB DDR4 allocated to a VM (don’t even really need that much, just had it available, special thanks to the year 2024), and an RX 9060XT 16GB ($500 GPU).
I get around 40-60 tok/s depending on the quantization level I choose.
As you can see, the CPU is nothing special, don’t even need DDR5.
Yes it runs on all levels of hardware - with the latest Strata my 5090 and 64GB DDR5 gets 200-240 tok/sec decode, 6500 tok/sec prefill. Around $0.09/M tokens in power usage (have excess solar capacity).
Jealous, lol. But I did spend a grand total of $500 for my setup. The rest of the server was built purchased with the use case of running game servers.
AI harnesses like Claude will set it all up for you, you can just say "I want to run a localllm on this machine" and it will find the best one for your hardware and even help you fine tune it etc
You will end up with a sub-par result. The space for small models is more specialized and specific and you should optimize to the specific task and or tasks you want to do. It will get some local model working, but there are a lot of interesting small models in the 4-10B space to look at and play with for your specific tasks. If you expect a full agentic coding agent it's just not going to happen without a larger model like Qwen 35B and ... that is not that great by today's standards, even Muse Glimmer is better.
After arguing and back and forth with Claude (not straight away), it found a kv streaming fork of llama https://github.com/achyudh/llama.cpp and an interesting ascii only model Qwen3.8-27B-ASCII-Condensed-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf . It's running, i'll see how it goes.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
SSD token caching (like oMLX does) goes a long way for prefill. Typical miss rates are under 5% in long coding sessions, which is mostly the output of a turn's tool use.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
Waiting is never a stupid decision because you can always save a good deal on apple refurbished. I got a mac on bestbuy refurbished a couple years ago shortly after it was released. It had like 4 cycles on the battery and I saved hundreds.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Srouji is killing it on whatever he has on mind or is asked to do. Everyone is riling up on GPU and Cloud AI costs. 99.99% of what people use AI for today already processes fine on an M1 from 5 years ago.
I guess this means I’ll be hanging onto my M1 Pro for another year and seeing what M7 has to offer.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
I jest...but I'm disgusted by the price gouging going on. Glad my hardware is relatively recent and I had mostly maxed out already when I bought it a few years back. The same setup today would be closer to $7k with equivalent parts.
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
What is it with fabs where there is just no competition springing up outside the existing memory cartels? Is the knowledge of how to build and run a fab strictly controlled by these companies? Is all qualified talent just immediately poached and put behind NDA and noncompetes? It just makes no sense. Capitalism would suggest these conditions with so much unstable equilibrium in this market would see increase in supply to take advantage of the pricing. The fact that this isn't playing out as such suggests there are some very powerful thumbs on the scale of this "free" market.
It takes about a decade to bring one up and during EVERY wave of a booming memory demand supply crunch there has been a subsequent round of major bankruptcies from suppliers who decided to scale and had no demand when they finally got online.
Supply is not elastic and responds very much slower than demand. There's no conspiracy or corruption needed for this result.
The conspiracy is real, it's even been proven in court, but as things stand, it's also necessary because of the factors you describe. Investors will not touch the DRAM market with a 10-foot pole, so it has had to rely on self-funding. While there have been state subsidies too, price fixing has proven to be the most effective way to survive the extreme volatility and fund the massive capex necessary for each generational leap. They have gotten a bit more sophisticated about it since the court case 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell, it's basically the same as it's ever been. The lack of effective competition is a function of the market itself, not any tilted scales. If anything, tilting the scales on purpose with greater state involvement is the only way to change the dynamics, but few states have the capacity and competence to carry that out effectively.
Micron's stock price did go way up, after they stopped selling DRAM to the consumer market. It has been flat for several months though.
For comparison, SK Hynix stock is flat YoY and Samsung's stock did go up this year, but has come back down a bit (they're also much more diversified). Those are the only other companies outside of China that actually make DRAM at scale. There's also CXMT, which is making inroads, but its stock is not traded on any open markets, and the company is heavily backed by the Chinese government.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.
And if you really want, you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
A $2500 Mac Studio with M5 Max running Qwen3.8-27b or Gemma4:31b in oMLX gets about the same speeds you quoted... and it comes with a warranty and has enough memory not to choke at longer context lengths.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
Go ahead and run Gemma4 on your M1, and you will find that its unusable at 12 tok/sec.
And this is also not touching prefill, which is the biggest thing that you need fast, and Apple sucks in this regard compared to nvidia cards. With gfx cards, you can throw big codebases at the local models and it will happily crunch through them in very little time.
Sure, spending 1.5k on a Macbook enables you to run a local model, and if you really have a good reason for running local (like running heretic/abliterated models) for tasks you don't mind waiting for, it works. The difference is, spend 1k more and let you never have to pay for tokens, and you can run inference all day long without your computer thermal throttling, like your Macbook.
And I don't need to make assumptions when you say idiotic stuff like "We're getting close to local AI being really useful", like you have any idea what you are talking about. On par with being an Apple fan though.
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
But the iMacs only have the sans-adjective M-series processors. And is it really gonna have optimal thermals in that thin frame pressed against a big, bright high-res screen?
If you need to push performance you'd probably go for a Mac Studio, no? Or at least a Mini.
Desktop maybe, but Imac that costs more for the same specs of the mini you can shove in the drawer in a desk? I mean with the airspace taken up by an imac you only remotely connect to you could probably have two side by side stacks of I don't know, maybe 20 mac minis each? HPC territory.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
An imac doesn't strike me as a desktop with proper cooling. Maybe they do some funny business in the chassis, but its pretty clear that airflow has been put on the bench in favor of having a sexy thin backside.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I agree with you, but Apple's monitor situation is letting everybody down. Not having a 32" monitor for professionals is frustrating. I am glad I bought my Pro Display XDR.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
I think it's mainly that from 2006 to 2019, the iMac was the only mid-tier desktop that Apple sold. Today, you can get a Mac mini or MBP that's the same or faster than an iMac.
There was a quad core Mini back in 2011. The old iMac was a good all in one package for designers, especially because you'd spend half or more for an equivalent quality screen.
I did have a 2010 Mac mini server, don't remember how it compared to the non-server one other than having dual HDDs instead of the DVD drive. I put them in RAID-1.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.
I’ve felt the same way since way back then ever since reading about this guy’s setup[0], so I paired a 11” MBA with the quad core Mac Mini 2012.
I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.
It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small.
My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
I understand that, but they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6, which was not planned. If they need higher RAM they can go M5 Pro/Max (outside of iMac form factor) or wait hopefully for newer iMac Pro variants in the future.
To be honest, I doubt we're going to see iMacs with very high RAM any time soon. RAM is expensive and most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor, not get an all-in-one with a small-ish screen.
> they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6
That's not what they said. I gathered they were waiting for an iMac refresh, with the hopes that iMac Pro would get an upgrade. Hence the "would be nice to have some kind of a pro model"
> most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor
The 27" iMac Pro 5K is holding its value pretty well on second-hand markets, despite its age. The Mac Studio replaced the Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
That's because the design hasn't been significantly revised for years, and Microsoft and HP copied its design language long ago. Also, total desktop sales are 14 % of all Macs, so the iMac is maybe 5% and understandably not a priority.
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
In 7 years, either the screen or the built in computer inside this iMac will be obsolete. I’d rather buy a separate mac mini and a wide curved screen. The mac mini is simply so small and fast that buying an iMac makes no sense.
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small.
My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that.
(Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
Yes, I liked using them for NAS builds. Great for ZFS machines.
Intel is weird with their stuff like that, I wrote about how they introduced and then dropped an SHA instruction that could be used to optimize hashing (useful for things like block checksum hashes on storage servers) before: https://neosmart.net/blog/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-...
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.
I have a 60hz monitor and a 144hz monitor and I simply can't tell the difference in normal usage. I can see a difference on something like http://testufo.com if I specifically look for it, and until I checked that I assumed the OS was just lying to me and the monitor was actually set to 60hz.
It's odd because I can tell right away if a game is set to 60Hz instead of 144Hz when first launched before I adjust the settings. The mouse cursor just feels laggy.
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
My M1 Max MBP has 64 gig, still runs well. I understand memory has skyrocketed in price, but Apple has been hamstringing the max ram in their MBPs it seems for awhile.
