Mine arrived around 10 days after ordering which was 3 weeks before predicted delivery by Apple!
1. This machine is replacing an aging 2015 27" 5K i5 iMac which we use as a general purpose machine in the kitchen/breakfast room for music etc. We have a 2020 27" i9 5K fully loaded iMac and a 2017 27" i7 (fully loaded at the time) for our more demanding and professional requirements. We also have a couple of i9 16" MBPros and an M1 MBA.
2. We ordered a yellow (goes with the walls and general decor in the area) machine with 16 GB memory and a 1 TB SSD. The keyboard is the one without numeric keypad but with Touch ID. We also ordered a matching trackpad and mouse.
Pros:
1. The machine was very well packed (in fact the packaging weighed more than the machine, see my cons!!) and was a pleasure to unpack.
2. Matching peripherals is both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because they are aesthetically nice, curse because replacements are not generally available (I am hard on mice and need to replace them more often than most people!) and they are likely to be expensive when they do make them separately available since they are color matched.
3. Easy start up and configuration. Apple have gone out of their way to make this a pleasure, with the default OS highlight colors and desktop matching the machine exterior.
4. The yellow is surprisingly pleasant and not at all jarring. It makes for a pleasant and less sombre experience. It fits in our decor.
5. That white screen surround is much less distracting than I thought it would be and matches the general demeanor of the machine.
6. Light and easy to maneuver.
7. Bright and color accurate display with high enough resolution for the size.
8. Snappy response time, with excellent disk read and write times.
9. Smaller footprint than the 27" machine it replaces.
10. Application load times excellent.
11. Runs all applications seamlessly whether or not they need Rosetta.
12. More convenient headphone port.
Cons:
1. The packaging is very substantial and weighs as much as the machine or more. Seems that they could save a little on shipping if they reduced the weight, but then would it arrive intact?
2. Screen is poor when viewing off centre so it suffers a little when several people are trying to watch it.
3. Sound is surprisingly quiet at full volume. Quality is adequate but it seems quiet and 'woolly' sounding. We use the machine with a pair of Homepods (not the Mini Homepods which are nowhere near as good in our opinion) which are excellent.
4. The keyboard has random disconnects so we are not sure whether it is faulty or not. It always comes back and works, so not sure what the issue maybe.
5. The keyboard does not have the quality feel of the full numeric gray (now discontinued) or white keyboards we use with our other iMacs. It is noisy and feels loose. Not quite the precision we were expecting (the space bar is especially noisy).
6. I keep hitting the Touch ID button when going for the delete key which puts the machine back to the login screen. My poor typing skills, I know, but I do it on all the Apple machines where the Touch ID and power is placed close to the delete key.
7. Apple software is as buggy as ever. Music is a disaster as I store all my music on the machine and each time I download it to a machine, Music cannot down load some number of tracks and I have to recover them manually from my backup. Then Music gets into a mess when it tries to upload to iCloud.
8. It tends to run out of steam with large Adobe Lightroom files and, when editing my drone movie footage, it tends to be a lot slower when rendering than my 2020 iMac (not surprising since the 2020 iMac is a powerhouse) in FCPX. I think someone likened this machine to a turbo charged engine in a car. Lots of immediate grunt but runs out of steam earlier than expected. This is to be expected given that I am comparing it to a 10 core machine with a decent graphics card. The fact that it competes at all is amazing.
9. I still need some USB A ports and thus need to have a dongle or dock to use older USB A peripherals.
10. This is a silly one but I cannot run my x64/x86 Windows VM on this machine. I have some programs that need a Windows environment and this machine cannot run them and is unlikely to in the future (emulating a Windows environment is much easier when the machine code is identical and all you to do is provide the APIs for Windows - OK not trivial but an order of magnitude simpler than trying to make it work on an ARM machine, and yes I know Windows ARM exists with built in x86 environments, but now you are into layers upon layers of emulation).
11. You get used to 27" screens so 24" screens seem small, but you get used to it.
Summary:
An excellent machine for its intended purpose and it bodes well for the future. Buy this machine if you want an easy to use machine for most regular uses e.g. email, shopping, editing documents without complex formatting and content, light photo editing and organizing, music playback etc. Do not expect it to replace the current top end 27" iMacs. But it is a fast light package and well worth the money.
