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In this article, I give you my Apple iMac 27-Inch (2017) review with specs included. This is something that hasn’t happened since late 2015, we finally have a new iMac. We’ve got the 27-inch iMac in for review.

Now usually we do more mobile products laptops you know smartphones occasionally some cameras and things like that but we do the occasional on one particularly if it’s unusual like from surface to do. Now, since it’s been so long since Apple’s refresh the iMac and our Video Editor happens to use them in a Ballwin taking advantage of it, we’re going to review it now.

Well, I may have a lot of complaints when it comes to what Apple has been doing with the MacBook Pro lately. Especially the astronomic pricing. But one nice thing that the iMac the pricing has stayed about the same and you get better and better stuff inside.

Notably when they start introducing a 5k display which is now standard on the 27-inch iMac. You’ve got a quad-core CPU and here. You start with the Core i5 quad-core. It’s a desktop CPU 65 watt you can also give us a core i7 up to 64 gigs of ram. It still has that ram door in the back as ever.

It’s the only user-accessible upgradeable part here. Anything else involves pulling that display off the front and you know technician sort of thing only. You’ve got AMD graphics apples and other AMD lately. But the AMD Radeon Pro 500 series that’s in here is perfectly good for pro apps.

And Apple never positions themselves was making a gaming product. It’s pretty good stuff and if you look at anything comparable in Windows Lane with these kind of specs you’re looking at about the same price. So I don’t have complaints about the pricing here. It’s justifiably priced I think.

Still in the box you get the wireless keyboard. It’s not an extended keyboard it’s small it’s light it has relatively low travel its Bluetooth pairs up automatically when you boot it up. You know with Macs you don’t have a traumatic set-up experience ever.

So to be fair Windows has gotten pretty easy too these days. And you get the magic mount to the kind you can touch and pet you know you scroll by rubbing your finger across the top surface that sort of thing. Their designs unchanged from the late 2015 model.

And you know it still looks pretty gorgeous I can’t think of anything that they should do. It’s still relatively very soon. Of course, it bows in the back its thickest in the middle on the back. What has changed over generations is it gets cooler and quieter.

And looking at something say you upgrading from a three or four year old iMac this one is going to be noticeably cooler and quieter when you’re pushing it which is nice. Another important addition besides all the ports that are in the same place is always on the back which is a little bit inconvenient.

Like you got your SD card slide you’ve got multiple USB 3.0 ports you have your headphone jack you have two Thunderbolt three ports on the back yay. I you know right now there’s not a lot of Thunderbolt peripherals it’s not like you need a dock. Because it’s a desktop it’s got enough points.

But for using external GPUs in the future that is kind of really Wow you know. If you really want to super tune this in the future to get it going for 8k video whenever a K video has become standard you know there’s a possibility of doing this. So I like that a lot. Configurations run from 1799 to 2299.

We have the middle 1999 configuration. Of course, you can bill to order and you can get more rammed SSD all that sort of thing. By the way do not unless you’re a real novice and you’re afraid of doing anything your computers do not pay Apple for the RAM upgrade.

One thing that’s kind of stupid and insulting is all the base models start with eight gigs of DDR 420 400 megahertz Ram that part’s not insulting that’s nice. There s Odom’s which is the small form factor like you use in gaming laptops.

But they charge it crazy amount of money to upgrade by 200 bucks to go from 8 to 16 gigs. Just go to the store and so you can usually find 2 8 gig modules for 99 bucks. In fact, that’s what we did. So yeah I do it yourself there’s a little door in the back is a little push-button release really easy to do.

And you can go up to 64 gigs so that’s pretty nice. You still get start out with a fusion drive as Apple calls it which is a hard drive with a large cache on it. So that speeds up the OS a lot of times some key application launch times.

It feels faster than it did from the original fusion drives from four years ago or so. Not going to be as fast as an SSD though. One terabyte is standard. You can go to three terabytes. If you draw that fast storage there are ssds you can get a 256 gig SSD that’s like a $100 upcharge.

If you want to go up to a 512 gig SSD that’s 300 dollars. And you know it’s going to make the Machine feel faster for load times and that sort of thing. So that that is nice of course. All three of those base configurations have a quad-core i5.

That’s a four core thread desktop CPUs 65 watts on a mobile CPU good times with them. And if you want to go up to a Core i7 – 7700 K then you can do that as well. So you’ve got a good selection of cpus there. Honestly, I think that core i5 unless you know who you are if you really need more.

