- It's so thin. It's so pretty. It's so light. Apple doesn't really
get into the performance of the 24-inch M1 iMac until over halfway down the product page. And I get it, this is a lifestyle product. I'm just supposed to be happy it's available in my favorite
color, but I'm not happy. As it turns out, Apple quietly
crippled the performance of the entry-level tier without disclosing it on the product page. So I'm pretty peeved right now to the point where not even
an adorable pink computer could cheer me up. Although it is really cute. Okay. Maybe it's cheering me up a little bit. You know what else cheers me up? It's almost Father's Day and
iFixit wants to help you save on the perfect Father's Day gift. Get $10 off your order of $50 or more with code DADS2021 until June 20th. Learn more at the end of this video or check out the link in
the video description. (upbeat music) Apple designed the new M1 iMac to be the first thing
that catches your eye when you wander into a big-box store and spot it amongst a sea of
silver and black monoliths, its own previous
generation iMacs included. It's bright, cheerful, and
fundamentally different from what you'd expect from a computer or even a computer monitor these days. The thickness or rather the
thinness is all inspiring. And the all glass front gives the machine an unusual flatness with no
seems to disrupt the aesthetic. Unfortunately, to
achieve this apple needed to provide an external power brick for the first time ever on the iMac. And surprisingly, it's not as
cute as the computer itself. I mean, if the appeal of the machine is supposed to be it's awe inspiring thinness and lightness, I wish it was a bit smaller, though the color matching
cord does make the cable run to the adapter itself, less intrusive and what's more the
optional Ethernet adapter also lives here for
perfect cable management. This really is some cool stuff
here, power and networking both go through the braided cable to a Meg safe as round plug that's keyed so it can only go in the right way. It's super easy to connect and frankly also really satisfying but it kind of raises the question. What makes the ethernet go? If you look closely, you can see a number of contacts on the outer
ring of the connector. And this is where the signals are carried at least from a physical standpoint. But then logically, as far
as the iMac is concerned, it's just an extension of the M1 soC I0. So it's not attached to any of the USB or
Thunderbolt controllers which is both unexpected and fascinating. There's not too much else
for us to say about it. Other than that, whatever
Apple's done here not having to worry about Hopland capabilities
probably made it simpler since unplugging the ethernet adapter would also cut power to the machine. Then there's the elephant
in the room, the bezels it seems these white bezels
surrounding the display have divided both apple
fans and haters alike with many pointing out not entirely incorrectly that having white around your display can
upset the eyes perception of contrast on the
screen, but because liking or hating it is considered
a hot take at this time. I want to take a step back and try to objectively examine the
effect that apple intended and the effect that it actually has. Apple's stated intention for the 24 inch iMac was to make it blend in with its surroundings,
not so much like a chameleon so you don't notice it. You notice it, but you're
supposed to notice it in a more organic way and
less like it's a piece of tech sitting on the
table and Apple's history of doing things like this goes way back with the iMac G3 being a notable example. At that time black bezels
hadn't even caught on yet. And we were still living
with beige bezel CRTs. Then through the early to mid 2000's apple continue to differentiate itself by using a purer white than anyone else. And then in mid 2007 Apple followed the rest of the
industry and moved to black. This arguably was the first
time we saw the now iconic black and silver design language that
apple has used up until now. And how long they stuck with
it is I think a big part of what makes the shift back
to later colors so jarring. But if we're being honest it's not as bad as it
first appeared to be like, yes I saw it and immediately
went, boy, that's ugly. But as Anthony was working
on benchmarking machine he noticed that, well, he
just stopped noticing it partly because the slightly
off white was blending in with the white wall
behind to the point where once he was focused on the display itself it almost appeared to be floating and the effect can be a
little disorienting at first. It's certainly easier to
focus on a display when it's surrounded by a
distinct black border, but after a while, neither
of us found it distracting. And you can just use
dark mode if you want to make it easier to distinguish. So our new take is that coupled
with the very pastel color of the chin bar, the
white bezel really does make the screen pop. And it does pop, peak