1. This machine is replacing an aging 2015 27" 5K i5 iMac which we use as a general purpose machine in the kitchen/breakfast room for music etc. We have a 2020 27" i9 5K fully loaded iMac and a 2017 27" i7 (fully loaded at the time) for our more demanding and professional requirements. We also have a couple of i9 16" MBPros and an M1 MBA.
2. We ordered a yellow (goes with the walls and general decor in the area) machine with 16 GB memory and a 1 TB SSD. The keyboard is the one without numeric keypad but with Touch ID. We also ordered a matching trackpad and mouse.
Pros:
1. The machine was very well packed (in fact the packaging weighed more than the machine, see my cons!!) and was a pleasure to unpack.
2. Matching peripherals is both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because they are aesthetically nice, curse because replacements are not generally available (I am hard on mice and need to replace them more often than most people!) and they are likely to be expensive when they do make them separately available since they are color matched.
3. Easy start up and configuration. Apple have gone out of their way to make this a pleasure, with the default OS highlight colors and desktop matching the machine exterior.
4. The yellow is surprisingly pleasant and not at all jarring. It makes for a pleasant and less sombre experience. It fits in our decor.
5. That white screen surround is much less distracting than I thought it would be and matches the general demeanor of the machine.
6. Light and easy to maneuver.
7. Bright and color accurate display with high enough resolution for the size.
8. Snappy response time, with excellent disk read and write times.
9. Smaller footprint than the 27" machine it replaces.
10. Application load times excellent.
11. Runs all applications seamlessly whether or not they need Rosetta.
12. More convenient headphone port.
Cons:
1. The packaging is very substantial and weighs as much as the machine or more. Seems that they could save a little on shipping if they reduced the weight, but then would it arrive intact?
2. Screen is poor when viewing off centre so it suffers a little when several people are trying to watch it.
3. Sound is surprisingly quiet at full volume. Quality is adequate but it seems quiet and 'woolly' sounding. We use the machine with a pair of Homepods (not the Mini Homepods which are nowhere near as good in our opinion) which are excellent.
4. The keyboard has random disconnects so we are not sure whether it is faulty or not. It always comes back and works, so not sure what the issue maybe.
5. The keyboard does not have the quality feel of the full numeric gray (now discontinued) or white keyboards we use with our other iMacs. It is noisy and feels loose. Not quite the precision we were expecting (the space bar is especially noisy).
6. I keep hitting the Touch ID button when going for the delete key which puts the machine back to the login screen. My poor typing skills, I know, but I do it on all the Apple machines where the Touch ID and power is placed close to the delete key.
7. Apple software is as buggy as ever. Music is a disaster as I store all my music on the machine and each time I download it to a machine, Music cannot down load some number of tracks and I have to recover them manually from my backup. Then Music gets into a mess when it tries to upload to iCloud.
8. It tends to run out of steam with large Adobe Lightroom files and, when editing my drone movie footage, it tends to be a lot slower when rendering than my 2020 iMac (not surprising since the 2020 iMac is a powerhouse) in FCPX. I think someone likened this machine to a turbo charged engine in a car. Lots of immediate grunt but runs out of steam earlier than expected. This is to be expected given that I am comparing it to a 10 core machine with a decent graphics card. The fact that it competes at all is amazing.
9. I still need some USB A ports and thus need to have a dongle or dock to use older USB A peripherals.
10. This is a silly one but I cannot run my x64/x86 Windows VM on this machine. I have some programs that need a Windows environment and this machine cannot run them and is unlikely to in the future (emulating a Windows environment is much easier when the machine code is identical and all you to do is provide the APIs for Windows - OK not trivial but an order of magnitude simpler than trying to make it work on an ARM machine, and yes I know Windows ARM exists with built in x86 environments, but now you are into layers upon layers of emulation).
11. You get used to 27" screens so 24" screens seem small, but you get used to it.
Summary:
An excellent machine for its intended purpose and it bodes well for the future. Buy this machine if you want an easy to use machine for most regular uses e.g. email, shopping, editing documents without complex formatting and content, light photo editing and organizing, music playback etc. Do not expect it to replace the current top end 27" iMacs. But it is a fast light package and well worth the money.
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