It’s going to be adequate probably for most people there. If you’re doing professional photo editing perfectly fine. If you’re doing 4k video editing like we do actually it’s pretty darn adequate. But if you’re doing a whole lot of motion work that sort of thing you probably want to think about the i7 option.

There’s been a minor refresh to AMD Radeon Pro 500 series graphics. So that’s about 10% faster than the 400 series of a faster obviously then what you’re looking at for the 300 series. And we have the mill configuration. So you can get that with the Radeon Pro 570 and not only is 2 gigabytes of gddr5 VRAM.

The middle on the 575 with 4 gigabyte of gddr5 VRAM that’s a pretty nice sweet spot configuration. They go up to the 580 with 8 gigabytes of VRAM inside. Performance like I said where you’re looking about 10 to 20 percent performance improvement from the previous generation in terms of graphics performance of.

It’s more than a tiny increment of Polaris but it’s also because beyond max graphics previous generation was a little bit older out of date compared to say the 2016 MacBook Pro. So those who really really have high demands, the iMac Pro is coming in December that’s the black aluminum one.

That’s going to Intel Xeon CPUs up to 18 cores and the Vegas top-line GPU. Which is really competitive with turnaround the NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU or so. That one starts at $5,000.. That’s a whole nother can of worms available in December. We’ll talk about that one December comes.

The 5k display is 5120 by 2880 pixels. Just like the last-gen 5k despite everything change is it is brighter now. Apple claims 500 nits we measured 536 nits. For something that’s going to be solely indoors that’s pretty searingly bright. Supports the p3 color gamut and the color gamut on this is excellent.

This is just a treat to use. If you’re upgrading from one of the older 2k I’m actually insula wow it’s you’re going to like this. Full srgb 92% of Adobe RGB 88% of NTSC. It’s all good here. Contrast is pretty decent on its own. All in all I mean if you’re getting a 4k video producer if you’re doing photo editing professionally this is fantastic and not to mention Netflix and youtube 4k is gonna look awful nice on the two it’s nice.

Now in terms of performance I know there’s some of you who wish Apple would go back to Nvidia because you want to play your Steam library on this and get the maximum performance. It does better for pro apps than it does for gaming honestly.

I mean this is fine for Diablo 3 and the usual tomb raider test that sort of thing. And it is fine for overwatch actually two. Needs the benchmarks on this fall it depends on the test your running. Unit gene heaven never does real great on this for example and it scores around a GTX 1050 equivalent on unity and heaven.

But if you take a look at Cinebench r15 which is a little bit more real-world pro apps kind of looking it does quite well. You can see the score right there and that’s similar to actually going close to a gtx 1070 there. So it really depends on what you’re doing with this and again anything pro apps-related is going to be stronger.

And anything that Apple makes is going to run better because they do a lot of optimizations for AMD. Which means that you can see what’s running both premiere pro and Final Cut Pro you’re going to have the fastest export times and the best performance though with Apple’s own Final Cut Pro on this.

So that’s the 27-inch iMac for 2017 with Intel seventh-generation KB Lake inside and AMD 500 series Radeon Pro GPUs. Yet like I said there’s there’s a lot of all ones out there and the imac originally made it a thing you know. To come in all price ranges obviously Apple deals in the high-end.

Even the 21-inch iMac is pretty high-end and I’m actually stoked to see things like coming with a 4k display and the option of having dedicated graphics. The 27-inch still remains a go-to product for those who are doing photo and video editing particularly 4k video editing because this powernow powerful enough to do it.

You’ve got workstation level performance they’re. Not super high in the workstation performance in a graphics card that’s oriented towards Pro Apps not as much gaming for example. Strong quad-core CPUs inside and that 5k despite which really helps justify the price.

If you look at other on ones in the world of Windows you’ll notice that you know they start out as cheap as four or five hundred dollars in the specs are pretty poor. A lot of them have mobile CPUs inside no dedicated graphics.

When you look at something like the XPS 27 from Dell or Lenovo’s Y 9/10 the gaming 27 inch all-in-one you start to get some specs that are like this and you’re looking at $2,000 and you’re still not getting a display as good as this.

So I may have a lot of complaints about the MacBook Pro Series these days and whether it’s worth it but I would still say if you’re looking for something with high-end performance high-end display and still a beautiful design and lovely quality the iMac is still where it’s at.