Will there ever be a new 27-inch iMac?

[whitby]

Given the new rumors (as of 28 August) that a new Mac mini is in the works with an M4 processor, I am guessing that the M4 Mac Mini (if that is what it is) plus Studio display is effectively the replacement for the 27" iMac. Costs would be about the same (this cannot be said for a Mac Studio and Display) and performance, relative to what is available now, competitive. I think the AIO machines are relegated to the 24" iMac (which is too small for me, although we have one as a music server and general purpose machine in the breakfast room). If you want iMac Pro performance then the Mac Studio is the way to go.

iMacs themselves had grown to occupy a market space for which they were not originally intended, or that is what it seems. So by rationalising the iMac back to its roots and improving the Mini and introducing the Studio they have their bases covered.

 

[Mimiron]

Given the new rumors (as of 28 August) that a new Mac mini is in the works with an M4 processor, I am guessing that the M4 Mac Mini (if that is what it is) plus Studio display is effectively the replacement for the 27" iMac. Costs would be about the same (this cannot be said for a Mac Studio and Display) and performance, relative to what is available now, competitive. I think the AIO machines are relegated to the 24" iMac (which is too small for me, although we have one as a music server and general purpose machine in the breakfast room). If you want iMac Pro performance then the Mac Studio is the way to go.

iMacs themselves had grown to occupy a market space for which they were not originally intended, or that is what it seems. So by rationalising the iMac back to its roots and improving the Mini and introducing the Studio they have their bases covered.

Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume.

 

[pshufd]

Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume.

It depends on the type of video editing.

For simple 4k video editing, any Apple Silicon Mac is fine. I think that it would be fine for the vast majority of those making YouTube videos. There are folks that do much more but they typically also have the bucks for nice studios, audio equipment, etc.

 

[whitby]

Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume.

If the Mini has the M4 Pro or M4 Max, the GPU is probably more than adequate for serious video editing (my MBPro with an M1 Max is a lot better than my 27" iMac with its Radeon Pro 5700 XT and 16GB memory). Most Apple Silicon processors have somewhat better built in GPUs than the Intel CPUs of the past and are seriously competitive with most of the external video cards used in Windows machines except for the high end dedicated gaming cards.

 

[Fishrrman]

re reply 52:
"Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume"

Don't ALL m-series Macs have a non-discrete GPU?
One that's built right into the CPU architecture?

 

[pshufd]

M-series Macs have dedicated decoders and encoders in hardware which means that some phases of editing run in the background with essentially additional processors. This is one of the reasons why transcoding doesn't seem to have any impact on foreground tasks.

 

[JouniS]

Considering how much Apple charges for the ASD, an iMac with a 32" screen will likely be very expensive. Will it be 6K?

The entry-level 5k iMac was not much more expensive than a 5k monitor from another vendor. Given that 6k monitors can now be had for less than $2k, it would be plausible to have the base model of the 6k iMac somewhere in the $2.5k to $3k range.

 

[pshufd]

The entry-level 5k iMac was not much more expensive than a 5k monitor from another vendor. Given that 6k monitors can now be had for less than $2k, it would be plausible to have the base model of the 6k iMac somewhere in the $2.5k to $3k range.

2020 base iMac 27 was $1,899.
2019 was $1,799.
2017 was $1,799.
Late 2015 was $1,799.
Mid 2015 was $1,899.
Late 2014 was $2,499.
Late 2013 2k was $1,799.

So it appears that there was a price hike going from the 2k to 5k display and then it dropped back down to $1,799 - $1,899. Perhaps there were some market realities that pushed them back to lower prices.

An LG Ultrafine 5k with speakers, webcam and microphones is $1,599 at Amazon. The version without speakers, microphones and webcam is $970.

So I agree that the 5k iMacs were good values as you got a computer for a few hundred more and even the base iMac CPU/GPU combinations were pretty good.

I've standardized on 27 inches and I'd prefer future 27 inch iMacs but I'd be open to going up to 32 inches. I'm not that much interested in buying 6k standalone monitors as my older equipment (Mac and Windows) doesn't support 6k.

