News Apple launches 27" 5K iMac Retina

Nice article, Gareth. But - do you mean OS X 10.10 Yosemite?

(It's nice for me to have the boot on the other foot - it's usually my documents that have typos in)

 

I sometimes wish we were back on 10.1
Actually that's a lie, Puma was awful. 10.3 was quite nice though.

The new display is a stunner. Seriously. I'm also impressed Apple have put it out for £1999 - that's the same price as the Dell equivalent monitor, but with a free computer thrown in as well. It's also nice to see Fusion Drive as standard. Bodes well for a standalone 5K display in the next six months once initial demand has died down and Apple can allocate panels away from the iMacs - but then we're stuck waiting for the next revision of DisplayPort which supports 5K. Maybe we'll be seeing a refresh in H1 2015 for the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro along with a display?

The one thing I dislike about the new iMac is the M290X/M295X. Really should have been 980M and 970M in there.

On the flip side, the Mac Mini update is terrible. Bottom end now uses the MBA processor (1.4Ghz ULV) and the i7 quads have been totally removed from the higher end. BTO now offers dual core i7 only, and for bonkers prices to boot. Dual HD has also disappeared, as the server variant is gone.

 

Do we know what the refresh rate of the 5k screen is?

As for the M290 etc, doesn't AMD cards have better compute performance than Nvidia?

 

I'll bet it's 60Hz. 30Hz wouldn't have been acceptable.

Yes, the AMD cards have better compute. The NV cards run faster, cooler and draw less power.

 

Btw this story is down.

 

Not for me, seems this has been happening randomly to people for a while. I've had it just throw up errors before when everybody else is clearly still able to read the article.

 

I'd imagine it's 60Hz, but I've not seen it written anywhere which seems a bit odd. And if that's the case about AMDs compute, I'd suspect that'd be why they chose AMD over Nvidia. Lets face it, neither would be good for gaming at 5K, so it's a moot point that the Nvidia is faster.

From what I remember of the Mac Pro, Apple were taking advantage of one gpu to do compute stuff, maybe making the m290 a better choice than a Nvidia option in the iMac. Again, if we're talking about compute alone, Maxwells power consumption may not be as good we think.

 

The 5k Mac is keenly priced (especially for an Apple product!) although lack of upgrade options make it kind of an expensive investment too.

I'm not one to object to any technological shiny, but 5k seems a bit, well, decadent. What's the point?

 

Could the same not be said for 4k if 5k is pointless surely 4k is also. After all 8k will replace them both surely lol?

 

I've not had a Mac in the house for quite some time, but that new 27" iMac does look to be quite nice with it's resolution. It would come in very handy for some of my recent design work that's been crying out for a higher resolution.

 

Will it though?

I don't quite get 8k. Both 4k and 5k make sense IMO as their pixel densities put them in line with the highest you'd ever really need for almost any application. A 27" 5k display has a pixel density of 217.5 PPI, a 4k screen has 163 PPI. Those are at the upper bounds for what a person may use for their desktop, possibly pushing to 32" (138 PPI for 4k and 183 PPI for 5k), even then, you likely won't be sitting close enough to be able to tell the difference between 4/5k and 8k.

The main reason why these marginal differences don't make sense to me is that there simply won't be any content available for 8k. Even if films and big budget TV shows are shot in 8k, imagine the file sizes, 4k's already huge, quadrupling that would be monstrous. We barely have unanimous 1080p streaming yet, bandwidth has only recently allowed it without horrific quantities of compression. It's going to be a while before 4k can take off, never mind 8k. As for gaming, sure it would probably mean you don't need to play with any AA on, but again it's such a huge resolution increase. 4K is currently still hard to game on if you want decent settings, running 4x4k would be ludicrous for a fair few years even at the high end.

No doubt we will move to 8k eventually as companies will want a new buzzword in order to sell TVs, that and production will probably end up no more expensive than a 4k panel. But by the time they're able to truly sell 8k (as in sell the idea to consumers), 4k will have been out for ages and we'll have had our fill, much like with 1080p now. A monitor/TV upgrade every 5-10 years seems reasonable enough to me at least.

 

Comes with a curved screen too. Well, it will if you buy a display model from the Apple store.

 

5120 = 2x 2560
2880 = 2x 1440

2560 x 1440 was a standard resolution, exactly doubling it each way should theoretically make it easier to up scale content with much prettier results than doing it with any odd multiplier.

 

We are still at 16:9 again though

 

You sure?

From here.

+1

 

Apples UI is made for 16.9 at last check so not a huge shock that the monitor is that also.

 

For pro users (namely video editors), 5K is awesome. Allows 4K video to be viewed at native resolution whilst leaving space for UI.

Dude, think before you post. OS X is happy at many resolution ratios. The MacBook Pros are 16:10 for a start...

 

What?! You do say silly things sometimes...


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