The most obvious change is to the iMac screen. Both the 21.5- and 27-inch screens are made with high definition video in mind. Like on many HDTVs, the black border around the new iMac's screen reaches out to the very edge; the aluminum border that surrounded the screen in the previous iMac is gone. This gives the effect of the screen being bigger than it really is. To the chagrin of many, there is no matte screen option. Glossy is your only choice.
While the 21.5-inch iMac isn't much bigger than the previous 20-inch iMac on paper, sitting side-by-side, the 21.5-inch iMac seems . The 27-inch iMac is gloriously big, but one editor said it might even be too big as a desktop Mac.
The iMac now uses an all-aluminum case, whereas the previous iMac has a black plastic back. If you look very closely, you can see a seam between the lower aluminum front panel and the side of the case. The power button is flush with the back panel and is also aluminum, so it feels like the rest of the back. If you're reaching around the back from the front of the iMac, it's not as easy to find as the power button on the old iMac, which had a concave button that had a different texture than the back panel.
Apple says that the iMac screens are LED-backlit widescreen TFT active-matrix LCDs with in-plane switching technology, and can display millions of colors at all resolutions. In the past, Apple has used 6-bit displays on its 20-inch iMacs and 8-bit displays on its larger-sized iMacs. Apple doesn't specify the bit depth on its ; I'm waiting to hear back from Apple about this.
In-plane switching is supposed to help flat-panel displays maintain image quality at any angle, and this seems to help with the new iMacs. I didn't notice any color shifting or loss of image quality when viewing at extreme angles. On the previous iMacs, there was a noticeable color shift-on the old 20-inch iMac, it didn't take much of an angle to see the color shifting.
As for performance, the iMacs felt snappy while opening and closing windows, and startup was fast, but I didn't get a chance to run any formal benchmarks. The iMacs will be in our lab for speed testing. Keep an eye out for benchmark results coming soon.
We'll also have a full, in-depth review with mouse ratings of the new iMacs in the next few days.
These are just a few questions. I'll update this section as more questions come in.
We don't have benchmarks right now--this first look is more about subjective first impression right out of the box. The iMacs will be in our lab and we'll be putting them through our benchmark tests.
Unfortunately, we can't test this yet, because you need special adapters that Apple says will be available soon. There is no HDMI in port, so it looks like it'll be a special HDMI-to-DisplayPort adapter.
In theory, it should work if you use the proper adapter. But since the adapters are available yet, I'm unable to test this out.
do they speakers sound any different than the previous iMacs?
The speakers on the new iMacs sound much better to me than the older iMacs. The sound is richer, cleaner, with more bass.
The had GeForce 9400M in the 2.66GHz models. The 24-inch 2.93GHz iMac had a GeForce GT 120 and the 3.06GHz iMac uses Nvidia's GeForce GT 130. Graphics performance will be part of our benchmark testing, so stay tuned.
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