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.
If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.
Haha, you may be a bit outdated. The sad part is you can go cheaper and still get a Mac. Thats why it feels like a scam - the price is so far from what you’re getting it’s borderline criminal.
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
I kind of missed the point when they've decided not to make 27" I guess.
My mother is still using my old iMac 2013 (the sceen is literally seprated from the body and the damp thing has an issue that sometimes make system task go 1000% of CPU)
The screen was always the selling point. Who even needs a 24" overpriced monitor?
People buy these instead of mac minis because of the pretty design. That's it. Consumers are a lot more irrational than most people give them credit for.
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
These were cool back when you could also use them as monitors - outside of that, I’d rather have a laptop and a nice monitor - way better bang for your buck imo
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
I get it. And even with that I (plus many others) still need to to download StillColor to stop the dithering. The other issue with this iMac - that I would actually LOVE to get - is that since about 2022, every Mac OS update has been like a waking nightmare - I'm sitting on Ventura which is insane as everything else I use is up to date but Apple have an aversion to fixing long-documented bugs on desktop. I'm not being precious - there are whole forums devoted to the hell that was Sonoma and somehow spending thousands on a flash new desktop only to then lose data, time and serenity is just insulting.
I also gather that if I do get this, I'd need to promptly install a debloater:
https://omlahore.github.io/RemoveMacAI/
The angry ghost of Steve Jobs must HAUNT Cupertino. Plug and Play is now Plug, install de-bloat software and multiple extensions to de-crappify your machine, then play.
I've bought several iMacs (2008, 2012, 2014, 2020) Anyway, it is frustrating once they aren't supported anymore. I think they are overbuilt, they are built to last forever but designed to be obsolete in 7 years. ChromeFlex has saved a few from recycling at our house (A chromebook with a retina display seems like such a waste)
I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a studio display instead (Equally well built but can be used almost forever). If you could only (easily) use them as monitors once they went out of support...
Agreed on the iMac, but disagree on the Studio Display.
I own two 2022 Studio Displays and as beautiful and overbuilt as they are, it just does not make sense to own such an expensive 60hz display today. You can get a 144hz 5k 27inch LG for $800 now. Yes, Apple makes a $3300 120hz version of the Studio Display.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother some but 60hz is pure agony at this point
I recently chose a Studio Display over the alternatives, because I wanted something with an integrated camera to use as the primary display. There are already too many devices on my desk, so anything that needs an extra cable or comes with a battery that must be charged feels like a poor choice.
And I don't really see much value in high refresh rates outside gaming. The difference between 60 Hz and 144 Hz is minimal in most uses. Given what displays were in the 90s and 2000s, I would have chosen a different career if I was too picky about display quality.
I mean, to this point, my Logitech Brio sits atop my monitor, with a tightly cinched cable hanging down, plugging straight _into_ said monitor. It might not be the cleanest possible option, but it's not adding desk clutter.
I totally don't care about refresh rates above 60 Hz. I do not enjoy but can tolerate even 30 Hz.
What I care about is resolution, color fidelity, color gamut, viewing angles, (anti-)glare, even how quickly the monitor wakes up. I don't play competitive FPS games, I do coding, graphics, and video work on my monitors.
I dunno. Scrolling around at 120+hz on web pages can be hard to let go. I have a few monitors around my home running at 120 or better, and it's painful to go back to 60hz sometimes.
I don't like smooth scrolling so my web pages might as well be scrolling at 10Hz for how much it matters visually.
I have a few Huawei Mateview 27 monitors. No branding facing you, brushed Alu, slightly higher that 4k (as they’re 16:10 not 16:9 - bonus), very accurate and beautifully designed - as if they were made for the Mac.
Real shame they discontinued them.
Interesting, I have used Samsung 5K displays for a year or two with my Mac Studio, and recently bought an Studio Display after one died. I am SO much happier with the studio display, it powers on so much faster, the black is much more "black", etc. The built-in camera is also really good.
I'm almost considering getting rid of the other two Samsung displays and replacing them with Studio Displays because it's just so much better.
I work with 30hz and cannot tell the difference. Mind it's mostly iTerm work.
They also have fans in them, that's not necessarily good for longevity. Thermally, yes, until the fans clog up or start making noise.
I think quite a few monitors that have USB-C input also have fans in them.
why doesn't 60 hz work for you?
60hz on old CRTs used to give me headaches as the flicker was subtly perceptible. On modern displays it's fine for me (though I mostly look at text so there's not a lot of movement happening).
Well, flicker usually has no connection to framerate on LCDs.
Yes, but does your LG monitor have an Apple logo on it?
It does if they take the case off.
That's funny. If only LG could do proper design.
The studio display is priced like a ultra high end monitor but gets beat by $800-900 monitors all day. It's small, it has bottom of the barrel 60Hz, and it's only saving grace (the resolution plus the build quality) is made way less exciting by the fact it's not a modern OLED with amazing HDR.
Too many great options today to settle that overpriced undersized thing.
The older imacs at least had target display mode. That was pretty amazing so you could say least use it at a screen after it's useful life as a computer. Unfortunately they dropped it years ago. It wasn't very efficient on power and you had to use a key combo, I don't think you could make it boot straight into it every time. But at least it was there.
I really loved target display mode. It made me so happy
agreed! I am just one of several people in my circle who would have loved to keep using our 27" Intel iMacs as target mode displays. Within the Apple ecosystem, once the old 27" iMacs were discontinued there was no simple (again within there Apple ecosystem) inexpensive way of having displays larger than 24".
Some of the old iMacs could just be displays natively.[1] it was just an odd ball feature no one used.
[1] <https://support.apple.com/en-us/105126>
It's a real shame they got rid of target display mode. But then people would hold onto iMacs even longer.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
opendisplay - https://github.com/peetzweg/opendisplay - can make a old iMac's screen useful again. In my case, a 2015 27" iMac can be used as a monitor for my modern Mac laptop, connected via ethernet cable.
Very cool, I like this a lot. Will be giving it a try!
I've had good success with https://juicycrumb.com/product/docklite/#imac-model
There is a g4 model too there if thats the version you have.
They are never as good as native input. There are a lot of compression going on that reduce image quality and increase latency.
Also they require software on both sides, so if you want to use your imac to display your computer BIOS, no.
I wonder if Apple dropped it because of some proprietary licensed IP, such as Intel WiDi, making the feature possible.
No, it was when the displays went to Retina. There was no way to drive them at 5K externally. Thunderbolt didn't have the bandwidth to do so.
They dropped it before the switch from Intel chips; my 2015 iMac could do it (I think) but my 2019 Intel iMac can't.
I think this disappeared with Retina displays.
I'm still using a 2019 iMac 27" and starting to think about Linux again.
I've got a 2014 Retina iMac and a 2017 Retina iMac. Both of them run flawlessly but are now past Apple's support window. And third party software developers are mostly already adopting a "LOL we don't care" attitude about them. The hardware works impeccably, but software developers refuse to lift a finger to make their software run on them anymore. The Apple ecosystem is infuriating. With great sadness, I retired both of them a few months ago and am now running a boring Linux box with a pretty standard DPI monitor. I miss the Macs but their window of usefulness is way too short.
Unpopular opinion no doubt but I think iMacs were way better with Intel chips. I still resent that my fantastic 2012 (yes) iMac finally became unusable due to software incompatibility. It was a beast of a machine. I actually did put Linux on it but it's not particularly satisfactory. If Apple were the 'eco-conscious' company they claim to be, they'd somehow make it so their machines lived forever...or longer. I'd love a new iMac but had to switch to Mac Mini/BenQ monitor after experiencing vertigo with the new gen iMacs.
My 2019 iMac is actually great with Linux on it. It had some issues (built-in WiFi not working, sleep resume bugs) but Claude fixed them for me.
Those retina Mac’s are intel, no?
You could just run any other OS if any of the free OS upgrades that Apple provides aren’t good enough.
I still lament buying a G5 PowerMac back in the day, top of the top spec, absolutely killer machine. Thousands and thousands of dollars. And it just ended up as ewaste while my freaking 486 is still chugging along.
I empathise!
The thing that makes older iMacs "disposable" is that the required cooling vents end up [mostly] blocked, within just a few years – then they thermally throttle, until death.
