Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display (2017) review: Apple’s greatest all-in-one is a belter

Any other manufacturer would have been accused of flogging a dead horse by now. Another year has rolled by without a significant change to the design of the iMac and, by the looks of things, iMac fans will have to wait at least another year until that happens.

Is that a serious problem? No. If there’s one thing you need to know about the 5K iMac, it’s that, even in 2017 after three years of “stagnation” it remains, categorically, the best-looking all-in-one computer ever made, both in terms of its design and its display.

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Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Design

The physical design of the 27-inch iMac hasn’t changed a jot since 2014, and that’s because it’s already really, really, ridiculously good looking. It’s Derek Zoolander’s “Blue Steel” hewn from metal, glass and Jony Ive’s tears. It’s dramatically sleeker and more attractive than any 27in monitor I’ve had on my desk in recent years, despite the efforts of many manufacturers, and Apple has managed to pack in a fully functioning computer, too.

If we lived in the 14th century, frankly, Jony Ive would have been burned as a witch.

In fact, I only have a couple of gripes with the iMac. The first is that there’s no height adjustability – you can only tilt the iMac back and forth. And, let’s be honest, sticking a pile of books under your brand-new iMac is hardly the done thing. It absolutely ruins the feng shui. The second is the 27mm-wide bezels surrounding the screen. In 2017 these are starting to look a little, well, fat.

Other than this, the 2017 27in 5K iMac is every bit the classic introduced back in 2014 and with the iMac Pro due to arrive later in the year, Apple shows no signs of killing it off or subjecting it to significant overhaul just yet.

In fact, this late-2017 iMac is all about the incremental improvements, with most of the enhancements invisible to the naked eye. Not that this new model is boring – that it most certainly is not. Unless you think computers are inherently boring, in which case you probably stopped reading ages ago. Anyway. iMacs.

Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Image quality 

First things first – the Retina display on the original model was already superb, and there are still very few 5K monitors that you can go out and buy. 

Despite this, Apple has gone and improved the display yet again, boosting maximum brightness by a claimed 43% to build on what was already a stunning screen. Like the previous model, the new 5K iMac is capable of producing not just the sRGB colour space with incredible accuracy, but also the wider DCI-P3 colour gamut.

Forget about the geeky intricacies for a moment, though, and you can summarise the iMac’s display like this: it’s bright, insanely crisp and whether you’re dabbling in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro or just shooting everything in sight in BioShock Infinite, it looks stupendous. Black is really very black; white is very, very white. Cute kittens look very, very cute. I simply haven’t seen many better displays than you’ll find here, and for most people, it’s the pinnacle of display performance.

Let’s introduce some numbers to back this up. Our X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter is a harsh mistress, capable of revealing the shortcomings that all but the best-trained eyes would struggle to see, but the Retina display puts up quite the fight. Brightness rises from a slightly silly 466cd/m² to an even more outlandish 527cd/m² (those are the kind of figures I’d expect from a top-notch TV, not a desktop monitor) and contrast hits a ratio of 960:1, which is very good indeed.

Colour accuracy is fabulous, as I’ve come to expect from Apple. The last model we reviewed hit an average Delta E of 0.7 and this year’s is only slightly worse at 0.97. The panel whips up 98.9% of the DCI-P3 gamut, bar the most intense shades of magenta and blue. This is very good news if you understand what it means – and, trust me, it really is, even if you don’t have a clue what I’m on about.

Oh, and by the way, if you fancy plugging in your MacBook and using the iMac as a 5K monitor, well, tough – you can’t. Apple still doesn’t support Target Display mode on the 27-inch iMac, despite adding Thunderbolt 3 support via a pair of USB Type-C ports on the rear of the machine.

Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Performance

If you were inquisitive enough to rip open the iMac then you’d find a completely revamped set of innards – but I’d leave that to the intrepid chaps over at iFixit if I were you. Inside, quad-core Intel Kaby Lake processors have been introduced next to a selection of new AMD Radeon Pro graphics chips and the combination delivers a decent boost to performance.

It’s not night-and-day stuff, but the changes are definitely welcome. The quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i5-7500 in our review model is the slowest chip available in the range, with other choices including the 3.5GHz Core i5-7600 (starting at £1,749), the 3.8GHz Core i5-7600K (starting at £1,949) and the 4.2GHz Core i7-7700K (starting at £2,219). Memory is available in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB configurations; our test iMac came with 8GB.

