Apple 21.5-inch iMac

The new Apple iMac is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. At its thinnest point, the screen is just 5mm thick, but it curves out towards the middle in order to house the rest of its hardware. Still, its brushed aluminium finish is as classy as ever - even the kettle plug has been designed to seamlessly blend in with its impeccably smooth contours.

It’s had to make a few sacrifices to stay so slim, with the DVD drive being the main casualty from the previous model. It’s also lost its mini-FireWire port around the back, but neither are likely to be big losses in this day and age.
We were pleased to see that all four of its USB ports now support USB3, plus there are now two Thunderbolt ports for super-fast external storage or connecting additional displays. The headphone output and Gigabit Ethernet port remain from last year, although the built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi may be more convenient.
The 21.5in version doesn’t have the huge 2,560x1,440 resolution of its 27in cousin, but its full HD (1,920x1,080) IPS panel is gorgeous to look at. We’re sometimes slightly hesitant about glossy displays, but Apple has pulled it off thanks to its full lamination display. This removes the 2mm gap that’s traditionally between the glass panel and LCD, and helps keep the screen brighter while allowing the iMac to be thinner. In addition, the anti-reflective coating is designed to cut reflections by 75 per cent.


Probing a little deeper into its display quality, our colour calibrator revealed it was showing 97.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut straight out of the box. This is exactly what we’d expect to see from an IPS screen, and its high level of colour accuracy translated very well in our subjective image tests as well. Reds, greens and blues were extremely rich and vibrant, blacks were deep, and whites were bright and clean. Our high dynamic range test photos also showed high levels of detail across each image, and the LED backlight was pretty much uniform across the entire screen. Its wide viewing angles were equally superb, and we had to be almost side-on before the screen darkened.
While the new iMac’s design may be enough for some to warrant an immediate purchase, most will want its interior processing power to match its flawless outer shell. The 21.5in version is available in multiple specifications, starting at £1,099 for an 8GB, quad-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i5 PC with an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M graphics chip. The only upgrade option here is to 16GB of RAM, so the quad-core 2.9GHz Core i5 base model (starting at £1,249) is probably the better bet.


With this model you can choose to upgrade for £160 to a 3.1GHz Intel Core i7-3770S processor (the CPU our review processor shipped with), upgrade the 8GB of RAM to 16GB for £160 and add the £200 Fusion Drive (this adds 128GB of flash memory cache to the 1TB hard disk to improve boot speeds). This can get expensive, and choosing everything will bump the price up to £1,769.
Unsurprisingly, with its Core i7 processor, our test iMac powered through our multimedia benchmarks effortlessly, scoring 108 overall, making it more than capable of handling both fine photo and video editing programs simultaneously. If you wanted to save money and go for the Core i5 processor, we'd expect the computer to score around 90 in our benchmarks. This makes the iMac one of the most powerful all-in-one PCs that we've reviewed.
We were slightly disappointed by its graphics performance. Our review sample came with a 512MB Nvidia GeForce GT 650M card, but it only managed 23fps in our Call of Duty 4 test at a 1,920x1,080 resolution and 4x AA. The previous iMac managed a much more respectable 41fps with its 512MB AMD Radeon HD 6750M mobile graphics processor at the same resolution, so the new iMac has taken a slight step backwards when it comes to gaming performance.
While 1TB of storage should be enough for most people, if you want that extra boost of performance you may want the Fusion Drive. This adds a 128GB SSD as a cache for your most commonly-accessed files, which should make starting OS X and applications faster. We tested an iMac with this drive and it booted in under 16 seconds. However, the Fusion Drive is expensive at £200, and the traditional hard disk-based system is hardly slow.

Apple ships the iMac with its Wireless Keyboard and Magic Mouse as standard. We found the keyboard very comfortable to use. All the keys were well-spaced and had plenty of feedback. Its wide range of shortcut keys, including media controls, screen brightness and Dashboard and Expose shortcuts, really help using Mac OS X to its full.
The Magic Mouse was just a little too small for our hands and, as a result, prolonged use quickly became a little uncomfortable. We’d recommend opting for the free upgrade to the Magic Trackpad instead, as this lets you use multi-touch gestures to navigate Apple’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion operating system.
One thing that hasn’t been compromised in the iMac’s slim-down, though, is its integrated speakers. Audio was rich and clear, and its impressive bass makes these some of the best all-in-one speakers we’ve ever heard.
With its powerful specs and beautiful, slim design and excellent OS the new Apple iMac remains the most desirable all-in-one, but there's not getting away from the fact that it's expensive.