If you open them up and keep them clean, they can have uses forever:
----
My 27" iMac (2009) still sits faithfully alongside my main 48" setup (because I own the copy of CS4 installed upon it – FU Adobe!). It mostly plays background shows (while I work on main computer, adjacent).
My 24" iMac (2006) still sits faithfully on my tax desk, for its annual usage/filing. It also still plays Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne (quite well!).
----
>I suggest spending a bit more and getting a mac mini and a ... display, instead
This is fantastic advice; my past two Apple's have been Mini's. My three main machines all connect to the same massive 48" display (that is about to outlast its first retired Mini).
The only new iMac I would ever again consider purchasing would be something on-par with the iMac Pro (2017) – but in 2026+ any iMac would need a 32"+ display (minimum) to be "usable" IMHO.
Yeah and the old ones are actually pretty easy to open up. You just take a suction cup and clip the screen off.
I mean even the newer ones aren't bad but cutting the tape, cleaning up and putting new tape is kinda annoying. They should have stuck with the magnets.
I agree, the 7 years is way too short and it's very frustrating.
Your point about them being overbuilt and built to last forever is spot on. Another way to repurpose these machines is to install Linux. I think people will find they are still snappy and supported.
I like Omarchy because it is so different from what I am used to but still useful. Opinions on its creator (DHH) vary, but from an O/S perspective, I enjoy it. I am sure other distros are great too.
Does “support” really matter? My 2020 iMac still performs great, although I use Sequoia on it instead of Tahoe. It also runs Windows or Linux very well and was easy to upgrade to 128GB RAM.
My 2015 iMac is 11 years old and still works fine - I use it to run Windows 10 for the occasional thing that needs that and to test builds of software in High Sierra. It also runs Linux great.
It does, because everyone and their dog started releasing software that only runs on the latest version of macos. So if you are not running the latest macos, you can't use the latest software version.
For example, I used Sketch on my ond mac once and was quite happy, but then they dropped support for the OS version that mac was stuck upon. And since newer libraries resources etc all target latest version of Sketch, the version of Sketch I could run quickly became useless.
The worst is when an application updates itself just so it can stop running and tell you to upgrade to the latest OS version.
Hyperbole. Almost no software on macOS requires the latest.
However, it's great that developers are not too concerned with backwards compatibility. It was really holding back a lot of software
The difference being that the M-series machines do not have good prospects in terms of running Linux well. As I would personally not want to run Windows for sure, this matters a lot.
It has better prospects of being able to run Linux than it does of being able to run Windows, to be fair
Why would that be? You're stuck on drivers either way and ARM Windows runs just fine virtualized.
Asahi Linux exists for ARM Linux and has Windows has no equivalent (since it’s closed source and Microsoft doesn’t want to support that). Linux also runs virtualized, that’s obviously irrelevant because daily driving a VM isn’t a great idea.
Old M series runs Linux well.
Trying using a Mac on which you cannot install latest Firefox and see how your statement holds.
That's one thing Windows is generally much better at.
Firefox runs fine on High Sierra.
It matters because AI is finding more security vulnerabilities than ever.
I was happy but all of a sudden my VPN refuses to release versions for Sonoma
My desktop is still a 2017 iMac Pro and I’m holding out for a workstation-class machine with similarly excellent speakers & display, pitched at the same target market but contemporary spec main board. The standard iMac is not up to this level, and hard pass on the M5 Ultra Studio + Studio Display combo, I like the integrated form factor too much. In the meantime I work mostly on MBP. Fortunately, I am patient.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
I kinda agree with you but this is for people who don't want to think about it. That 24" monitor is incredible compared to anything sub 500.
A 32" gaming monitor is garbage once you're used to 216 ppi for creative work.
Realistically there is like 1 display from BenQ that even comes close spec wise.
Their target user will pay 1700 and have an incredible machine that does literally everything they want and probably won't need to upgrade for what, 5-10 years in a single purchase. Compared to having to buy a mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam, and monitor.
Also having good speakers and a webcam is underrated. I use my wife's Studio Display sometimes and it's a real, real nice piece of hardware. I have a 5k LG ultrafine at work that's spec for spec similar but it feels like a toy in comparison (it's also like half the price though so).
Recently bought a retina 32” screen (Japannext 6k 32”) for around $800. Pretty sure you can get a decent kb and mouse for under $100. But a “magic trackpad” alone is way more than that.
You could get a kb and mouse at apple quality for $70, let alone 100.
The magic trackpad is nice, but really not required.
Looks like a cool monitor (900 euros here). I am happy to see that there are more and more of products in this category popping up. I wish they would chose better names though (Kuyon is pushing it, but Japannext is very Aliexpress coded).
As a francophone, Kuyon sounds funny to me.
Disagree. I like my S3425DW (and my oled laptop) much more than whatever my colleague's macs
Man, but these Macbook Pro screens are so sweet.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions I guess :P
I never cared about any of this until I had to help my wife with monitor shopping where colour accuracy & PPI is king, and spent some time testing these out. Hard to go back now.
I was using the 49" Samsung Ultrawide for years at work and now I feel like I can count the pixels.
100%. Once you get used to an Apple 5K display, the normal and even "high end" gaming monitors just look awful.
That was my experience. The quality of the hardware is also superior. It happened the first time I used a touchpad after using my MBP for a while, it was just bad.
yes :) we can have different opinions
> I don't understand why someone would buy this.
The old Studio Display still goes for $900 used for 27” so it’s definitely a component of the cost that’s valued by the folks who do end up buying these. The PC market very much wants to disregard the ‘high PPI, well-calibrated color by default, built-in webcam and virtual surround speakers’ aspect of the iMac display but that’s worth the entire cost of the device to someone who wants that out of the box (except at that price you get 27” for display only :) Gaming and very large monitor folks may have more nuanced preferences but I can plonk down this iMac for any generic Mac user and they will be satisfied enough to get work done, barring field-specific technical requirements (primarily in thermals or extreme ram/cpu) that exclude use of an iMac regardless of cost.
You’ll have to be more specific about the manner of your dislike to convey how it may have bearing here — is your monitor preference for Mac use? What’s uniquely great about it to you that Apple’s display lacks? etc.
I daily drive a similar monitor and I'd give my left nut for an equivalent with twice the pixel density
I think it's obvious why someone would buy this and why Apples continues to slowly update them.
It's got a bright and colorful design where a Mac mini and any third party monitor would just be silver/grey + black plastic. Everything works together, no decision making about compatibility, no extra purchases, it has a webcam, speakers, one power cable, only one customer support call if you need help with any of it, one warranty etc. It's quite far from the "same" computer as a Mac Mini.
Yes. Design sells.
"Why would anyone get Eames Lounge Chair? I can buy similar enough kit for a 20th of the price".
Since many of us are sort of keen on products this would be really, really good to remember :)
The Eames Lounge Chair is a terrible example; you can buy near-exact clones for about 1/7th the price of a real one. There's one in the room with me right now. It's fantastic, and will probably last me decades.
Does the chair stop fitting your bottom after 8 years?
Yep, for someone with ~zero technical aptitude, I'd happily pay the premium for decreasing the number of things that can go wrong. Things getting unplugged accidentally account for a lot of tech support.
I am sure that you can have both taste for that design and technical aptitude.
Oh yeah, for sure, they're nice. Just mean that it's also just a real utilitarian benefit for those without technical aptitude.
This 100%.
A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.
An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.
Totally different markets.
This. Cables suck. Imagine if cars were like this and you had to haul the engine or battery around on trailer.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1v87f6i/moni...
[2] https://kuycon.us/monitors/P20
Many people report poor colour and uniformity with the panels Kuycon use. Also just on the specs alone the brightness is dismal.
The Dell is only 450 nits, and the Kuycon site says the it costs $1050 delivered to the US with a stand ($950 if you BYO VESA stand).
Even using the sale prices, an iMac is still cheaper than a Mini with the Kuycon.
The P20 is a 28" display so is much lower pixel density than the iMac.
Never heard of this brand up until now. Design is indeed Apple-ish, are the panels any good?
I think they at least used to be literally the same panels (though potentially a downrated version with higher dead pixel tolerance etc)
And it's almost impossible to find ones that get as bright as Apple monitors for less than Apple charges!