In our in-house benchmarks the 3.4GHz model turned out to be quicker than the 3.2GHz Core i5 Skylake model we tested back in 2015 by a margin of 9% (overall score: 109), which is similar to the improvement that model delivered over the 2014 model (a 10% boost, with an overall score of 100 versus 91). In all honesty, it isn’t a huge performance boost; certainly not big enough to notice in everyday use.

As for graphics performance, that’s a bit more impressive. This year, depending on the model, you’ll get either an AMD Radeon Pro 570 (with 4GB of VRAM), an AMD Radeon Pro 575 (with 4GB of RAM) or an AMD Radeon Pro 580 (with 8GB of VRAM), and the difference over 2015’s 27in 5k iMac is significant.

I’ve only had the chance to test the AMD Radeon Pro 570-equipped model, which is in the lowest-spec 5K iMac this year, but with results that beat the last edition’s top-end model – and by quite a distance – it’s a major step forward. Whether you’ll be able to game smoothly at the screen’s native 5K resolution is another matter entirely, however.

I put the iMac through its paces using Unigine’s Heaven Benchmark – a pretty good representation of how much gaming grunt a machine has – and it reveals that, although much faster than before, the iMac’s GPU power is still comparatively limited.

At 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and Medium detail, the Pro 570 in our review unit achieved a mostly smooth 42fps, which is double that of the 2015 iMac’s 26fps (R9 M390) we tested last time. If that sounds good, though, remember this test still isn’t running at the full 5,120 x 2,880 the display is capable of; the benchmark simply doesn’t run at such high resolutions and even if it did, you could expect the frame rate to drop significantly.

The 5K iMac we’ve reviewed here has a 1TB Fusion Drive, with the top-end model available with a 2TB or 3TB disk. Sadly, it’s not nuclear-powered – this would be simultaneously both worrying and very impressive – but it does combine a superfast SSD with an old-school hard disk.

The theory is that all your regularly used applications and data end up on the really-very-fast SSD, and everything else gets plonked onto the HDD. There isn’t much change in the amount of SSD storage on offer here, though, with this year’s 1TB drive boasting 32GB of fast flash storage compared to the 2015 model’s 24GB.

If you want to get back up to the 128GB flash storage that was offered on the original iMac 5k’s Fusion Drive, you’ll have to move up to the 2TB or 3TB model.

Does the Fusion Drive work, though? It is very quick in benchmarks, but it’s difficult to say how well the system will work once you’ve filled the storage with the accumulated gunk of several years’ use. Out of the box, it’s pretty fast – I clocked it at around 987MB/sec while reading files, and 130MB/sec while writing them back to the disk. That’s faster for reads than the previous model, although a touch slower for writes.

This is nowhere near as lightning-fast as the pure flash storage in the latest MacBook Pro laptops, however. If that sort of performance is paramount, then you can swap to an SSD-only model with 256GB, 512GB and 1TB options available on the Core i5 5K iMac and a huge 2TB SSD drive available on the top-end Core i7. Bear in mind, though, that all these add cost over the 1TB Fusion Drive, with the 2TB SSD increasing the price by an eye-watering £1,260.

The elephant in the room here is Mac OS High Sierra, an update to the 27in iMac’s operating system that is due to arrive in autumn 2017. This isn’t set to bring much in the way of user interface tweaks or obvious new feature additions, but there are a small handful of architectural changes that could make the world of difference to performance.

Apple said High Sierra was going to be all about “deep technologies” when it announced it earlier in 2017 and it was right. The major change is that the default file system will be the new APFS (Apple File System) for the first time, a file system designed to save you space and improve the speed of some file operations.

There are also a handful of changes that should improve video playback efficiency and gaming performance via support for H.265 and Metal 2. The most interesting development, however, may well be native support for external graphics, allowing users of even comparatively low-powered machines to boost gaming performance to the levels of a proper gaming PC.

Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Apple Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2

Magic? Eh? What Apple is on about I have no idea. Keyboard, mice and touchpads are the least magical parts of my daily existence. However, Apple’s accessories are pretty special.

The Magic Trackpad 2 is the same as it was last time out, but that’s no bad thing. It has the air of a Philippe Starck-designed door wedge and is more expensive than ever at £144. If you’d rather have your magic in Touchpad rather than mouse form, you can swap it for £50 when you buy it with your iMac. Want both a mouse and a trackpad? Then that’ll be a further £129.