brightness is 500 nits, which is higher than most displays that aren't HDR certified, meaning that it is plenty bright enough to be readable in a bright sunlit room which especially in this
yellow color seems to be exactly where apple
expected it to end up. There is some panel uniformity
trouble along the edges. That's plainly obvious,
especially off axis but the panel is otherwise
pretty solid with a four and a half K resolution that
is very retina at this size. You will not be making
out the individual pixels. The speakers, meanwhile are (upbeat music) well, what can I say. (upbeat music continues) They are fantastic. They're clear at any volume with reasonably Boomi base
for something without a sub thanks to the large resonance
chambers that apple squeezed in behind the display. And I mean, I don't know
what else to say about it. I shouldn't be that surprised
given how good the speakers on recent Mac books are but I was still taken aback when I fired up some 5.1 content on apple TV plus. It's not quite the same feel as surround speakers obviously but the spatial audio effect
was instantly noticeable to the point where apple has managed to give the iMac a much wider soundstage than you would have ever expected out of desktop stereo speakers. I mean, let alone that speakers that are
thinner than a USB type A plug and that fire downward into
the surface of your desk. It is truly impressive stuff, even if it's not fully
immersive or room filling in the way that apple
likes to claim that it is. Meanwhile we claim to have
the comfiest underwear around also in a variety of colors, lttstore.com. And of course we can't forget about the new 1080 P webcam. Jonathan over at our Mac
address channel, go subscribe if you haven't already by the way. Did a test for his review. And as you can see in both his and ours the signal processing that Apple's doing with their M1 soC does an excellent job with this many pixels. And that's particularly true compared to the old 720P webcams that apple used for so freaking long,
goodbye and good riddance. As for the new peripherals,
they're a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand, the colors
match perfectly with the iMac. And they're plenty pleasing to look at but on the other fundamentally they're the same as
they've always been right down to the lightening charging ports and sometimes interesting places. - [Anthony] Are you still
going on about that? - What? The fact that it's
been stupid for so long that the meme is dead. That doesn't make it less stupid, that makes it stupider. Get subscribed by the way because we're going to
be investigating how not all lightning keyboards
are what they seem to be. The new keyboard is the one thing that's been genuinely updated. It's slightly more rounded,
the view of the designs and it features a massive escape key and emoji key that doubles as the function key and
a dedicated lock key that on the upper end models doubles as a touch ID sensor, that is huge. Touch ID hasn't been a thing
on the desktop up until now and it is about damn time. It works great and it can even be used
for fast user switching which is a great addition
for multi-user environments like I don't know families or when Anthony and Jonathan need to hot seat at the computer to get
their reviews out on time. Hey, that sounds great
Linus, I hear you saying. But you spent five minutes
talking about the design. When are you going to talk about the benchmarks, what about that? The 24 inch iMac as it
is right now is identical to the Mac book pro and Mac
mini in all about form factor. And while we will be
testing its thermal output there's not much point in
testing its performance because we know what M1
is capable of already. It's capable of whatever apple
allows it to be capable of. That's where things get a little thorny. Not only does the base model
have one fewer graphics core as apple advertises on the product page. It also has 50% as many fans which means at least in theory it could be more prone to
overheating and thermal throttling like the M1 MacBook Air and
thermal throttle, it does for CPU performance, our
Mozilla Firefox compile test has the lower end iMac taking
a minute and a half longer or about 7%. Blender now has a native
M1 version in 2.9 free and while rendering with the
M1 isn't a great experience in the first place thanks to having just four performance course,
our properly coolant unit, again manages a 7% performance advantage in the short BMW blender. And that extends to 8% over
the longer Classroom blender. Now seven to 8%. That's not an earth shattering difference. And over very short tests
like cinebench and geekbench it didn't even overwhelm
the cooler enough to show up and your grandmother certainly
isn't going to notice it while she's browsing Facebook but it's not the size of the
discrepancy that bothers me. It's the poor disclosure. I mean, it's not like apple doesn't know that they saved $2 on a fan. So why don't they want
you to know, what is wrong with letting your customers
make an informed decision? Yeah, this one's cheaper, but