My absolute favorite feature of Apple displays is that I don't need to have the brightness cranked to max all the time, even when sitting next to a window. Some of them are, dare I say it, too bright for a normal office at maximum brightness (yet still dim for comfort in a pitch black room).
There are some good alternatives if your budget stretches to $1000, though: Samsung's 27" ViewFinity S9 comes to mind, with 2880p and 600 nits.
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
A glass front is a negative. Reflections always get in the way, and they therefore don't comply with worker safety rules in some countries.
If you do creative work, including frontend development, you need to have a hidpi glass display because a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices.
Apple's solution to reflections is to overpower them. I use my MacBook in some bright public spaces and reflections have never been an issue. For an iMac which is more likely than a laptop to be used in an environment with controlled lighting, it's just a non-issue.
> a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices
Looks to me like it would be the opposite unless a majority of your users are on a Mac. MacOS has a 30% market share in the USA and only around 15% globally.
> you need to have a hidpi glass display because a fuzzy plastic display will not faithfully represent what your viewers/users will see on their devices.
That literally cannot be true, unless you're saying that your users are ALSO going to have a 218ppi desktop. If you're developing for phones, sorry, a 218ppi display is woefully inadequate for replicating what the phone looks like because phones (modern iPhones) have 450+ ppi, more than TWICE the ppi of the display you're using.
An apple display is nice. But it's absolutely NOT absolutely required for anything no matter the creative work you're doing, because there's nothing it matches except developing stuff for display on that exact display.
Overpowering them leads to eyestrain though in some people
Nanotexture is an option now, to get a matte finish and cut down on reflections.
Fair point but do people really need high pixel density at 32"?
I have bought a 32" 4k monitor like five years ago and have really regretted it. Sure fonts are slightly crisper but I would rather have preferred to have a higher refresh rate. Newer games will barely run on 4k if you don't have top of the like hardware or will need frame generation trickery. Plus the odd app that still doesn't support hidpi displays properly.
I feel like 1440p is already the sweet spot.
I’ve got a 32” 4k monitor at work, and a 27” 5k at home (the rather problematic LG one; got it just as it was being taken off the market in Europe over emissions rules). The 27” is so much nicer.
A 6K 32 inch from LG like $1200. You can get a 5K for $800 now, although it might be Asus.
"You can get the same thing for less money" has never been an effective criticism vs Apple computers. People will pay the extra $800 so they don't have to also buy a 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse... and they'll all be the same color.
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.
If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)
My Mom had a 2008 20" iMac. When it got long in the tooth, we replaced it with an M1 in 2021 or 2022. She was disappointed she wasn't able to get a 20" screen again and had to get one with a huge 24" screen!
Not everyone wants a massive display. Not everyone wants cables everywhere. Not everyone cares about their keyswitches. Not everyone upgrades often enough for a few hundred more bucks to really make a difference.
And sometimes having something that looks nice and clean and colorful brings you joy. That’s who this is for.
It is a design piece. No wires besides the single power chord. Yet webcam and speakers working.
Yeah this thing is built for desk reception
It's also built for people who need a reasonable desktop computer but don't want their living room to look like a 14 year old's bedroom, or a corporate office space.
I'm not one of them, but I think many of us have had to convince partners that the big clunky monstrosity of a setup is actually cool...
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
This. I worked as a network/computer guy for the architecture department at our university. They all had iMacs, which for me was quite a win because replacing/carrying them was super easy: disconnect power chord, carry to my desk - done. Fix or install whatever needs fixing, and simple carry back.
It’s cord bro not chord. Only mentioned it cos you did it in a couple of comments.
Mea culpa. Needless to say english is not my first language.
A "power chord" is a thing, btw, but it's something you play on guitar
My wife made me essentially give away my budget-friendly gaming PC and get an iMac when she moved in with me after grad school.
Did you make her replace all her shoes with your preferred brand (Crocs)? That would be a fair exchange then.
That's pathetic.
They even put the (optional, by default it's wireless only) 2.5G Ethernet socket in the external power brick. This pattern seems to have been introduced with the M1 iMac. The 2.5G upgrade is new.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
iPhones have great cameras. Get a MagSafe mount for on top of the monitor and stick the camera to it. The feature is called "continuity camera", and it works with any Mac app that would use a USB webcam.
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
I've been happy with Samsung's 27" 5k which has a decent clip-on camera: https://www.samsung.com/us/monitors/flat/27-viewfinity-s9-5k...
I've got one. It can be a bit annoying because I have a Samsung TV in the same room, and turning the TV off with its remote sometimes also turns the monitor off.
Lenovo sells such a display. Built in mic, cam and speakers.
It’s also a usb c dock with a Ethernet port
DELL too, bought a 4k 24" conference monitor off a second hand site for £80. It's got a good quality pop-up webcam, too. Usb hub, hdmi/dp ports, Ethernet on the back. Connects and powers the laptop with a single thunderbolt usb-c cable.
Not sure about ppi and stuff, but works great for me.
any specific model you had in mind? when I'm looking at the Lenovo offering, the "built-in" webcams are protruding and if I pair it with 4k resolution I quickly end up at 1300 dollars (yoga pro)... for $1600 you get the 5k apple Studio Display.
Just get the iMac, come on.
Apple used this picture in 2007 (!): https://64.media.tumblr.com/ddfe45456996d1244d65373ff9b6fd73...
I still think it captures the ethos of why fairly well.
> _antiquated 24" monitor_
What's antiquated about it? It's the perfect monitor for most tasks. Very bright, high DPI. If you're typing a paper, this is going to be much better than a 15" laptop monitor.
I love my 24, though a second monitor. Larger and you have to move your head around too much.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
Thanks!
What about Dell's UltraSharp series? I have a 1440p 27" one and the only complaint I have is that that particular model has a bit of inverse ghosting. Not egregiously so but compared to my ugly MSI gaming monitor right next to it it's a bit noticeable.
Edit: For posterity the model I have is a U2724D.
kuycon has a basically Apple display clone.
Huawei mateview is also quite eye-candy.
Have you tried Samsung? They have designs that mimic Apple, though probably plastic.
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
People need (!) this type of devices in representative settings, eg the reception of a boutique hotel.
How is an all-in-one better than a mini attached to the back of a monitor, or better yet locked in a cabinet for security?
It looks nicer. What you’re suggesting has either a brick attached on the back and/or at least two cables (but probably more).
Aesthetics obviously.. engineers and tech nerds are not the target audience for this machine.
>a mini attached to the back of a monitor
It is ugly. Especially i places like a reception, where the back of the screen is facing the customer. Plain and simple.
A boutique hotel needs a 27” version. They arent gonna switch from a windows all in one to a smaller mac aio.
Good point, but do these settings need the latest M-series chip then, too?
Most I've seen are just used to RDP into a Windows box anyway, so probably not. That does make it a little strange that no one seems to design a nice looking terminal PC.
No, but if you're on a 3-5 year refresh cycle and this is your year, it'd be lame to not have the latest chip!
It's simpler and better for both hardware makers and buyers to just keep refreshing instead of trying to get clever about who deserves the current series of chips in their form factor, assuming the refreshes are of similar cost, utility etc.
These places aren't going to care about saving $200 on a machine that will return an order of magnitude or more than that in sales per hour
That would be a 4K 32", and I don't understand who would buy such a low-res monitor. A "very nice" 5K or 6K monitor is way more than $800 alone.
Try to find a good monitor with a good integrated webcam, speaker, microphone and usb-hub. You simply won't find any except Apple Studio Displays which start at $1500.
You forgot Retina pixel density.
Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine.
Do... people drag a full iMac to a public workspace like that? I feel like this would be ridiculed since even most co-working spaces provide monitor hookups. But if I saw you order a single coffee at a tiny shop and are set-up with an all-in-one desktop then me and everyone else will be giving you a side-eye
Slightly less worse would be one of those fold-out multi-monitor attachments that I've never seen in the wild either
People still occasionally wear Vision Pros in public, so I don't think the normal social etiquette applies here.
That said, truly not caring what strangers at a coffee shop think about you is probably a great step toward a great life.
To a certain extent, yes. But you could apply that same logic to people who do indecent exposure. At some point, if you're setting up for 4+ hours in a tiny coffee shop with a laptop replacement and you're not buying more than just a cup of joe, you're doing a net-bad for your community by making that coffee shop and thus cheap community spaces less viable.
