it's so thin it's so pretty
it's so light
apple doesn't really get into the performance of the 24-inch m1 imac until
over halfway down the product page and i get it this is a lifestyle product
i'm just supposed to be happy it's available in my favorite color but i'm
not happy as it turns out apple quietly
crippled the performance of the entry level tier without disclosing it on the
product page so i'm pretty peeved right now to the point where not even an
adorable pink computer could cheer me up
although it is really cute okay maybe it's cheering me up a little
bit you know what else cheers me up it's almost father's day and ifixit wants to
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apple designed the new m1 imac to be the first thing that catches your eye when
you wander into a big box store and spot it amongst a sea of silver and black
monoliths its own previous generation imax included it's bright cheerful and
fundamentally different from what you'd expect from a computer or even a
computer monitor these days the thickness or rather the thinness is
awe-inspiring and the all-glass front gives the machine an unusual
flatness with no seams to disrupt the aesthetic
unfortunately to achieve this apple needed to provide an external power
brick for the first time ever on the imac and surprisingly it's not as cute
as the computer itself i mean if the appeal of the machine is supposed to be
its awe-inspiring thinness and lightness
i wish it was a bit smaller though the color matching core does make the cable
run to the adapter itself less intrusive and what's more the optional Ethernet
adapter also lives here for perfect cable management
this really is some cool stuff here power and networking both go through the
braided cable to a megsafest round plug that's keyed so it can only go in the
right way it's super easy to connect and frankly also really satisfying but it
kind of raises the question what makes the Ethernet go if you look closely you
can see a number of contacts on the outer ring of the connector and this is
where the signals are carried at least from a physical standpoint
but then logically as far as the imac is concerned it's just an extension of the
m1 soc's i o so it's not attached to any
of the usb or Thunderbolt controllers which is both unexpected and fascinating
there's not too much else for us to say about it other than that whatever
apple's done here not having to worry about hot plug capabilities probably
made it simpler since unplugging the Ethernet adapter would also cut power to
the machine then there's the elephant in the room the bezels
it seems these white bezels surrounding the display have divided both apple fans
and haters alike with many pointing out not entirely incorrectly that having
white around your display can upset the eye's perception of contrast on the
screen but because liking or hating it is considered a hot take at this time i
want to take a step back and try to objectively examine the effect that
apple intended and the effect that it actually has
apple's stated intention for the 24-inch imac was to make it blend in with its
surroundings not so much like a chameleon so you don't notice it you
notice it but you're supposed to notice it in a more organic way and less like
it's a piece of tech sitting on the table and apple's history of doing
things like this goes way back with the imac g3 being a notable example
at that time black bezels hadn't even caught on yet and we were still living
with beige bezel crts then through the early to mid-2000s
apple continued to differentiate itself by using a purer white than anyone else
and then in mid-2007 apple followed the rest of the industry and moved to black
this arguably was the first time we saw the now iconic black and silver design
language that apple has used up until now and how long they stuck with it is i
think a big part of what makes the shift back to lighter colors so jarring but if
we're being honest it's not as bad as it first appeared to be like yes i saw it
and immediately went boy that's ugly but
as Anthony was working on benchmarking the machine he noticed that well he just
stopped noticing it partly because the slightly off-white
was blending in with the white wall behind to the point where once he was
focused on the display itself it almost appeared to be floating and the effect
can be a little disorienting at first it's certainly easier to focus on a
display when it's surrounded by a distinct black border but after a while
neither of us found it distracting and you can just use dark mode if you want
to make it easier to distinguish so our new take is that coupled with the
very pastel color of the chin bar the white bezel
really does make the screen pop and it does pop peak brightness is 500
nits which is higher than most displays that aren't HDR certified meaning that
it is plenty bright enough to be readable in a bright sunlit room which
especially in this yellow color seems to be exactly where apple expected it to
end up there is some panel uniformity trouble along the edges that's plainly obvious
especially off axis but the panel is otherwise pretty solid with a four and a
half k resolution that is very retina at this size you will not be
making up the individual pixels the speakers meanwhile are
well what can i say
they are fantastic they're clear at any
volume with reasonably boomy bass for something without a sub thanks to the
large resonance chambers that apple squeezed in behind the display and i
mean i don't know what else to say about it i shouldn't be that surprised given
how good the speakers on recent macbooks are but i was still taken aback when i
fired up some 5.1 content on apple tv plus
it's not quite the same feel as surround speakers obviously but the spatial audio
effect was instantly noticeable to the point where apple has managed to give
the imac a much wider sound stage than you would have ever expected out of
desktop stereo speakers i mean let alone
the speakers that are thinner than a usb type a plug and that fire downward into
the surface of your desk it is truly impressive stuff even if it's not
fully immersive or room filling in the way that apple likes
to claim that it is meanwhile we claim to have the comfiest underwear around
also in a variety of colors ltdstore.com and of course we can't forget about the
new 1080p webcam jonathan over at our Mac Address channel
go subscribe if you haven't already by the way did a test for his review and as
you can see in both his and ours the signal processing that apple is doing
with their m1 soc does an excellent job
with this many pixels and that's particularly true compared to the old
720p webcams that apple used for so
freaking long goodbye and good riddance
as for the new peripherals they're a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand the
colors match perfectly with the imac and they're plenty pleasing to look at but
on the other fundamentally they're the same as they've always been right down
to the lightning charging ports in
sometimes interesting places
what the fact that it's been stupid for so
long that the meme is dead that doesn't make it less stupid that
makes it stupider
get subscribed by the way because we're going to be investigating how not all