I think that a 27 inch 5k iMac with Apple Silicon with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD at $1,899 would sell really well.

The 27 inch iMac is iconic and it's a past image that Apple owns. I'm disappointed that they abandoned it.

 

[Minghold]

Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume.

You don't need a fast GPU, or any kind of speed whatsoever, for video-editing, by which I mean cutting and joining, which is probably what 99% of people creating social-media content are doing. Get ahold of AvidDemux for cutting, and MKVToolNix for joining ("appending"); both are free, which means Apple and Adobe will never, ever mention them to you -- they want you thrashing your processors and roasting electricity for hours rending video in expensive subscription-model applications when almost all of the time it is completely unnecessary, since cut and joined files are losslessly stream-copied.

 

[Minghold]

I think that a 27 inch 5k iMac with Apple Silicon with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD at $1,899 would sell really well.

Virtually all of the time, a computer is running at the speed of waiting-for-the-human to type or click. Faster machines simply wait faster. 8gb/512ssd isn't that spectacular since it's exactly the same specs you could get in a 2013 27".

Apple's real problem is that they've boxed themselves in a corner with their APFS file system & myriad spy-on-the-user telemetry, which together conspire to run like an utter dog on rotational drives. While Apple was desirous of exactly that artificially-obsolescing tens of thousands of perfectly good intel Macs by auto-"updating" them to APFS, they now have no ability to market, say, a hypothetical 27" iMac Pro i9-14900 with a 1TBssd/8TBhdd Fusion drive -- which would have run really slick under HFS+, if only they'd kept that file-system. (For the really high-end customer, Apple expects $7,000 starting for base-model egg-crate towers with 1TBssd and wanting an eyewatering +$1,000 for 2TBssd, clearly targeting that niche unwilling to put it in a PC tower themselves for under a grand.) Jesus.... You can buy a 1TBssd at Microcenter for under a hundred bucks, and an 8TB 3.5" rotational for one-twenty.

 

[pshufd]

You don't need a fast GPU, or any kind of speed whatsoever, for video-editing, by which I mean cutting and joining, which is probably what 99% of people creating social-media content are doing. Get ahold of AvidDemux for cutting, and MKVToolNix for joining ("appending"); both are free, which means Apple and Adobe will never, ever mention them to you -- they want you thrashing your processors and roasting electricity for hours rending video in expensive subscription-model applications when almost all of the time it is completely unnecessary, since cut and joined files are losslessly stream-copied.

You could just use iMovie too. It runs fine on any Apple Silicon Mac for 4k editing. Most of the time spent from what I see is doing the transcoding phase and the dedicated hardware for that makes it pretty smooth. I now do most of my editing on the iMac Pro and that handles it just fine too. It has a beefy GPU but I haven't checked to see how much that matters.

4k editing was a stretch on my 2015 iMac 27. I usually did the capture on the 2015 but the video editing on my Mac Studio before getting the iMac Pro.

You can clip edit with mpegstreamclip which is what I used a long time ago. Very fast for making clips which could be stitched back together but iMovie is more convenient.

 

[pshufd]

Virtually all of the time, a computer is running at the speed of waiting-for-the-human to type or click. Faster machines simply wait faster. 8gb/512ssd isn't that spectacular since it's exactly the same specs you could get in a 2013 27".

That's not the point.

This discussion is about the cost differential between the 27 inch iMacs and a desktop Mac + Studio Display. And Apple did well with the market in 27 inch iMacs because you got a great display, speakers, microphones and webcam for a little more than the cost of a similar display. I have a friend who ran his YouTube channel off a base M1 mini, and has upgraded to a base M2 Air. He can live stream and do other things on his systems at the same time. You can actually do 4k editing on the base Apple Silicon Macs and offering one at that price point would result in lots of sales.

How do I know that? I've seen lots of 27 inch iMacs for sale on the secondary market with the base RAM and storage. Or RAM amounts that indicate that they bought it with base storage and added two RAM sticks afterwards. And they were apparently happy with that level of RAM for at least a couple to several years. And a lot of people were even happy with Fusion drives until they went bad or until a version of macOS made them feel slow.