If you want to do it in a Panera or SBux go ahead but not in a local shop. Being conscientious is actually a good thing, believe it or not.
There are plenty of local shops that are large, have plenty of seating, and don't mind you staying for several hours. It's up to the shop to enforce rules if it doesn't want people camping or using laptops or if it wants to require purchase.
I feel comfortable asserting most freelance professionals have outgrown a fear of "side-eye".
Do... people drag a full iMac to a public workspace like that?
I saw a guy with a Commodore PET at a coffee shop in Toronto once.
And more than once, I've been that guy with a TRS-80 at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop in Las Vegas.
A TV reporter who stopped in for coffee seemed interested in what I was doing, until he saw that I was just playing Monopoly.
That seems really great, though. If you showed up with an ancient retro PC, you're asking for other nerds to chat you up and ask you what you're tinkering with.
Nobody's going to want to talk to you if you show up with a full iMac setup.
definitely saw a few in starbucks around the world. no one cares
> Have you ever tried dragging that monitor and all those cables and peripherals into a Starbucks and camping there for 7 hours? This is a freelancer’s dream machine
For sure and you get a nice workout hauling a full desktop computer around to coffee shops. A fun conversation starter too, I bet!
If you bring in a color printer and photo scanner, you can really get some work done. Just need to grab another table to fit it all. I am sure nobody would mind.
I’ve literally seen this
Hold on, you do what now?
Have you ever tried using an iMac at a Starbucks?
I mean, this seems like a dream but in a bad sense: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/imacs...
Nothing personal, but the increasing amount of people setting up their work desk in coffee shops or lunch diners makes me not want to go there anymore. If I want to be surrounded by people working I'll go and eat at the office. It disturbs the vibe of the place a bit for me personally.
Apple will happily sell you the Mac mini for that setup too. Or the Mac Studio if you want something beefier.
It’s all about segmentation of the market.
Apple has customers that want a small, well designed all in one computer that fits on a desk. If it has a pop of color, all the better. It is a customer segment that Apple knows well and has been serving since the first Macs.
There are many companies that want to address the market for a budget friendly small PC with an external monitor. There aren’t many that try to address this segment of the market.
Don't forget a decent webcam and pretty good speakers. I roll these out at work and I don't like retiring them after seven years; however monitors don't last forever either.
There's something to be said about the aesthetic of having everything in one, not having speakers and Webcams strewn across the place.
Gotta say they do look amazing in hotel check ins, shop desks, retail etc.
A single object to hand your kid for their dorm that will move every 8 months is much nicer than a bunch of parts and wires.
No, that's called a laptop.
bringing a stationary desktop to the dorms has never been the correct decision
lan parties, dude!
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
You just explained it. Extra cables, potential mounting hardware… when disassembled is also more to pack up, move, and set back up.
You might not think it’s much harder, but it’s harder.
But why not just buy a Macbook at that point?
I agree. In the case of the older 27" iMacs-- you couldn't really get a 5K screen of that quality for any reasonable cost. It made it actually useful.
Deployments to organizations like .edu that strongly appreciates there's less hassle per seat (and gets them for under wholesale a lot of the time).
Well, I got M4 iMac because I wanted a screen on my workbench with minimum cables and must be VESA mounted. I also needed a mac to build iOS apps. iMac was perfect fit.
1. Social signalling
2. Aesthetic
3. Pretty colors
4. Nostalgia
The price put upon "I don't have to go figure out what a good monitor is and what are good input devices".
For some people is pretty much priceless.
Also there's no cables to connect the monitor and the device making it all one thing you can pickup and move around, which people value as well. Also the difference between (900+$monitor+$mouse+$keyb) and $1700 is really not a lot of money for a lot of people, especially those people considering an Apple devices.
Anyone who cares about those things you listed is not the intended audience, and instead the intended audience will buy these.
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
But they aren't Apple.
No, most of them aren't 6k.
Do you ever talk to non-technical people about the computers they use?
same reason people buy any new device, form factor. we have one in our kitchen and love it, it gets spun around like an ipad .
They are, in fairness, quite nice monitors.
Some here claim that the design, but I think the iMac looks ugly. The bezels are ginormous. It looks like a 15 year old product.
It starts at $1500 not $1700
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.
I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?
Why is antiquated?
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
[0] https://www.retinarelay.com/
Cool, I suppose it doesn’t work with windows? To use a 5k iMac as monitor to my windows desktop?
I'm pretty sure it relies on Mac APIs like Metal and ScreenCaptureKit but it's worth reaching out to the developer. He was very responsive when I requested features, and it may be a lot easier to build a windows application that adheres to the protocol using agentic development.
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
I have 4K at 32". It's pretty sharp but at 6K the pixels would be significantly less visible, and I could run it at an even 200% so that older programs don't have scaling issues.
And I don't need to run games at full resolution.
6K at 32" would be the same density as 5K at 27"
4k stretched to 32 is awful. screen door very visible. honestly it’s not even quite enough for 27.
Oh to be young again. I use a 43" Samsung TV at 4K. That works for me. The 32" 4K monitor next to it I run at 2560x1440, you know, so I can read it...
You need to increase UI scaling, not turn down the resolution. All modern desktops support this in some form. I would only lower the resolution if the GPU can't keep up in games after exhausting all other options such as AI upscaling.
If you use a 27" 5K iMac its impossible to go to 32" at 4K. It looks terrible.
Apple have never released a 32" version of the iMac; even the iMac Pro was only available as a 27" model.
Completely agree.
iPad docking station too
To me, it doesn't make sense, I would go a Mac Studio with multiple screens instead a big 32, but some people love working with one monitor.
Thats my setup - Mac Studio with two 32” monitors.
Would just be nice if I could buy the monitors from apple too.
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
You can't continue to support Target Display mode when the connectors and cables of the day don't yet support 5k displays.
If you have an older 5k iMac, there is an inexpensive third party hardware kit to convert it into a display with modern connectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VXQu0fAc8s
There are countless non-5k iMacs. I never said it had to be that. I had a beautiful 27” 2.5k display from 2011 I could’ve put to work.
There is no excuse other than laziness IMO. They likely decided not enough people use it and that they didn’t need to keep an excellent feature (total speculation to be fair). I can use iMovie to directly control/run playback from a dvcam from 2002 via like 4 daisy chained cables - including FireWire 400 - but they can’t connect an iMac anymore over thunderbolt 4 after supporting that for over a decade? Nah. Maybe there is a legitimate reason but I am incredibly skeptical.
The iMacs before the 5k version did support Target Display mode.
They dropped it when the cable and connector standards of the day didn't support a display that big.
That's not laziness, it's a technical limitation.
Now that we have newer high bandwidth connection standards, you can once again use a newer iMac as an external display over a thunderbolt connection.
When 5K iMacs first came out in 2014, they were mostly limited to displayport 1.2, which was unable to support 5K without either dropping to 45Hz or using chroma subsampling. So the 2014 version is excused, and we can excuse the 2015 version too.
But with the 2017 revision, they had a displayport 1.4 GPU in there, and there was no good reason for leaving display target mode out.
And they've left it out ever since.
Streaming compressed video with a significant latency penalty doesn't count. But if it we act like it does count, then they lose their excuse for removing target display in the first place, because even in 2014 it was possible to do 4:2:0 5K @ 60Hz over a normal connector. That looks better than compressed video does!
Yes the previous iMacs sent a signal. Their current computers don’t receive the signal. This is not about the 5K display, you’re missing the core problem. It stopped working when the silicon line came out. You can’t get any iMac to work in target display mode on silicon Macs.
That’s not a technical limitation, that’s laziness. Go read more about this. It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
There is literally nothing stopping you from using a modern iMac as an external display using a thunderbolt connection today.
If you're OK with video compression artifacts, you can even do it over a WiFi connection.
You cannot grab an iMac, plug it into a silicon Mac, and get a picture on the iMac (without 3rd party software). This is incorrect. Please go look this up. The feature stopped working when silicon Mac’s came out. It only works on Intel Macs. 5K iMac or not.
Target display mode, the feature that allowed this, is no longer supported.
> without 3rd party software
At least you can finally acknowledge reality.