it's also slower, not just GPU but also CPU because we
didn't put in another fan. Like they disclosed the
lower GPU core count which unsurprisingly
contributes to lower performance on the seven GPU Core model. But interestingly, that lower
performance wasn't as much as we'd expect either,
based on the specs alone the difference should
be 12 and a half percent but we ended up with
more like seven or eight which indicates that either
Apple is actually clocking the course higher to compensate for the missing core or there could be some
additional optimization that's yet to be done on
the eight GPU core model. Hopefully gaming will help
us shed some light on this. And that's a bit of a
mixed bag on the M1 too the way that Intel puts it. It's 100% less good
than any PC, but frankly that just smacks of sour
grapes at this point because it really does depend on the game. I mean, it's true. AAA titles, aren't a thing right now on M1 but we showed world of
Warcraft and previously and now that a dolphin port exists for M1 it's actually possible to
play GameCube games as well. And at high resolution the eight core GPI Mac
managed up to 4k Rez with ethics AA enabled in
games like super Mario sunshine and Starfox assault
with headroom to spare. Although some games like
Rogue Squadron three won't run full speed
matter what you do, thanks to all the tricks that factor
five used to make that game what it is. As for the 7 GPU core iMac,
we couldn't quite do 4k in super Mario sunshine running just a hell below 100% speed. So if you want to run that game you're going to need to drop
the resolution a little bit or by the better eye neck. Moving on to thermals, when running a 10 minutes cinebench burden both IMAX pushed the performance course to a blistering 98 degrees
peak, both machines but that's not concerning. As we've said previously these sensors act more
like a hotspot temperatures because enough heat is going
to be dissipated into the soC by the time it's temperature is taken but it's going to be down around or even below 80 degrees
with the low iMac hovering around 85 on the hottest SOC sensor. That is well within reason, the fans do end up running full tilt to maintain that temperature
throughout our run. But while they're
audible on both machines, they're not whining. There's a whining and wishing
kind of quality to the sound. If you get your ear up close,
but it's difficult to detect from a sitting distance. Surface temperatures also
don't get uncomfortably high which is a nice touch. Get it, nice touch. Anyway so what do I
think about the M1 max? Well, it's clear they're
not for everybody. I mean, you can tell from the design the screen size and limited IO. Yes my friends, the entry-level
one is a desktop computer with only two thunderbolt
ports and a three and a half millimeter Jack and the premium non-managers just two
more USB, three type C's but for who they are for, it's tough. to see many downsides other than maybe needing Rosetta to
run some of your applications. And that's only true for now. So for home use, it's
probably going to turn a lot of heads and the feature
set is going to allow enough everyday folks to
make these things desirable as for whether you agree
with the aesthetic or not. It's tough to deny that
the performance is there. Thanks to apples on M1 SOC
it's just kind of too bad that it's priced the way it
is at $1499 for the model with 8 GPU cores, it's more expensive than an equivalent M1
MacBook pro and yeah, the IMAX got a bigger screen and a bit more IO, but the
Mac books got a battery. So you can take it anywhere as
for my personal favorite Mac the Mac mini, it offers
identical performance while costing less than half as much. And okay, you need to
supply your own keyboard, mouse and display, but you can
get all of that so much less. So please y'all, don't buy
this, get the Mac mini. It has USB type A. You can even get it with 10
gig networking, although, well if there's anything I've
learned after all these years making tech videos it's that many of you had already
decided you were going to buy this product before
clicking the video anyway and only a small handful of you were even going to make it this far into the point where I make
a product recommendation. You know what, Anthony we need to find a way, we
need like a time machine. So we can go back and
plant a subliminal message at the beginning of the video telling everyone who clicks
it, that not to buy this that the Mac mini is the better choice. Do you think, is there any way we could do - [Anthony] We can make it happen. - Maybe we could. Just like I could tell you
about our sponsor, iFixit. Thanks to iFixit for
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right tools for every job. Thanks for watching guys. Go check out the Mac address
review of the 24 inch iMac M1 to get a more apple user take on things. It does touch on a lot of great
points that often get missed and more like technical
overviews like this one.
It's worth going back and checking.
Why the green tape on the Mac?