Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing

New iMac vs Old iMac: Is it Worth It?

Nick Mokey
By

Just in time for the upcoming back-to-school season, Apple has given its iMac line its perennial update. Although the newest iMacs look identical to their older cousins, a bit of retooling under the hood leaves them faster and more capable than ever. Will you notice? Here’s a rundown of what’s new, and what it means to you.

Core i3, i5 and i7 Processors

The trusty Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad designations have disappeared in favor, appropriately enough, of Intel’s new i-branded Nehalemn-architecture chips. Although they share the same clock speeds, the new chips use a 32nm fabrication, which improves both performance and efficiency. Other technologies, including hyper threading and smart cache, should also improve performance, albeit incrementally.

Recommended Videos

ATI Radeon HD Graphics

Apple has jumped ship on the GeForce 9-series cards found in the last iMacs and switched to AMD’s Radeon HD cards. You’ll also notice no “mobility” or “M” designation tacked on there. These are the full-power desktop versions of the new cards, not the neutered notebook versions the last-generation iMac was using. Long story short: They should offer significantly improved gaming performance for folks hoping to install Bootcamp and get their Crysis on. Especially if you opt for the big-daddy Radeon HD 5750 with 1GB of onboard GDDR5 memory.

Support for dual hard drives

It used to be you could order an iMac with a standard magnetic drive, or a speedy solid-state drive. This time around, Apple has eliminated the either-or proposition with the option to equip your new iMac with both a 256GB solid-state drive and a conventional drive. Sound like overkill? For many users, it might be, but loading the operating system and certain programs onto the SSD can significantly improve load times, while a conventional drive keeps a terabyte or two handy for large video and music collections.

The Apple iMac continues to remain one of the most powerful all-in-one systems available. While it is not as upgradeable as a full on desktop system, Apple gives users the ability to upgrade most major components including hard drive and RAM. In our book, the new iMac gives users an experience worth paying for!

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Nick Mokey
Nick Mokey
Managing Editor
As Digital Trends’ Managing Editor, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team delivering definitive reviews, enlightening…
Waiting for the M3 iMac? We’ve got bad news for Apple fans
Man using a 24-inch M1 iMac.

If you’ve been holding out for Apple to launch a refreshed iMac, there’s some bad news: it might not launch until late 2023 or early 2024. If correct, that could mean disappointment for anyone who has been waiting for Apple’s all-in-one computer to get upgraded to the latest and greatest chips.

The news comes from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman (via MacRumors), whose track record for Apple leaks is one of the best in the biz. In his Power On newsletter, Gurman explained that he has not seen any indication that a new version of the iMac is imminent. “So if you want to stick with the iMac,” he added, “you'll just have to sit tight.”

Read more
The iMac Pro launched five years ago today. What comes next?
Apple iMac Pro News

Today marks five years since Apple launched the iMac Pro. The company’s ill-fated pro-level all-in-one promised the kind of performance that the “trashcan” Mac Pro could only dream of, but was itself soon thrown by the wayside. It was unceremoniously discontinued in March 2021.

The iMac Pro’s reveal was highly unusual for Apple’s standards. In April 2017, a number of senior Apple execs apologized for the state of its offerings tailored to professionals and acknowledged that the current Mac Pro could not meet those customers’ needs. To compensate, Apple announced it was working on a new Mac Pro with a modular design, a high-end display, and a new pro-level iMac that later emerged as the iMac Pro.

Read more
Head-to-head: Intel Core i7-12700H vs. AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS
Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X front view showing display and keyboard deck.

Two of the top laptop processors in 2022 are the Intel Core i7-12700H vs AMD Ryzen 6900HS, but with so many other factors impacting laptop performance, it's hard to compare them head to head. So, when Lenovo offered me the opportunity to run the Intel version of its excellent Slim 7 Pro X laptop, which I had previously reviewed in its AMD incarnation, I jumped at the chance to pit two very similar laptops against each other.

I say "very similar" because, unfortunately, they're not identical. Importantly, they both used the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, which means we're directly comparing the CPUs themselves. The most important difference, beyond the processors, was that the AMD version running the Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU enjoyed 32GB of 6400MHz LPDDR5 RAM. The Intel Core i7-12700H version was loaded with "just" 16GB of slower 5200MHz LPDDR5 RAM. That means that while our benchmark results are likely to be close enough to gauge the performance differences, we can't be truly scientific. And the Ryzen 9 6900HS is a lower-power version of that chip while the Core i7 is full-power.

Read more