“Apple is indeed planning to release a new version of its 21.5-inch iMac with a 4K display this fall, according to reliable sources,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac.
“The current plan is to announce the refreshed version of the smaller iMac by the end of October alongside OS X El Capitan and begin shipping the product by the beginning of November,” Gurman reports.
“The new 21.5 inch iMac’s 4K display will come with a resolution of 4096 x 2304” Gurman reports, “which is up from the current model’s screen resolution of 1920 x 1080.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: These will be very sharp-looking Macs. Hopefully, even with vastly upgraded 4K displays, Apple will be keeping the prices relatively reasonable for the smaller iMacs which currently start at just $1099.
what many people want is a headless Mac between the $500 Mac Mini and the $3000 Mac Pro.
lots of people, I’ve read dozens of comments to that effect, want a Mac they can add their own monitors, switch out the graphics card and upgrade ram easily. I kept a cheese grater Mac Pro going for years by changing out the video card (a 3 GB card cost only $100+) adding ram.
Lots of potential PC switchers are also reluctant to go Mac as they think they have to dump all their monitor investments and get an iMac.
if apple is worried they’ll lose ‘monitor’ profits from the iMac they can charge a bit more for the headless ‘mid tower’ than comparable PCs. I’ll still buy one.
I have to agree that this is one area in which Apple has failed to address its customer base.
The original Mac mini filled its niche pretty well, especially when the rest of the Mac lineup was more expensive. But the prices for MacBooks and MBPs and iMacs gradually declined and left the Mac mini in a bit of limbo.
Even if you max out the Mac mini, it has inherent limitations (particularly graphics) imposed by its design. The Mac mini is a great miniature computer for many applications, but it is not the readily reconfigurable “headless Mac” that many people have requested even before the cheese grater Mac Pro was discontinued. If you max out the Mac mini and add the accessories and monitor, then you are approaching the 21.5″ iMac in most respects.
The old cheese grater Mac Pro was a lovable beast but, still, a beast of a machine. It offered much to be admired – four elegant internal HDD blind-mate sliding trays, slots for additional cards, great power supply, plenty of RAM expansion room, etc. The internal design was clean and elegant and the easily releasable side panel made access a breeze. But it was also large and heavy and the fan could get pretty noisy.
Perhaps there is a compromise…a fairly powerful, “mid-tower” type of headless Mac that offers a portion of the old Mac Pro expandability – two or three HDD/SSD bays (3.5″ HDDs, not 2/5″ notebook HDDs), one high-speed slot for a dedicated graphics card (why does it have to be a special version for the Mac?!!), perhaps one additional expansion slot, and four to eight SDRAM slots so that you do not have to toss existing RAM in order to upgrade. The headless Mac should use more powerful desktop processors, not the mobile versions in the Mac mini, iMac, and MB/MBP, even though that will require cooling fans. Apple knows how to implement quiet and highly functional adaptive cooling fans – not every Mac needs to be passively cooled.
When I said “mid-tower” above, I do not mean the bland, squat, mid-tower configurations typical of Dell and HP. I expect more from Apple – something with the design elegance and accessibility of the Mac Pro in a smaller form factor. Perhaps Apple could find some inspiration in its NeXT roots and design a unique headless iMac that leverages aspects of the old NeXT cube.
That is the type of multi-purpose headless Mac that would make a lot of people happy.
I’ve always liked the smaller size better. I used a 17-inch white Core 2 Duo iMac for many years, with a larger secondary display.
Shame that Apple abandoned the 17″ MacBook Pro.
It’s unbelievable how slow Apple is at realizing that it takes at least 3 sizes of practically any product to cover the market needs of the users.
iPhone: 4″, 4.7″, 5.5″
iPad: 7″, 9″, and something ~12″
laptops: 13″, 15″, and 17″
iMac: 21″, 27″, and 30″ (same for Cinema displays)
Mac Mini, TrashCan Mac, and new Mac Pro cheese grater workstation with serious internal upgradeability.
Can you spot all the obvious holes in Apple’s current lineup? Why can’t the richest company in history do anything about it?
If Apple doesn’t release a new Cinema Display by 2016 I will conclude Apple won’t ever update the Cinema Display and my money will go elsewhere.
how about releasing a computer where the end user has the option to select a top notch GPU from Nvidia? The current AMD options in the 5k iMac are a joke. Also, stop making the machines so thin it overheats every time you throw something semi-rough at it.
I really hope they make it super thin, its just too fat and bulky right now. Dump the hard drives, go all soldered on flash, dump the fans and put in a super low wattage, super low powered CPU….then Apple will have a winner.