lightning cables are what they seem to be the new keyboard is the one thing
that's been genuinely updated it's slightly more rounded than the older
designs and it features a massive escape key an emoji key that doubles as the
function key and a dedicated lock key that on the upper end models doubles as
a touch id sensor that is huge touch id
hasn't been a thing on the desktop up until now and it is about damn time it
works great and it can even be used for fast user switching which is a great
addition for multi-user environments like i don't know families or when
Anthony and jonathan need to hot-seat at the computer to get their reviews on on
time hey that sounds great Linus i hear you saying but you spent five minutes
talking about the design when are you gonna talk about the benchmarks
well about that the 24-inch imac as it is right now is identical to the macbook
pro and mac mini in all but form factor and while we will be testing its thermal
output there's not much point in testing its performance because we know what m1
is capable of already it's capable of whatever apple allows it to be capable
of that's where things get a little thorny not only does the base model have
one fewer graphics core as apple advertises on the product page it also
has 50 percent as many fans which means
at least in theory it could be more prone to overheating and thermal
throttling like the m1 macbook air and thermal throttle it does for CPU
performance our mozilla firefox compile test has the lower end imac taking a
minute and a half longer or about seven percent
blender now has a native m1 version in 2.93 and while rendering with the m1
isn't a great experience in the first place thanks to having just four
performance cores our properly coolered unit again manages a seven percent
performance advantage in the short bmw render and that extends to eight percent
over the longer classroom render now seven to eight percent that's not an
earth-shattering difference and over very short tests like cinebench and
geekbench it didn't even overwhelm the cooler enough to show up and your
grandmother certainly isn't going to notice it while she's browsing facebook
but it's not the size of the discrepancy that bothers me it's the poor disclosure
i mean it's not like apple doesn't know that they saved two dollars on a fan
so why don't they want you to know what is wrong with letting your customers
make an informed decision yeah this one's cheaper but it's also slower not
just GPU but also CPU because we didn't put in another fan
like they disclosed the lower GPU core count which unsurprisingly contributes
to lower performance on the 7 GPU core model but interestingly that lower
performance wasn't as much as we'd expect either
based on the specs alone the difference should be twelve and a half percent but
we ended up with more like seven or eight which indicates that either apple
is actually clocking the course higher to compensate for the missing core
or there could be some additional optimization that's yet to be done on
the 8 GPU core model hopefully gaming will help us shed some light on this
and that's a bit of a mixed bag on the m12
the way that Intel puts it it's a hundred percent less good than any pc
but frankly that just smacks of sour grapes at this point because it really does
depend on the game i mean it's true triple a titles aren't a thing right now
on m1 but we showed world of warcraft running previously and now that a
dolphin port exists for m1 it's actually possible to play gamecube games as well
and at high resolution the 8 core gpui map managed up to 4k res
with fxaa enabled in games like super mario sunshine and star fox assault with
headroom to spare although some games like rogue squadron
3 won't run full speed no matter what you do thanks to all the tricks that
factor five used to make that game what it is as for the seven GPU core imac we
couldn't quite do 4k and super mario sunshine running just a hair below 100
speed so if you want to run that game you're gonna need to drop the resolution
a little bit or buy the better imac
moving on to thermals when running a 10-minute cinebench burn-in both imacs
pushed the performance cores to a blistering 98 degrees peak
both machines but that's not concerning
as we've said previously these sensors act more like hot spot temperatures
because enough heat is going to be dissipated into the soc by the time its
temperature is taken that it's going to be down around or even below 80 degrees
with the low end imac hovering around 85 on the hottest soc sensor that is well
within reason the fans do end up running full tilt to
maintain that temperature throughout our run but while they're audible on both
machines they're not whiny there's a whirring and whooshing kind of quality
to the sound if you get your ear up close but it's difficult to detect from
a sitting distance surface temperatures also don't get uncomfortably high which is a nice touch
get it nice touch anyway
so what do i think about the m1i max well
it's clear they're not for everybody i mean you can tell from the design the
screen size and limited i o yes my friends the entry level one is a desktop
computer with only two Thunderbolt ports and a three and a half millimeter jack
and the premium one manages just two more usb 3 type cs
but for who they are for it's tough to see
many downsides other than maybe needing rosetta to run some of your applications
and that's only true for now so for home use it's probably going to
turn a lot of heads and the feature set is going to allow enough everyday folks
to make these things desirable as for whether you agree with the
aesthetic or not it's tough to deny that the performance is there thanks to
apple's m1 soc it's just kind of too bad that it's priced the way it is at 14.99
for the model with eight GPU cores it's more expensive than an equivalent m1
macbook pro and yeah the imac's got a bigger screen
and a bit more i o but the macbook's got a battery so you can take it anywhere
as for my personal favorite mac the mac mini it offers identical performance
while costing less than half as much and okay you need to supply your own
keyboard mouse and display but you can
get all of that for so much less so please y'all
don't buy this get the mac mini it has usb type a you can even get it with 10
gig networking although if there's anything i've learned after all these years making
tech videos it's that many of you had already decided you were going to buy
this product before clicking the video anyway and only a small handful of you
were even gonna make it this far in to the point where i make a product recommendation you know what Anthony
we need to find a way we need like a time machine so we can go back and plant
a subliminal message at the beginning of the video telling everyone who clicks it
that not to buy this that the mac mini is the better choice do you think is there any
way we could do that we can make it happen
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the right tools for every job thanks for watching guys go check out the mac
address review of the 24 inch imac m1 to get a more apple user take on things it
does touch on a lot of great points that often get missed and more like technical
overviews like this one