Also, VLC over a wired connection and streaming from one Mac to another using WiFi (AirPlay) are built into the OS.
I have already explained that and it’s not the same as native support any more than display link means one can claim M1’s run 2 external monitors (Mac mini excluded). I wrote this multiple comments ago:
> It simply doesn’t work anymore without 3rd party solutions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266629
You know what I am saying. This is a dumb argument and I’m moving on.
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
If you have a 27" iMac with the Retina display then you can get a kit to transform it into a monitor.
The strangest thing is that with Thunderbolt 4+ you could easily do this in software only I suppose?
There are third party apps like Luna Display that do this now.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
Dense models are not well suited to this. Depends on your system, but most inference engines let you put the KV cache on the host. They should let you use "Q8" KV cache format as well which takes half the storage of bf16, the default format. You essentially are stuck at having to fit the entire dense model into VRAM because it must compute across the entire model every token. Without it being in VRAM it is slow. MoE models such as Qwen 35B with 3B active parameters are much friendlier to limited VRAM systems. This is why you see systems with 16GB of VRAM running something like DeepSeek Flash if they have a bit of spare system RAM. Usually not at any good token rate, but tolerable.
Dense models also don't like quantization as much and are less tolerant of it. There are some very interesting smaller models like https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Labs-Dory1.0-4... Dory that I would check out. You need system RAM or to stream a larger MoE model from disk and it won't be fast. You need to specialize the models some to get quality results if you have very limited system resources.
I've benchmarked quite a few models on my 9070XT, and I basically gave up hope of using models locally: https://claude.ai/artifact/77pHgucqQNsmic8ZEnqdBA
I asked Claude to come up with 7 problems to solve that were not part of any benchmarks. Besides speed, I asked it to put together a scoring that would reflect models that perform well on the 7 problems and in a reasonable time-frame (RWS, the definition is in the artifact). I valued models that produced good answers in a reasonable time better than models that had very high throughput but kept spitting useless stuff. Overall, IIRC most of them still had a >30% chance of producing wrong/non-working replies.
I then tested Strata ( https://github.com/niko1221/strata ) and the results are not even close. You can basically ignore everything in that table and use Strata instead, you can use bigger/less-quantized models and have way better results. Basically any otherwise-decent model degrades noticeably at Q < 5, and KV cache at Q4 also contributes a lot.
Still, a 20$/mo Claude subscription is way cheaper/more efficient if you code 2-3h in the evening than running stuff locally, unless you really have hardware than can hold models that get most things right at the first try. You can iterate way faster and cover a lot more ground in 2-3h using a Claude subscription, or OpenRouter if you prefer to change models. You get faster replies that are 99% correct at the first try, whereas using the local model you'd be spending 30% of your time fixing things that don't work and prompting it to do better.
Nowadays I use the local model to delegate tasks that would burn a lot of tokens, like sifting through big data archives for indexing and such.
QFN Q4 K XL Unsloth is basically identical to the bf16 model. It’s KL divergence is very very small. It is competitive with the full model. Also I benchmarked iq3 xxs on Strata for 3 days against deepswe and it scored better than the published benchnarks for the model. If the gsq rco quant prettain tasks fit well it is a great model quant. My data shows it takes 20% more tokens basically than q4 xl. A4 xl is within noise on all my repeated task benchmarks over the public model serving and my own runs of q8. I published the deeswe results. You have to be very specific about model choice and know these models and their quirks.
This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
https://stealthgoat.com/fnfl/pelicans.html
Also YMMV in “faster” — I have less than 5K into my home AI lab shenanigans and it’s pretty fast :)
> QFN Q4 K XL Unsloth is basically identical to the bf16 model.
Yes, but like original poster I have 16GB of VRAM and 64GB of RAM, I was referring to non-Strata benchmarks :)
I did quickly run a couple things on Strata but haven't gotten around yet to benchmark bigger models/customize them with Strata, but will do rather soon. So far Strata/Swift IQ2_XS performed really well compared to non-Strata/Qwen3.8 quantized variants.
> This is not about if a frontier AI provider is cheaper. It is about having control over your data and use of AI.
Yep, totally get it, and to be honest getting to run ablated models sometimes can also be useful.
> Also YMMV in “faster” — I have less than 5K into my home AI lab shenanigans and it’s pretty fast :)
My rig is... ~1.5k, maybe 3k if we count the CPU and GPU upgrade since 2019 :-D I really wanted to grab one of the latest mini-PCs (Halo, Spark, and other minor assemblers) for local setup, but to be honest I can't justify a 6k+ purchase for me and my wife alone. Perhaps in 3 years these mini-PCs will get to the ~2k ballpark (perhaps used), and although older by then, I might be able to run things 24/7 locally as well.
With 32 GB more of RAM you can run ISTA GSQ RCO IQ3 XXS fast. You can make it work now but it is tight. You can stream experts from disk with builds now. You will get an okay token rate. Try it out if you have some disk space. It is a very good local model. I benched it at that quant. Sonnet 5 class at coding benchmarks.
Get a couple or V100S GPU. Figure out cooling. They will run it /fast/ with the right engine. :)
The easiest thing to do (takes 5 minutes) is to use LMStudio and then search for the model inside LMStudios UI.
It will show you on the model selection IF a model fits and if you use a "Qwen 3.8-35B-A3B" type of model, it should just work out of the box. A3B stands for Active which means you need a lot less fast ram.
You will run into issues fast though: If you have big tasks for it to do, your pc/mac will get warm very fast and noisy and you will cosume relevant more energy.
And as you mention: yeah small context!
Its still not that practical in my opinion.
I have been trying to setup LMstudio for hours and the model downloads always fail. Looks like my vpn is blocked somehow/somewhere :/
If you have enough system RAM (64GB), you can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with a GPU as small as 12GB, this repo is pretty amazing:
https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata/
My setup is a Ryzen 3600, 90GB DDR4 allocated to a VM (don’t even really need that much, just had it available, special thanks to the year 2024), and an RX 9060XT 16GB ($500 GPU).
I get around 40-60 tok/s depending on the quantization level I choose.
As you can see, the CPU is nothing special, don’t even need DDR5.
Yes it runs on all levels of hardware - with the latest Strata my 5090 and 64GB DDR5 gets 200-240 tok/sec decode, 6500 tok/sec prefill. Around $0.09/M tokens in power usage (have excess solar capacity).
Jealous, lol. But I did spend a grand total of $500 for my setup. The rest of the server was built purchased with the use case of running game servers.
AI harnesses like Claude will set it all up for you, you can just say "I want to run a localllm on this machine" and it will find the best one for your hardware and even help you fine tune it etc
You will end up with a sub-par result. The space for small models is more specialized and specific and you should optimize to the specific task and or tasks you want to do. It will get some local model working, but there are a lot of interesting small models in the 4-10B space to look at and play with for your specific tasks. If you expect a full agentic coding agent it's just not going to happen without a larger model like Qwen 35B and ... that is not that great by today's standards, even Muse Glimmer is better.
After arguing and back and forth with Claude (not straight away), it found a kv streaming fork of llama https://github.com/achyudh/llama.cpp and an interesting ascii only model Qwen3.8-27B-ASCII-Condensed-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf . It's running, i'll see how it goes.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
SSD token caching (like oMLX does) goes a long way for prefill. Typical miss rates are under 5% in long coding sessions, which is mostly the output of a turn's tool use.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
These M7 rumors and that they're skipping the M6 Pro/Max rumors are really making me try to stretch my M1 Pro until next year.
I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
Waiting is never a stupid decision because you can always save a good deal on apple refurbished. I got a mac on bestbuy refurbished a couple years ago shortly after it was released. It had like 4 cycles on the battery and I saved hundreds.
They've been saying the $LATEST_CHIP is better for AI since at least the M3.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Srouji is killing it on whatever he has on mind or is asked to do. Everyone is riling up on GPU and Cloud AI costs. 99.99% of what people use AI for today already processes fine on an M1 from 5 years ago.
Apple killed M6 Pro, M6 Ultra and M6 Max to focus on AI chip, so yeah that'd be a more sensible option.
I guess this means I’ll be hanging onto my M1 Pro for another year and seeing what M7 has to offer.
