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M1 iMac First Impressions

11:45 video

The new 24-inch iMac with Apple silicon is out. A couple of weeks ago, I said the new iMacs were slightly disappointing after the announcement; it’s too early to tell, but they’re interesting in a few ways. This is the mid-tier 2021 iMac.

Unboxing

The iMac weighs under 10 pounds (about 9.8), but inside the box it feels enormous, and it sits upside down, so you can pull it out with one hand. Underneath are the accessories: a braided USB-C to Lightning cable for charging the keyboard and mouse, a braided power adapter (on the mid-tier, with an Ethernet port), the color-matched Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and the Magic Mouse (my choice). There’s more plastic film than I’ve seen on any Mac: a cover, a screen protector, plastic on the back and film around the outer edge. I covered the Magic Keyboard in a separate video.

Colors and thinness

I didn’t like the colors on the website or in the presentation, and I’m not a fan of pastels, but they look better in person: the orange really pops. (You’d only see the back if you face it toward the middle of a room, as Apple seems to expect; I won’t, so I’m stuck with the pastels, which aren’t as hideous as I expected.) It’s unbelievably thin for an all-in-one: essentially a MacBook Pro and MacBook Air in desktop form. It’s a bit thicker than the second-generation Apple Pencil and a tiny bit thicker than an iPhone 12 Pro in the Apple silicone MagSafe case.

Display and white bezels

The whole thing is a display with a computer attached: 4.5K, essentially the same pixels per inch as the previous 21-inch 4K and 27-inch 5K iMacs, 500 nits, Retina, True Tone. It lacks the HDR playback of the 2020 27-inch iMac; otherwise it’s nearly identical.

The white bezels have drawn controversy. I’m not a fan, though many like them; “Jerry’s still out on that one.” With True Tone on, they look better, since they adjust to the room’s ambient light; with True Tone off (for color editing), they look grimy, muddy and dingy. I haven’t done editing yet. Also, the front is a full sheet of glass, and light from behind or above bleeds a little into the bezels.

Stand and weight

I like the stand’s structure and the little heel at the back. It tilts back quite a bit, but there’s still no height adjustment. Because the iMac is so light and the feet are slick, it slides around your desk when you adjust the display (the white bezels at least hide fingerprints). The power cable connects magnetically but takes quite a bit of force to remove, so if someone trips on the cord (a slow trip, hopping along), it will pull the iMac off the desk.

Power adapter with Ethernet

I was negative about Ethernet in the power brick, but after testing for added latency, I think it’s pretty smart. I’d love to see more ports in the power brick and for it to be available for other Macs, like a MacBook Pro or Mac mini adapter with Ethernet, USB and Thunderbolt built in.

Ports

Two Thunderbolt ports and two USB-C ports on the back, with power and Ethernet, and a headphone jack on the left. For 90% of people, four ports are enough, though you may need a dock or dongles for non-USB-C devices.

Camera, mics and speakers

The camera is very bright and very clear compared with my 2020 iMac’s 1080p camera, a clear advantage, and I recorded with only the built-in studio mics (you be the judge). The speakers are a six-speaker system (two force-canceling woofers per side plus a tweeter). They sounded a little quiet compared with my 2020 27-inch iMac: with the Apple Watch noise meter at about 20 inches, I got about 80 dB from the 27-inch and about 73 dB from the 24-inch. But in a later test, I couldn’t reproduce the difference, so I’m not sure what’s going on: it sounds great and loud.

Performance

M1, so it benchmarks closely to the earlier M1 machines. It beats the Intel i7 iMac in single-core; the i7 barely beats it in multi-core Geekbench; the i7’s graphics are about twice as fast as the M1’s 8-core GPU. Disk speed is a consistent 2,900 MB/s read and write.

It feels fast, has a refreshed design for 2021, and has new features like Touch ID on the Magic Keyboard and Ethernet in the power brick. I’m excited to compare it with the baseline model and my 2020 27-inch iMac.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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