- [Jeff] How's it going,
ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
Jeff Benjamin with 9to5Mac.
In this video, we're reviewing the 2020 iMac.
Now, this iMac could be the very last iMac
with this design and the very last iMac
sporting an Intel CPU inside.
But if that's true,
I have to say that Apple at least went out with a bang
with the 2020 iMac.
Let's review it right now.
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- [Jeff] All right, so here it is folks,
the 2020, 27 inch 5K iMac.
On the surface, it looks like the same old,
same old iMac but underneath the hood,
there's quite a bit new to talk about,
but first we need to go ahead and get it unboxed.
Now you may have noticed that the actual design
on the outside of the box
is the same design that Apple used last year
so they didn't even bother changing the design of the box.
Instead, what Apple did is just slapped a new sticker on top
with all the latest and greatest specifications
so we're gonna talk about all what's new
as soon as we get this thing completely unboxed
so we're gonna go ahead and grab the power cable
down here beneath,
so there we go, nothing's changed with that.
Let's go ahead and pull the iMac out of the box.
We'll slide the box aside.
Let's take these little styrofoam protector things off.
One on that side, one on this side.
Now we'll remove the tamper-proof sticker
and take the protector sheet off
and we also need to remove the plastic protector
that goes all the way around the display.
Just grab that off like that, there we go
and there's one more little sheet there at the bottom
and we'll remove that.
There we go.
So we're in business folks,
so now let's talk about
what's in the design by Apple in California box.
So first up is the magic mouse.
Of course, this is just your regular white magic mouse,
it has rechargeable batteries inside,
non-removable by the way.
I love the magic mouse for its gestures,
but I will acknowledge it has terrible ergonomics.
We also have the magic keyboard,
which is a really great keyboard with enough key travel
that's suitable for most people in my opinion.
You also have your little charging port there
for your lightning connector.
The magic mouse also has a charging port as well,
but it's on the bottom and you actually can't use it
while you're charging,
which is just a terrible design.
Here in you're getting standard packing,
you have some documentation,
you have regulatory information,
you have your Apple stickers.
Yeah, thumbs up for those Apple stickers
and you also have a cleaning cloth to clean the screen,
which reminds me be sure to check out our
screen cleaning tutorial linked up below.
You also have a lightning to USB-A cable,
which is great because you have a limited amount
of USB-C ports on the back of this iMac.
Speaking of ports, let's talk about I/O.
So right off the bat, I'll tell you
not much has changed here with the IO.
There is one change
and that is the ability to configure 10 gigabit ethernet
instead of gigabit ethernet for an extra 100 bucks
so just keep that in mind.
So you have your 3.5 millimeter headphone input.
You have your SD card input right here,
and then you have four.
Yes, count them four USB-A ports.
Seems like a little bit of overkill,
In my opinion, I would have preferred to have
two extra USB-C ports,
even if they weren't Thunderbolt three capable.
Here are your two Thunderbolt three USB-C ports
and that is one of the major deficiencies
of this 27 inch iMac,
only having two Thunderbolt three ports.
The Mac mini has four,
So I mean you have just two here on the iMac,
that is a definite bummer.
We'll talk about that a little bit later
and then, like I said, you have gigabit ethernet standard,
but you can also configure this now
for 10 gigabit ethernet for just $100 more
so if you wanna connect to a Synology NAS
that has 10 gigabit ethernet this is a great option.
On the opposite side you have your power button
and I just have to say,
man as outdated as the design of this iMac looks,
I mean the build quality is still spectacular.
You see your power socket and then right below that
you see the Kensington Security Slot
and then right above the power socket,
you have your RAM door and the exhaust port for your iMac.
So this iMac has a 27 inch 5K display
and the great thing about this design
is that you can move the display
literally with a pinky and it stays right in place.
It's so easy to move and adjust.
it doesn't go up and down, but you can tilt it.
You'd be hard pressed to find any third party monitor
on the market that has as good functionality
in this manner as the iMac.
It is just second to none.
Granite the design has been around for a long time
and it is in desperate need of a refresh in my opinion,
but still there's no denying the fact
that functionality wise and design wise,
the 27 inch iMac is super practical
and about as timeless as you can hope to imagine
a product in today's fast food society where
you just have a product one day
and you throw it away the next day.
Once this design is gone,
I think a lot of people including yours truly admittedly,
are gonna look back back on this design with fondness.
Now in this review,
I am specifically focusing on the
entry level $1,800 base configuration
and I wanna discuss the value of the base configuration
in this particular video.
So let's get started with the
nitty gritty details right now.