This is the first time I’ve ever kept a computer this long and never really felt like it needed to be upgraded. I suppose this is a bit of a gift and a curse for Apple.
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Will local AI eventually pull the proverbial rug out from under the big providers and the huge sums invested in building out data centers?
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
Interesting. I have the same machine w/ same specs. I find it sluggish. I think it depends on what you're doing.
You might want to do a full restore or something, my M1 Max isn't sluggish at all.
I recently upgraded to Golden Gate, and that helped a bit, but it still feels sluggish.
What are you doing with yours? I recently started using Android/iOS emulators locally and combined with anything else my M1 Pro 32 GB feels unusable.
Definitely grabbing 128 GB + for the next machine.
In this economy?!
I jest...but I'm disgusted by the price gouging going on. Glad my hardware is relatively recent and I had mostly maxed out already when I bought it a few years back. The same setup today would be closer to $7k with equivalent parts.
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
> Memory fab capacity will go up
The fabs are terrified to overscale in case the market collapses before the builds are complete.
> AI datacenter provisioning will go down
Depends on political opposition at both local and national levels. Hard to predict the future, which feeds into the previous point.
What is it with fabs where there is just no competition springing up outside the existing memory cartels? Is the knowledge of how to build and run a fab strictly controlled by these companies? Is all qualified talent just immediately poached and put behind NDA and noncompetes? It just makes no sense. Capitalism would suggest these conditions with so much unstable equilibrium in this market would see increase in supply to take advantage of the pricing. The fact that this isn't playing out as such suggests there are some very powerful thumbs on the scale of this "free" market.
It takes about a decade to bring one up and during EVERY wave of a booming memory demand supply crunch there has been a subsequent round of major bankruptcies from suppliers who decided to scale and had no demand when they finally got online.
Supply is not elastic and responds very much slower than demand. There's no conspiracy or corruption needed for this result.
The conspiracy is real, it's even been proven in court, but as things stand, it's also necessary because of the factors you describe. Investors will not touch the DRAM market with a 10-foot pole, so it has had to rely on self-funding. While there have been state subsidies too, price fixing has proven to be the most effective way to survive the extreme volatility and fund the massive capex necessary for each generational leap. They have gotten a bit more sophisticated about it since the court case 20 years ago, but as far as I can tell, it's basically the same as it's ever been. The lack of effective competition is a function of the market itself, not any tilted scales. If anything, tilting the scales on purpose with greater state involvement is the only way to change the dynamics, but few states have the capacity and competence to carry that out effectively.
> Investors will not touch the DRAM market with a 10-foot pole
Have you not seen Micron or Sandisk stock?
Sandisk doesn't make DRAM.
Micron's stock price did go way up, after they stopped selling DRAM to the consumer market. It has been flat for several months though.
For comparison, SK Hynix stock is flat YoY and Samsung's stock did go up this year, but has come back down a bit (they're also much more diversified). Those are the only other companies outside of China that actually make DRAM at scale. There's also CXMT, which is making inroads, but its stock is not traded on any open markets, and the company is heavily backed by the Chinese government.
Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. You don't need to run large models for usefulness. Large models can get things write the first time, but thats their only advantage. Running small models that are good enough like gemma4:31b fast allows you to do faster iterations.
And if you really want, you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
A $2500 Mac Studio with M5 Max running Qwen3.8-27b or Gemma4:31b in oMLX gets about the same speeds you quoted... and it comes with a warranty and has enough memory not to choke at longer context lengths.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
>Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k, 3090: ~40tok/sec
Try more like 70-130 tok/sec. https://github.com/L-Forster/open-jet/tree/master/megakernel.
And also Qwen models famously chase benchmarks. They are good for writing code, but fall behind in other areas. Gemma4:31B is 6gb larger and does a much better job across all areas. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vyzopv/gemma4_...
Go ahead and run Gemma4 on your M1, and you will find that its unusable at 12 tok/sec.
And this is also not touching prefill, which is the biggest thing that you need fast, and Apple sucks in this regard compared to nvidia cards. With gfx cards, you can throw big codebases at the local models and it will happily crunch through them in very little time.
Sure, spending 1.5k on a Macbook enables you to run a local model, and if you really have a good reason for running local (like running heretic/abliterated models) for tasks you don't mind waiting for, it works. The difference is, spend 1k more and let you never have to pay for tokens, and you can run inference all day long without your computer thermal throttling, like your Macbook.
And I don't need to make assumptions when you say idiotic stuff like "We're getting close to local AI being really useful", like you have any idea what you are talking about. On par with being an Apple fan though.
Most people don't run their own LLMs, let alone install GPUs themselves.
I'm one of those Mac users, but I do have a linux tower for remote dev work and LLMs.
..really useful on a Mac. FTFY
I'll wait for the M7 iMac with OLED and then never buy it
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
But the iMacs only have the sans-adjective M-series processors. And is it really gonna have optimal thermals in that thin frame pressed against a big, bright high-res screen?
If you need to push performance you'd probably go for a Mac Studio, no? Or at least a Mini.
Desktop maybe, but Imac that costs more for the same specs of the mini you can shove in the drawer in a desk? I mean with the airspace taken up by an imac you only remotely connect to you could probably have two side by side stacks of I don't know, maybe 20 mac minis each? HPC territory.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
An imac doesn't strike me as a desktop with proper cooling. Maybe they do some funny business in the chassis, but its pretty clear that airflow has been put on the bench in favor of having a sexy thin backside.
>or a reception desk at a business
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
Laptops are bad because you have to crane your neck down.
If you need portability, you have your phone already.
I agree with you, but Apple's monitor situation is letting everybody down. Not having a 32" monitor for professionals is frustrating. I am glad I bought my Pro Display XDR.
Too big for the use cases above. iMac is not for “pro” use unless you’re a writer perhaps.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
I think it's mainly that from 2006 to 2019, the iMac was the only mid-tier desktop that Apple sold. Today, you can get a Mac mini or MBP that's the same or faster than an iMac.
There was a quad core Mini back in 2011. The old iMac was a good all in one package for designers, especially because you'd spend half or more for an equivalent quality screen.
Yeah, they had a "server" Mac mini that was faster multi-core at the cost of being slower single-core. But 2011 Mac mini server https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/specs/mac-mini-c... or non-server https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/specs/mac-mini-c... vs the iMac https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i7-3... of the same year, the iMac is much faster than both in both single and multi core.
I did have a 2010 Mac mini server, don't remember how it compared to the non-server one other than having dual HDDs instead of the DVD drive. I put them in RAID-1.
Too relatable.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
All while complaining about the OLED price.
Wait until the ProRes version comes out before you sleep on it permanently.
it will cost a kidney + Apple would remove the keyboard and sell it back to you for 499$.
They'll sell the kidney or the keyboard back to you for $499?
Yes. And we think you're gonna love it.
I can't even get a Temu kidney for less than $999, no way there's an iKidney for less than $30,000
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
it is a piece of furniture though, so aesthetics matter
Effectively yeah, it’s a desk lamp.
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
Look at that thick base of the iMac. That's where they should put the CPU. Bring back the G4 iMac you cowards!
You can get it with a VESA mount instead of the base.
>meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever
"And we’re just getting started."
It is an Apple machine, yes.
Still 24 inch screen in 2026. You can get a 27 inch panel for far less than a stick of ram these days. Why not give us a decent sized screen!
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
And receptionists! Don't forget receptionists. :)My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.
I’ve felt the same way since way back then ever since reading about this guy’s setup[0], so I paired a 11” MBA with the quad core Mac Mini 2012.
I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.
It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.
0: https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-note-about-my-new-mac-set...
That's interesting. (I mean that genuinely. Sometimes when people say that, they mean "You seem crazy")
What's the appeal there? Doing big-RAM-requirement stuff that just won't run on a laptop?
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
It's 24" 4k display with perfect 2x scaling. Good luck finding something similar. 24" != 24" HiDPI perfect 2x scaling.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small. My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
Because then they can't sell you their overpriced 27" screen.
Waited for it so long but.... still no memory option for more than 32GB. It would be nice to have some kind of a pro model.
32GB max memory is ludicrous today. We've regressed as a technological society.
Did you know Moore had two not-as-famous cousins with their own laws? Sam and Leslie.
Sam predicted price-per-transistor-per-square-inch density would asymptote, while Leslie predicted it would level off and then regress.
