“I love using a desktop computer to write, surf and create, but I’ve had a nagging suspicion that they’re going away. Who needs a desktop in a world with laptops, tablets and even phones that are just as capable?” Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for The Wall Street Journal. “Last week Apple introduced a new kind of desktop iMac that changed my mind. The new computer is similar in shape and capability to last year’s iMac, except for one amazing feature: It packs four times the resolution into its 27-inch Retina screen. Because it has so many pixels—14.7 million, in fact—you’ll never need to think about pixels again.”
“Priced at $2,500 and up, you don’t need this new iMac—standard 27-inch iMacs start at $700 less. But oh boy will you want one, particularly if you spend time working with digital photos or videos. Using the Retina iMac lets you see, for the first time, every pixel you’ve captured all at once. And even if you’re just buried in spreadsheets and Web pages, it feels like putting on a new pair of glasses. The Retina iMac makes type, icons and images look like they’ve been printed on the screen,” Fowler writes. “The Retina iMac has 67% more pixels than even 4K, with a 5120×2880-pixel resolution known as 5K.”
“The moment the Retina iMac became valuable to me was when I opened one of my favorite photos of Rome and realized, for the first time, it’s actually out of focus! Maybe I’m not as good a photographer as I’d thought. But at least now I have the tools to sharpen things up,” Fowler writes. “My biggest worry was that the computer would choke while trying to drive all those millions of pixels. But performance wasn’t a problem in my tests loading giant images in Photoshop, flicking through a field of previews in Adobe Lightroom or editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro. I tested the $2,499 base configuration, which has a speedy 3.5Ghz Intel Core i5 processor, Radeon graphics chip and ultrafast Fusion Drive. ”
Much more in the full review here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Scott M.” for the heads up.]
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