It’s still a wonderful thing, though, with a 30% larger touch surface than its predecessor and Force Touch providing that extra layer of luxury. Powered-off, it’s a large slab of cold, unclicky frosted glass, but flick the switch and it provides all the handy Force Touch functionality and gesture-controlled loveliness I’ve come to expect from my MacBook Pro.

Touchpads on a desktop might sound like a rubbish idea, but Apple really makes it work – flicking between multiple desktops and whizzing up Mission Control is super, super fast and instinctive. Plug it in, use it, and – trust me – you’ll miss it when it’s gone. The coolest feature? Oh, Silent Clicking. Enable this in the control panel and the high-pitched click disappears, leaving only the low-frequency thump to be felt through your fingertip. For those who value silence above all else, it’s a great party trick.

It’s harder to get excited about the Magic Keyboard 2. It’s quite flat, which is due entirely to the removal of the AA battery compartment from the old Magic Keyboard, so depending on how you like your keyboard to be angled, this may not be your bag at all. However, there is at long last an extended version of the keyboard with a numeric pad stuck on the side. Yours for another £30. Are you keeping tally?

Whichever model you choose, though, it’s as nice to type on as the previous model. The function keys along the top are now all full-sized, and the left and right cursor keys have grown slightly.

Magic Mouse 2. It’s a mouse. It’s wireless. It moves cursors all day, every day. It’s comfy to use, and although there still aren’t discrete left and right buttons, it works so predictably that there may as well be.

The AA batteries of the original have been flung out in favour of a lithium-ion battery that charges via – yup, you guessed it – a Lightning cable. It’s bundled with the iMac for free, or, if you’re particularly excited at the prospect, you can go out and buy one for £65. It really isn’t desperately exciting. And if, like me, you really do like games, it’s not the greatest choice. A cheaper USB gaming mouse would make a much better bet. However, it is very, very nice to look at.

Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Connectivity

Are you still here? Drat. I was hoping I could get away with just not writing this bit. Right, erm, let’s talk connectivity. We love that stuff, and the iMac has some tasty, tasty ports. They’re actually quite annoying as ports go, as they’re all hidden around the right-hand rear of the iMac, so plugging in a USB device involves far too much getting up, leaning and generally moving around for my liking. If you do a lot of that, you might want to get yourself a USB hub.

Still, once you have got up and peered awkwardly around the back of the iMac (this is probably a good time to mention that the iMac’s rump is about as pretty as the rear of computery things get), there’s all the stuff you’d hope for and more. Four USB 3, one Gigabit Ethernet, an SD card reader and a headphone output that, alas, no longer doubles as an optical digital audio out. A small but annoying step backwards.

There are a couple of new ports here, too, with a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C ports supplanting the Thunderbolt 2 ports of old, doubling potential data transfers from 20Gbits/sec to 40Gbits/sec and opening the way for external graphics acceleration once MacOS High Sierra arrives later in the year.

Factor in 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4 wireless networking stuff and the iMac hits all the right notes. Hell, you can even whip off a panel at the rear and add more RAM. There are four slots, with two occupied as standard and you should be able to add up to 64GB.

Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display: Verdict

I’m going to keep this brief: the Apple 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display is still fantastic. I love it. Even though it’s even longer in the tooth than it was in 2015, I’d totally buy one if I had the money, and there isn’t anything – other, perhaps, than the graphics – that would stop me.

But then with the advent of official support for external graphics acceleration in High Sierra, this might not matter soon. With a breakout box and the right graphics card, you should be able to game at native resolution on your iMac even one, two or three years down the track.

So, decision made, you’re going to buy one. Which do you get? This is an easy question: any one of them. Even the base-model 5K iMac, no longer hobbled by a non-Fusion Drive HDD, will suffice. At £1,749 and a mere £150 more than the previous base-spec 5K iMac, it’s also good to see that Apple hasn’t taken the opportunity to hike up the prices as every other manufacturer seems to be doing right now.

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And, while it’s impossible to describe anything that costs £1,749 as being cheap – unless it’s a car or a house – the base-specification 27-inch iMac line-up really is very good value for money. A display of this quality would cost at least £1,000 on its own, maybe more; it wouldn’t look anywhere near as pretty; and it wouldn’t come with a fast, capable, fully functioning computer built in.

Sure, you could build a faster desktop PC and make do with a 4K monitor, but this is beside the point. As all-in-one PCs go, it’s fair to say that the 27-inch iMac is something of a steal.