Selling at a low base price does not imply that Apple wouldn't offer options though. I'd expect an offering to at least a Max chip as they could do a better job cooling in a 27 inch iMac with the old design compared to the 24 inch iMac. And they could cool an Ultra chip if they used the iMac Pro cooling design.

 

[JerryDon]

iMac 23.5 is too small and Studio is too expensive - I'll have to give in and go with Mac Mini and 3rd party Monitor I suppose

 

[Significant1]

If you do video rendering I would avoid the iMac PRO models as the Xeon chips are not as good as the core i7-i9s

I don't render video, but afaik that was only initially due to lack of quicksync and apple had not yet added T2 hardware encoder support.

Anyhow the silent cooling in imac pro is a joy to work with. It never get noisy in a way that get on your nerves

 

[theluggage]

This discussion is about the cost differential between the 27 inch iMacs and a desktop Mac + Studio Display. And Apple did well with the market in 27 inch iMacs because you got a great display, speakers, microphones and webcam for a little more than the cost of a similar display.

The cost differential is mainly applicable to the base 5k i5 iMac that sold for $1800 vs. $2300 for a base Mini and Studio Display... but power-wise that's more comparable to the $2300 i7 iMac, so the differential is down to $200 to level up the Mini's storage. Further up the range you go, the less the differential. A top-end i9 iMac with 32GB of RAM cost $3600 - exactly the same as a Mac Studio 'max' + Studio Display. OK, that includes Apple's $600 RAM upgrade rather than a cheaper third party option - but so would any hypothetical Apple Silicon iMac.

OK, there's the issue of keyboard + mouse, but YMMV - I'm happy with the option not to pay for a Magic Keyboard and Mouse because I'm going to get third party ones anyhow... and the real dividends come in the future when you can roll whatever display you buy over to your next Mac. (or vice versa if a shiny new display appears on the market).

 

[pshufd]

I don't render video, but afaik that was only initially due to lack of quicksync and apple had not yet added T2 hardware encoder support.

Anyhow the silent cooling in imac pro is a joy to work with. It never get noisy in a way that get on your nerves

I do video editing and run a Windows virtual machine from time to time and it handles it with ease, and the cooling system is fantastic. It is even better than on my Mac Studio. The fans have always been on minimum speed around 1,100 or 1,200 RPM. That's probably to handle the 18-core Xeon W and Vega 64 options.

My 2014 iMac i7 got quite loud. My 2015 iMac i5 is quiet but I never ran anything heavy on it as I had a Studio to go with my 2015. I had been shopping for a 2019 i9 or 2020 i7 but not having to worry about Fusion drives, getting 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM made for a bit more peace of mind. The extra two USB-C ports and the ability to drive up to 5 monitors was nice to know though I drive my external monitors with my Mac Studio these days.

There's a little more peace of mind buying a used iMac Pro in that the person who purchased it paid at least $5k for it for professional work and they generally take better care of their equipment and know more about it. There's always some concern when you go into a residence to look at a used system. I bought it from a big-cap tech company employee who knew an engineer that I worked with for several years. He has set up the system so I could spend 30 minutes evaluating it but I decide in 30 seconds based on who he is and how he set the system up. Where he lived was also a factor. We mostly chatted about software engineering and content creation afterwards.

 

[pshufd]

The cost differential is mainly applicable to the base 5k i5 iMac that sold for $1800 vs. $2300 for a base Mini and Studio Display... but power-wise that's more comparable to the $2300 i7 iMac, so the differential is down to $200 to level up the Mini's storage. Further up the range you go, the less the differential. A top-end i9 iMac with 32GB of RAM cost $3600 - exactly the same as a Mac Studio 'max' + Studio Display. OK, that includes Apple's $600 RAM upgrade rather than a cheaper third party option - but so would any hypothetical Apple Silicon iMac.

OK, there's the issue of keyboard + mouse, but YMMV - I'm happy with the option not to pay for a Magic Keyboard and Mouse because I'm going to get third party ones anyhow... and the real dividends come in the future when you can roll whatever display you buy over to your next Mac. (or vice versa if a shiny new display appears on the market).