Leslie's Law is in full effect, it seems.
It's a fairly realistic lower-bound for professional macOS work, if you don't want to thrash the SSD with zram writes.
If you find yourself loading that much stuff in memory you probably need to offshore your compute
As the saying goes, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
the laptop has up to 128G as an option, but also pushes towards 10k for a laptop, insane
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
They’re looking for an iMac Pro. Sorry if you didn’t catch that, but M5 Pro / Max are not available in iMac form.
I understand that, but they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6, which was not planned. If they need higher RAM they can go M5 Pro/Max (outside of iMac form factor) or wait hopefully for newer iMac Pro variants in the future.
To be honest, I doubt we're going to see iMacs with very high RAM any time soon. RAM is expensive and most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor, not get an all-in-one with a small-ish screen.
> they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6
That's not what they said. I gathered they were waiting for an iMac refresh, with the hopes that iMac Pro would get an upgrade. Hence the "would be nice to have some kind of a pro model"
> most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor
The 27" iMac Pro 5K is holding its value pretty well on second-hand markets, despite its age. The Mac Studio replaced the Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro.
The maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio is only AU$28,700 / US$18,300.
Peripherals not included.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
Used to have a 27" iMac and loved it. If they made a decent iMac "Pro" with a 27" again, I would seriously consider getting one!
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
They didn't always have the chin. Imac G4 put the computer at the base. Consider the size of a mac mini you could do something like that today without needing half a sphere like the g4.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
0: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...
The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.
There were serious thermal issues with the late 00's 24" iMacs. I had one that ate 3 hard drives, and then the display in about 6 years.
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
Power over fibre?
But where would you put post-it notes? :P
Makes the angle very easy to adjust.
I used to put post-its on mine too.
What a boring looking device. It looks like it could have been made by HP or Microsoft. What has happened to Apple?
That's because the design hasn't been significantly revised for years, and Microsoft and HP copied its design language long ago. Also, total desktop sales are 14 % of all Macs, so the iMac is maybe 5% and understandably not a priority.
It exactly like their last dozen iMacs but with slightly less rounded corners.
I wish they would put these colors on laptops.
For me it's the other way round. I wish they would offer a space-gray or black option like they have on their laptops
Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
I was looking for this comment. Yes!
The old aluminum imacs look so damn good too. Actually feels pro instead of borrowing one of the CareBear's computers.
YES!
I do think they should offer that for iMacs as well.
Agreed; they're super cute. Cuteness-factor is one of the reasons I ended up with the Framework Laptop 12
they put some on macbook neos ... But one thing for sure, Apple reserve those flashy colors for entry levels models (Ipad 10/11th gen, Macbook Neo).
The design, especially with those colors is gorgeous, yes.
Why can't we buy the colored magic keyboard as standalone product?
I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
> £700/£800 buys you a 24" display
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
In 7 years, either the screen or the built in computer inside this iMac will be obsolete. I’d rather buy a separate mac mini and a wide curved screen. The mac mini is simply so small and fast that buying an iMac makes no sense.
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small. My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that. (Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
24” and 60hz…
It’s intentional product segmentation. Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary.
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
Yes, I liked using them for NAS builds. Great for ZFS machines.
Intel is weird with their stuff like that, I wrote about how they introduced and then dropped an SHA instruction that could be used to optimize hashing (useful for things like block checksum hashes on storage servers) before: https://neosmart.net/blog/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-...
Wait until you find out that some lower-tier Intel CPUs can use regular RAM in an ECC mode, albeit losing some capacity and throughput.
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Perfect for the target audience!
My wife used to mock me for being adamant about 120hz+ monitors, until the day I had her try my 200hz monitor for an entire day.
Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
I wish I could be like you, because going back to 60Hz feels like everything is stuttering for me.
It's also correlated with age. Older = fewer "fps" neurologically.
How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.
Mhh, maybe it was the resolution that I turned down on mobile to save battery.
I can just go in to settings and turn the battery size up?
Never thought I'd meet someone who's eyes can't see "more than X Hz anyways".
What phone is that? I thought they all had variable refresh rate nowadays.
If you mean LTPO, most in fact don't have it.
I have a 60hz monitor and a 144hz monitor and I simply can't tell the difference in normal usage. I can see a difference on something like http://testufo.com if I specifically look for it, and until I checked that I assumed the OS was just lying to me and the monitor was actually set to 60hz.
It's odd because I can tell right away if a game is set to 60Hz instead of 144Hz when first launched before I adjust the settings. The mouse cursor just feels laggy.
They are _still_ featuring magic mouse on the promo photos for the iMac
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
I also find Apple keyboards terrible. The keyboards we have today feel worse than the ones from 20 years ago.
Same. I'm also a Magic Mouse person.
It's still the standard Apple mouse, no? Why wouldn't they include it in the promo photos?
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
Why does one have to choose BETWEEN stand or vesa mount?!
My M1 Max MBP has 64 gig, still runs well. I understand memory has skyrocketed in price, but Apple has been hamstringing the max ram in their MBPs it seems for awhile.
The 27” iMac was the perfect computer. Why would they just stop making it? 24” is too small.
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
No.
It's like a 24" MacBook Pro with no keyboard and less portable?
If it were back to 27" and hidpi screen again it might make sense
Waiting for 512 GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra still. I guess they are rolling things out now, it has been expected for late October.
The M5 Ultra with 256GB went from a early Dec estimated delivery to Feb now. I wonder what the 512GB lead time will be.
I'm still dreaming of 30" iMac that is reasonably priced. Don't need crazy specs but the screen real estate in retina PPI would be so nice
I just modded a Macmini from 2006 to make music with an Akai Mini and GarageBand. It's been fun!
I wish they built an iMac Mini with a square display while being bigger than the HomeView. It's a niche category but a nod to the Macintosh Classic.
Looks like they it still comes with a "magic mouse", of course the only thing "magic" about it is having a worse sensor than a $5 Logitech.
Looks like its an easy $40-60 to be made listing it on ebay if you don't want it. That can get you a nice logitech mouse. I like my G305.
The problem with getting a new Mac is then you're stuck with macOS 27 with Liquid Glass.
27 is fine, fixed a lot of the issues in 26.
macOS 27 is pretty good. They walked back a lot of the poor changes from 26
24" only! Why not offer 27" iMac that Apple used to make before?
I love these things. Never going to buy one. But I love what they are doing with them.
Available at 1829 euros for the basic configuration, nah.
The title text animation is really cute, props to whoever made this!
24" and not 27" monitor?
Would have bought one otherwise.
This is starting to feel like a scam. I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
I hope people know they can get a lot more for this amount of money.
Says the guy who provides no examples of an equivalent machine that costs less.
If you're going to be critical of Apple, at least provide a link to a Dell machine that's ugly, made of plastic, and has worse specs. It's HN tradition.
Haha, you may be a bit outdated. The sad part is you can go cheaper and still get a Mac. Thats why it feels like a scam - the price is so far from what you’re getting it’s borderline criminal.
Haha, still no example links. The sad part is that you bothered to reply, but still can't back it up.
Do people still actually buy iMacs?
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
That’s the crazy thing, not everything has to be for you.
I kind of missed the point when they've decided not to make 27" I guess.
My mother is still using my old iMac 2013 (the sceen is literally seprated from the body and the damp thing has an issue that sometimes make system task go 1000% of CPU)
The screen was always the selling point. Who even needs a 24" overpriced monitor?
People buy these instead of mac minis because of the pretty design. That's it. Consumers are a lot more irrational than most people give them credit for.
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
These were cool back when you could also use them as monitors - outside of that, I’d rather have a laptop and a nice monitor - way better bang for your buck imo
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
I want one and I don't know what I'd do with it
That motherfucking display sill runs at only 60hz?!??
I get it. And even with that I (plus many others) still need to to download StillColor to stop the dithering. The other issue with this iMac - that I would actually LOVE to get - is that since about 2022, every Mac OS update has been like a waking nightmare - I'm sitting on Ventura which is insane as everything else I use is up to date but Apple have an aversion to fixing long-documented bugs on desktop. I'm not being precious - there are whole forums devoted to the hell that was Sonoma and somehow spending thousands on a flash new desktop only to then lose data, time and serenity is just insulting.