Still beautiful. Still good. Still the wrong form factor for basically everybody.
The M4 iMac is a beautiful computer that feels more and more like it fell out of a universe where laptops never took off.
You can see it, can’t you? In a world without laptops, the iMac would be the ultimate computer. Instead of a box and a screen with a tangle of wires leading everywhere, everything you need is right there, jammed into an impossibly thin aluminum chassis. Monitor, processor, speakers, webcam, microphones, and all the ports: all built in. It’s elegant. It’s restrained. It’s lovely. It’s plenty fast enough for most people. The iMac would be in every library, in dorm rooms, in cubicles, in computer labs and living rooms. People would haul them to coffee shops.
Now imagine going to that universe and showing them a MacBook Pro. People might go for that instead.
The M4 iMac is a beautiful object and a good computer. The design is three years old, but it’s still stunning, especially from the back. It’s still the only Mac that comes in actual colors, and this year they’re even cheerier. It’s a little faster than last year, there’s more RAM in the base model, and it gets the same new webcam and anti-glare screen option as the M4 MacBook Pro.
But otherwise, it’s the same machine as it was in 2023, and it’s substantially the same as it was back in 2021. Don’t get me wrong, I love looking at this thing. I feel calmer and more productive walking into my office and seeing that unbroken expanse of blue instead of the rat’s nest of cables that come out of my regular monitor. There are just vanishingly few situations in which the most important thing about a computer is how it looks from the back, and the iMac asks you to give up too much in exchange.
The M4 iMac starts at $1,299 with an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU M4 chip, 16GB of memory, and a 256 GB SSD. As usual, the starting configuration seems to exist only to encourage you to spend more money. Only two of the base models’ four USB-C ports are Thunderbolt ports, it only supports one external display instead of two, the Ethernet port costs extra, and the Magic Keyboard it comes with doesn’t have TouchID. All those problems disappear if you spend $200 more to get the next tier, which also bumps you up to a 10-core CPU. If you’re buying an iMac for yourself, that $1,499 model is the real starting point.
My review unit, with a 10-core CPU and GPU, 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, the $200 anti-glare nanotexture coating, and the full-sized Magic Keyboard comes out to $2,329. This is more than you should spend on an iMac.
The thing about an all-in-one computer is that all of those things have to be worth it. If you have to start plugging in a bunch of stuff to compensate for what’s built in, you might as well get something else. (This is what’s known in the biz as “foreshadowing.”) And the iMac mostly, mostly nails it.
That 10-core processor is the same chip as the base M4 Mac Mini or MacBook Pro, and in daily use, the iMac feels plenty fast. Even the 8-core base model should be good for at least five years and probably longer, thanks to that 16GB starting RAM. My work machine is a four-year-old M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, and I have no complaints about its speed in day-to-day work. (Port selection and the fact that I can only use one external monitor, yes.) Apple Silicon has some legs to it. You do have to hand it to them.
The iMac’s speakers are as good as ever, and the mics and noise-canceling are advanced enough that I never had to plug in a headset for a video call. The 12MP Center Stage camera is a big upgrade over last year’s model and much less obnoxious than the similar ultrawide one in the Surface Pro 11, which defaults to a zoomed-way-out view of your entire surroundings. It’s better at keeping me centered in the screen than the gimbal-mounted Insta360 Link webcam I usually use. And unlike the Insta360, it doesn’t randomly decide to point at my lap or bookshelf instead of my face or refuse to turn on because it’s not getting quite enough power from the USB hub behind my monitor.
Source : https://www.theverge.com/24303351/apple-imac-m4-review-expensive-beautiful-niche
