A Redditor awaiting delivery of a non-Retina 27-inch iMac ordered before yesterday’s announcement of the new Retina models has reported being given a free upgrade by Apple.
You may not have heard, but we just announced the new iMac with Retina 5K display. Since your order has yet to ship, we automatically upgraded you to the new iMac with Retina 5K display.
Since the old price of the non-Retina model he’d ordered and the new base-model Retina machine are the same – $1999 – it’s likely that Apple has offered the same deal to others in the same position. But is this necessarily a good deal … ?
While a free upgrade from the standard display to the Retina one sounds like a no-brainer (with a slightly beefier processor thrown in), there is one difference that is giving the video producer pause for thought. His non-Retina model came with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M graphics card, while the base-model Retina gets the AMD Radeon R9 M290X.
In particular, the NVIDIA card supports CUDA, a form of GPU acceleration used by Adobe, though this appears to be of limited benefit for most operations.
A comparison of the performance of the two cards does appear to show some cases where the NVIDIA card offers better performance, like coping with significantly more audio tracks in Logic Pro X, but these comparisons were run with the older Retina iMacs, and there were still only a minority of cases where the non-Retina machine came out ahead.
So if you’re in the same position and Apple offers you the same deal, you probably want to jump at it. Note that the current non-Retina iMac now comes with the slightly less powerful NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M with 1GB video memory at a lower price of $1799, with no option to upgrade to the GTX 780M.
Apple does quite regularly switch back and forth between AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards when launching new models. LG suggested last month that Apple will launch an 8K iMac “this year.”
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I’d take it in a heartbeat…
I think you’ve gone and broken Betteridge’s law of headlines – surely the answer is “Yes” rather than “No”…
Really unnecessary article. None of the graphics cards shipping in any of the iMacs are anything special. They might as well go with top of the line Intel graphics and save everyone a few dollars.
Truly though, I can’t imagine someone ordering a 27″ iMac today and not opting for the Retina model. There is no comparison between the two. One is simply inferior.
Take a chill pill. You will live longer. Actually ……………. don’t bother
Nobody’s perfect. It’s the – shall we say – slightly less necessary articles that make the slightly more necessary articles stand out.
All thei IMac.s coming with Haswell chip sis discouraging to me. I’m not concerned. about the graphics caress much. The price for the retina models to me is more in line with what it should started out being.
I still have some I ssue of a $2000 non upgradable computer having 3 year old chip technology inside, but with the $500 cheaper price is less of an issue now.
I’m still thinking I will wait for Skylake versions next year. I imagine next years model will feature a new design and usb 3 c. I still think all the retina models should come with a ssd or at least SuperDrive. I wish Apple would design the 27 iMac.s with a door to replace the drives.
I think 8k displays are a pipe dream until Skylake is released, which I don’t see happening this year. At this point the broadwell chips are not available for iMac’s.
and then you’re going to wait for Cannon Lake , and then for the next one !! hahaha i’ve been down that road , I just bought a pc and upgrade the CPU every year comes out slightly cheaper !
nice
Once you go Retina, you can’t go back.
It’s like switching from a LCD HDTV back to a CRT.
WTF ? HOW IS LOGIC IN NEED OF GPU POWER ? WTF THAT IS SAD IMO !
I am one of these people that got the free “upgrade” except for the fact I dislike ATI graphics due to past bad experience with the (one device over a 3 year period replaced about 4 times due to the graphics card crapping out) and they have dropped me to an I5 because the I7 I ordered is not available in the cheap arse retina and I do not want to pay an extra $800 to get the more expensive retina, especially when the Retina screen is really of little use to me, I would be happier with what I originally ordered vs what they want to give me
Funny you mentioned Logic Pro. The arrangement view zooming responsiveness is horrendous on retina displays. Something tells me it’s not to do with graphics card power but how it’s implemented. Because I didn’t see performance improvements when I tested it on my rMBP with the dedicated graphics card on vs off.
Still, you wouldn’t want to get a non-retina over retina for that reason, as you can always launch Logic Pro or any other app in non-retina mode. And as rnc said in the comments, once you go retina you won’t go back.
Wrong. I just got that non-retina iMac with gtx780. That GPU was an upgrade, it came with the gtx775 as standard. The r9 m290x is better than the old gtx775, but slightly behind the upgraded gtx780.
That said, the performance-per-pixel on the retina iMac will be quite terrible. You need the R9 m295X upgrade just to partly compensate for all those pixels.
I was been planning on getting a 27″ iMac this summer. But I am actually holding out for some concerns. I guess you guys have much better eyesight then me. because I could totally live with a NON-retina iMac. Looking at the non-retina model right next to the Retina, I can barely detect that the Retina is sharper. But I would never know the difference otherwise. But I guess that’s just me. I would rather spend the extra money in processor power and RAM.
But I noticed I cannot get an i7 processor on the 27″.
“The BIG next thing” seems to be Broadwell, USB-C, and that very cool Butterfly keyboard mechanism that is only available on the new MacBook and nothing else.
So since none of that is currently available in the 27″ iMac – I’ll wait.