Apple sold a lot of these base models so clearly the price-point was attractive to consumers. Microcenter and Best Buy sold the 2020 base iMacs new even in 2024. They are both out of stock at this point and I don't think that they are getting any more but Best Buy still gets refurbished iMacs from time to time. So does OWC. They were all sold out last time I checked so there is clearly still demand for this model, even with a 4-year-old Intel CPU.

One other thing about the Intel iMacs is that they have better external monitor support than the M1 and M2 base iMacs or base M1 and M2 minis. I'd guess that wide consumer approval of 27 inch iMacs over ASDs and the continual demand for used 27 inch iMacs is evidence of their desirability. I can actually afford to outfit my desk with 4 ASDs but I choose not to as I do consider value along with usability. 4 ASDs do not make sense, either, as I don't need one set of speakers, microphones and webcam. An ASD without the other options would be a nice offering from Apple.

 

[Minghold]

This discussion is about the cost differential between the 27 inch iMacs and a desktop Mac + Studio Display.

This discussion's subject is set by the OP's thread subject-title. Anyway, the sentence of yours that I replied to was:

I think that a 27 inch 5k iMac with Apple Silicon with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD at $1,899 would sell really well.

Which I found issue with since the specs (aside from processor) aren't improved at all in a dozen years.

Apple did well with the market in 27 inch iMacs because you got a great display, speakers, microphones and webcam for a little more than the cost of a similar display.

It was also the last non-tower Mac whose memory could be easily upgraded without machine disassembly.

I have a friend who ran his YouTube channel off a base M1 mini, and has upgraded to a base M2 Air. He can live stream and do other things on his systems at the same time. You can actually do 4k editing on the base Apple Silicon Macs and offering one at that price point would result in lots of sales.

You can do video "editing" on anything, because it's just lossless stream-copying of clipped between-keyframe segments. (But Apple and Adobe don't want you to know about AvidDemux and MKVToolNix; they want creators to associate editing with rendering in subscription-model bloatsuites that require a 300mph nitrous processor just to move.)

How do I know that? I've seen lots of 27 inch iMacs for sale on the secondary market with the base RAM and storage. Or RAM amounts that indicate that they bought it with base storage and added two RAM sticks afterwards. And they were apparently happy with that level of RAM for at least a couple to several years.

Most base-model configurations come from schools and corporate secretary desks where they didn't have to do anything except run library checkout software and appointment calendars. (Thus the spate of dog-slow 1.4ghz i5 21.5" models circa 2014.)

And a lot of people were even happy with Fusion drives until they went bad or until a version of macOS made them feel slow.

Speaking of that dog-slow model above, it was rated kosher for Catalina/APFS, whose Spotlight-accumulating cruft more or less bricked the machine's 2.5" 5400rpm rotational-drive within a year. (I get these from recyclers for $25 now, and they perk up nicely backgraded to Mojave/HFS+)

Selling at a low base price does not imply that Apple wouldn't offer options though. I'd expect an offering to at least a Max chip as they could do a better job cooling in a 27 inch iMac with the old design compared to the 24 inch iMac. And they could cool an Ultra chip if they used the iMac Pro cooling design.

Apple's intel iMac marketing problem was that they had steadily acquired a well-earned reputation for selling deliberately-delicate products that were nigh impossible for the user to fix, a sentiment the admittedly beautiful 27" iMacs were primarily responsible for imparting. They were explicitly designed to break, with their outer-glass and underlying screen assembly a single glued-together piece. So, break the glass, and the machine is toast as it'd be cost-prohibitive to purchase a whole new screen assembly and have it put it. (Compare to an old blackback iMac with metal corners protecting inset glass which is easy to manually replace.) Pissed-off/ripped-off customers never forget.

 

[Chuckeee]

Mac Mini though will have a crappy integrated GPU which will be bad for video editing I assume.

All SoC Mac have integrated GPU. External GPU are inconsistent with the M chip architecture. Any [mythical] large screen iMac with an M chip will have the same limitation

 

[Minghold]

You don't need a fast GPU, or any kind of speed whatsoever, for video-editing, by which I mean cutting and joining, which is probably what 99% of people creating social-media content are doing. Get ahold of AvidDemux for cutting, and MKVToolNix for joining ("appending"); both are free, which means Apple and Adobe will never, ever mention them to you -- they want you thrashing your processors and roasting electricity for hours rending video in expensive subscription-model applications when almost all of the time it is completely unnecessary, since cut and joined files are losslessly stream-copied.

