Yes, the new 24 inch iMac comes in a variety of cool crazy colors.
But the most important visual thing is actually what you're seeing right here.
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Now I'm gonna explain what I mean by that.
This is a video shot directly with the camera built into the new iMac It's A10 ADP camera a full HD camera.
A lot of other Mac's including the predecessor to this model, the 21.5 inch iMac, and the MacBook and the MacBook Pro.
They all have pretty low ish and 720B cameras.
No one's really been happy with them for many years.
But even fancier laptop cameras have not been that good either.
We've all discovered that during the COVID era when we're doing a lot of zoom meetings, so only a handful of laptops actually have 1080 cameras.
Now we have this 24 inch model.
We have last year's 27 inch iMac which also moved up to a 1080 p camera and man I could really tell the difference.
What Apple says about this model is that the hardware is upgraded from what's in that 27 inch Intel iMac from last year.
And also the new M1 platform gives it more headroom to have image software processing going on behind the scenes so that your image looks even better.
It has a lot to do with lighting.
And color Correction and as you can see here, I'm in a fairly challenging lighting situation.
I'm very heavily backlit.
I'm in kind of a dim area right now.
And yet I think the image quality is pretty darn good.
But what good does that do you?
What do you get to look at?
Well, you get to look at all these crazy new colors.
This is not something we've seen Apple do on computers for a while, iPhones have been available in colors for a long time now.
And yes, some of the Mac books you can get in silver or gray are kind of a gold that looks like a mix between silver Great, but they were not really bold, vibrant colors.
This is very clearly a throwback, to that old iMac G3 from the 90s, where it had a big CRT display, and I kinda dressed that up a bit with these semi-transparent, candy colored jells.
It's really a great moment in home computer design, and I'm very excited to see something like it could come back, because it's still pretty rare to find Really cool colors on a desktop or a laptop or a Chromebook.
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So with that the design of this system is entirely different.
The iMac design has stood for many, many years really goes back to at least 2012 for the current version And then you've got a big screen.
It bows out in the back.
That's where kind of all the computer parts are and is a big hefty foot that it stands on and the screen rotates up and down on that.
And frankly the 27 inch iMac weighed like 20 pounds the 21 inch iMac weighed like 12 pounds.
So this new guy weighs 9 pounds.
And it was amazingly easy to just pick up, unplug it carried to another room, plug it in somewhere, I moved around my house a bunch actually, especially you might want to do that if you're going to do web meetings from the living room or from your home office or your dad or the kitchen.
At least it's easier to carry a nine pound Big Screen around than a 12 pound or 20 pounds.
Now I went with the orange color it's got a bit of a cream sickly like feeling to it.
It's paler in the front and deeper on the back.
That's true all of the new iMac colors They have a little bit of a more washed out version than the front and they have a more vibrant version in the back that flows through the foot.
The foot is now very squared off, before was more trapezoidal and it also follows you through to other parts of the system.
You get a matching keyboard and you get a matching mouse or touchpad or both.
If you order both The keyboard has a color running you know right through white keys on the colored background, the touchpad and the mouse.
They've got some colored accents on the bottom and sides less obvious, but still a nice color match look.
Now there's a couple of things to watch out for with the keyboards.
If you order the base price 24 inch iMac the 1299 version, you will get a keyboard that does not have the Touch ID fingerprint sensor built in And that has become so useful on so many devices especially now that they've added it to Mac books where you just put your finger right on the fingerprint reader and unlock your system.
Super useful and it's really been annoying on an iMac frankly to type in my password every time I wanna do something.
That's number one, you don't get that you have to spend, I think an extra $50.
To get that upgrade.
You could trade up to the 1499 iMac or one of the higher end models and you'll get the fingerprint reader built right in.
You can also spend a little bit more on top of that and get one with a fingerprint reader.
And the number pad.
The other thing to watch out for is you can only get the keyboards in the color that you choose your Mac, you can't mix a green Mac and a blue keyboard or anything like that.
Everything is color matched and that actually extends to the desktop wallpaper that comes with the system and the fox that comes in the image on the fonts is your color of iMac and even the handle on top of the box is your color of iMac At some point in the future maybe Apple will let you buy different colored keyboards or by the touch ID keyboard.
If you don't already have it, do a little mix and match or just get them and use them with another system.
They are not allowing that yet, I do have reason to feel slightly hopefully however, because the really cool dark gray iMac keyboard that came with the iMac.
Pro that was not available separately at first, and then later it was.
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When it comes to performance, I pretty much knew what to expect in the new 24 inch m one iMac, because this is essentially the same computer in a lot of ways as the M one MacBook Air as the M 113 inch MacBook Pro Pro and as the Mac Mini, there were some minor differences in the M1 that some of these systems use.
Some of them have a seven core GPU, some have an eight core GPU, and some of the systems have more fans in them for better cooling, so the chip can run hotter for sustained periods of time and you can get better performance that way.
But again testing now for M1 systems and it'll be 5, if we get to test the M1 powered iPad Pro, I'm not seeing a ton of daylight in the results.
Now again in the iMac if you ordered one of the high Higher end models if you get the eight core GPU version and I believe you get an extra fan inside that will help with cooling.
And this is a bigger system.
So so you shouldn't have some of the cooling issues and thermal issues that you have with something like the MacBook Air, which is currently fanless and can obviously get very hot under sustained workload.
So who is the 24 inch iMac supposed to be for?
Apple has a lot of interesting ideas about where you might use a 24 inch iMac A lot of people don't have all in one desktop at home, they just use laptops everywhere.
And now the home office makes sense in the living room makes sense and all in one computer like the iMac Makes for a better family computer, especially we've put different people's profiles on it, and everyone can sort of use a big machine in a central location.
That's less useful now that everyone is doing remote schooling and remote work and kind of needs our own machine.
But still nice to have a big screen.
Everybody can use.
One idea apple pitched was using this as a kitchen computer.
Maybe you'd be watching some recipes or following along while you make something in the kitchen or doing an online cooking class.
I could see that because I've done that through a Mac Book, and I'd much rather have a big screen with a better camera for that.
There's nothing particularly special about the iMac that makes it kitchen resistant in terms of moisture or dust.
It's built to the same standards as other IMAX and other Mac books are Frankly a lot of people would probably find a touchscreen more useful to use in a kitchen.
But that said, the iMac is really light, easy to just pick up and carry into another room.
So I went and put in the kitchen and played around with it a bit.
And you know what if I I had space in my kitchen, I could see that.
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If you are a high end video editor special effects person, even high end photo editing, this may not be the iMac for you.
You top out at 16 gigs of RAM you top out at two terabytes of storage on these regular m one max I'm able to run you know premiere and DaVinci Resolve I can do some editing with with 4k clips.
I can even preview in 4k most of the time if I don't have you know a lot of effects running.
But if you're a real video Pro, you're probably waiting for the 27 inch iMac version of this with an M one, just to see how high up the specs go how much RAM you can add how much hard drive space what other extras they have, or maybe even eventually the Mac Pro desktop, which I would presume we'll get that m one treat them someday as well.
But obviously the 24 inch iMac is never gonna be the best selling product in Apple's computer lineup.
This really feels like a test case for these new colors and I'm sure everyone is gonna wanna see them move on to other Mac products.
I know I would love to get a purple MacBook Air or a green MacBook Pro, because once we've opened that colorful Pandora's box, there's really no going back.
