Apple has unveiled the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, featuring what the company says is the world’s highest resolution display with 14.7 million pixels. The all-in-one also boasts the latest quad-core processors, high-performance graphics, Fusion Drive and Thunderbolt 2.
“Thirty years after the first Mac changed the world, the new iMac with Retina 5K display running OS X Yosemite is the most insanely great Mac we have ever made,” says Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With a breathtaking 14.7 million pixel display, faster CPU and graphics, Fusion Drive, and Thunderbolt 2, it’s the most beautiful and powerful iMac ever.”
With a resolution of 5120 x 2880, iMac with Retina 5K display has four times more pixels than the standard 27-inch iMac and 67% more pixels than a 4K display. Text looks as sharp as it does on a printed page, and you can see more of your high-resolution photos with pixel-for-pixel detail, according to Schiller. In apps like Final Cut Pro X, you can view 4K video at full size while still leaving plenty of room for your assets and editing tools, he adds.
The iMac with Retina 5K display uses an oxide TFT-based panel and a single "supercharged" Apple-designed timing controller (TCON), with four times the bandwidth, drives all 14.7 million pixels. The all-in-one also uses highly efficient LEDs and organic passivation to improve image quality and reduce display power consumption by 30%, even while driving four times more pixels at the same brightness, says Schiller.
To improve the contrast ratio, iMac with Retina 5K display uses a new photo alignment process and a compensation film to deliver blacker blacks and more vibrant colors from any viewing angle. In addition, every iMac with Retina 5K display is calibrated using three spectroradiometers.
The all-in-one iMac comes with a 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9GHz, and for the first time can be configured with a 4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.4 GHz. Every new iMac with Retina 5K display also comes with AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics and can be configured with AMD Radeon R9 M295X graphics, delivering up to 3.5 teraflops of computing power, the most powerful graphics ever offered on an iMac.
The iMac with Retina 5K display comes standard with 8GB of memory and a 1TB Fusion Drive. The new iMac can also be configured with up to 32GB of memory, a 3TB Fusion Drive, or up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage. In addition, iMac with Retina 5K display includes two Thunderbolt 2 ports that deliver up to 20Gbps each, twice the bandwidth of the previous generation. And, of course, it comes with Mac OS X Yosemite.
The iMac with Retina 5K display begins shipping today with a 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics and a 1TB Fusion Drive for a suggested retail price of US$2,499.