You could just use iMovie too. It runs fine on any Apple Silicon Mac for 4k editing.

Joining video with stream-copied output is far from an intuitive process in iMovie, and the two freebies I mentioned above will run on any ancient piece of poop running Mac, Windows, or Linux operating-systems older than the hills.

 

[Mimiron]

I still don't know if I did the right thing, maybe i should have gotten the m1 ultra for 2700 EUR instead of the imac pro for 1,400 which is now super old and the cpu/ram upgrades to the 18-core and 256 gb ram will cost me probably 2100 EUR in total with everything included. Might return the iMac Pro when it arrives by the end of this week. I mean m1 ultra sounds more reasonable, but they are going to introduce M4 soon so maybe it's worth waiting? Who knows...

 

[Onimusha370]

I still don't know if I did the right thing, maybe i should have gotten the m1 ultra for 2700 EUR instead of the imac pro for 1,400 which is now super old and the cpu/ram upgrades to the 18-core and 256 gb ram will cost me probably 2100 EUR in total with everything included. Might return the iMac Pro when it arrives by the end of this week. I mean m1 ultra sounds more reasonable, but they are going to introduce M4 soon so maybe it's worth waiting? Who knows...

I think M4 Pro and M4 Max will be out later this year in the MBP (and the Pro chip in the Mac mini). I’d guess that an M4 Ultra, and the rumoured Extreme chip which could end up in the Mac Pro, are more likely to be Spring or Summer 2025.

 

[Expidia]

I've been waiting for a few years now, but there’s still no sign of Apple releasing a new iMac with a 27-inch screen. A while back, I bought an older 2017 iMac, maxed out the RAM to 64GB, and added an NVMe SSD. It’s fast, but the CPU is showing its age. I need to switch to Apple Silicon, but I don’t want to buy a Mac Studio and a separate screen. The 24-inch iMac is too small for me, and I prefer not to use two screens for work. Do you think the rumors about a new 32-inch iMac are true, or am I the only one waiting for Apple to release an iMac with an M-chip and a bigger screen? How long do you think we'll have to wait?

I feel like a new model would cannibalize the sales of the Mac Mini and Studio...

I think I might have replied with this above already . . . I went ahead and sprung for the 15 inch MacBook Air. And paired it with a 35 inch Samsung monitor that I was using on my desk at work before I retired. I would never pay $1600 for Apple's monitor.
I'm loving this setup. MacBook Air is portable as a bonus. I had no interest in a mini. True, my 9 year old iMac had a tb of storage, but I only upped to 512gb for the Air as I have a 2tb ext hard drive. I think the 15 inch Air has like 6 speakers and a woofer. It sounds great and even plays the audio when it's closed and connected to the display. But I found a Bose Companion 3 on Facebook marketplace for $60 and it sounds amazing. Good sized woofer and great sounding tiny satellite speakers on each side of my monitor now.

 

[Mimiron]

Returned the imac pro, it was laggy in obs while recording wow footage in 2560x1440 so yeah, here we go again. M2 ultra is the next stop.

 

[Mimiron]

I think I might have replied with this above already . . . I went ahead and spring for the 15 inch MacBook Air. And paired it with a 35 inch Samsung monitor I was using on my work desk before I retired. I would never pay $1600 for Apples monitor.
I'm loving this setup. MacBook Air is portable as a bonus. I had no interest in a mini. True, my 9 year old iMac had a tb of storage but I only got 512gb for the Air as I have a 2tb ext hard drive I think the 15 inch Air has like 6 speakers and a woofer. It sounds great and even plays the audio when it's closed and connected to the display. But I found a Bose Companion 3 on Facebook marketplace for $60 and it sounds amazing. Good sized woofer and great sounding tiny satellite speakers on each side of my monitor now.

While this setup looks cool and all, it wouldn't be nearly enough for my workflow.