We're gonna start off with memory.
Now, the iMac comes standard with eight gigabytes of RAM,
but you can configure up to 128 gigabytes
for the first time for a whopping $2,600.
So that's taking your $1,800 iMac and making it $4,400
to upgrade to that RAM.
Now, in another video,
I showed you how you can upgrade the RAM yourself
and save two grand if upgrading to 128 gigabytes
like I've done here,
but you can also upgrade to 64 or 16 even or 32,
whatever the case may be, whatever your needs are.
So for the first time this year,
Apple is allowing iMac users
to configure up to 128 gigabytes.
That'll give you lots more headroom
to run multiple applications,
and it will also boost your CPU performance.
As you can see here,
I gained almost 1000 points
in my Geekbench Multi-Core score
by upgrading that eight gigabytes of RAM.
So that's the great thing about the 27 inch iMac
is that it has a little RAM door
on the back to upgrade yourself.
Now for the first time the iMac
gets the Apple T2 security chip.
Now this chip does obviously security related things.
It has a secure enclave,
which allows for secure boot and encrypted storage,
but it's also a Jack of all trades
and that's because it consolidates
multiple controllers on a single chip
so you have,
for instance, your SSD controller,
system management controller, audio controller,
it allows for things like, hey, you know who.
It also allows for the very first time,
a 1080P full HD camera
and here's my colleague Miles Somerville
talking about the camera and microphone upgrades.
- The Apple webcam built into the iMac
had far better color reproduction,
much better dynamic range.
It's honestly crazy to see how badly
(indistinct) Logitech Brio compared to the iMac's webcam.
As far as the iMac,
I can definitely tell the difference
between the microphone on this machine
and let's say something like my MacBook Air.
I'm thinking anyone who needs a higher quality mic than this
probably already has that microphone.
So anyone who just wants to use something solid
for Zoom calls and stuff like that,
it should be pretty fine.
- [Jeff] Thanks Miles.
Now let's talk about storage
because for the very first time,
the base model iMac now gets an SSD standard.
In other words, goodbye horrible fusion drive.
Unfortunately you only get 256 gigabytes
of flash storage on the base model,
but that will usually be enough for the operating system
and all of your applications.
Notice the speed here,
it's not a barn burner by any means,
but it's definitely faster than the fusion drive
and the key is you'll get relatively consistent speed.
As you upgrade that SSD flash drive
you'll get even faster speeds.
Now, that being said,
if you compare that drive
to something like the OWC Envoy Pro EX
which is a four terabyte Thunderbolt three SSD.
You could see the speeds on that guy
are much faster than the SSD inside of the base iMac,
but either way your speeds will be better
than the fusion drive.
For instance, back when I reviewed the 2019 iMac,
I copied a 500 gigabyte file from my Mac
to an external SSD and it took forever,
but watch what happens when I do the same thing here,
copying a file,
it's not 500 gigabytes,
but nonetheless, you see the speed there.
The sheer raw speed of flash storage
when compared to a hybrid drive, like the fusion drive.
Now let's talk about that 10th generation Intel core i5 CPU.
So right off the bat, you're gonna notice.
Yes, indeed speeds are better
than the base model 2019 5K iMac
and that should come really as no surprise
but the cool thing here is that with this latest iMac,
you can actually upgrade to a 10 core Intel i9 CPU.
If you wanna see a video on that,
leave me a thumbs up below and let me know,
but take note of the Multi-Core score 6437
and here's the Multi-Core score
from last year's base model, 5084
so that's a not insignificant jump between year models
and compared to something like a MacBook Pro
the iMac's great, because it has lots of room for cooling
and it can keep that CPU cool,
even when under load for sustained periods of time,
so here I'm transcoding some video files
and you can see that thing is just pegged at the top
and it is working hard.
All 12 of those threads working diligently.
And I must say the fan is a little bit loud,
certainly much louder than the iMac Pro.
Now let's talk about graphics because this is a big deal,
so this iMac is gonna be pretty good for gaming,
so if you're an Apple Arcade subscriber,
it works great for games, video editing, et cetera.
Now the base model is stack with the Radeon pro 5,300.
You actually can't even upgrade
unless you jump up to the 2299 high end configuration,
but even this base model, as you can see,
63 frames per second in our Heaven benchmark
compare that to last year 46.8,
so a pretty big jump between these two year models
and the same thing goes for the Valley benchmark.
Basically what I'm saying is, games are gonna perform
generally speaking, quite decently on this iMac
and we can look at some of the Metal benchmarks.
So I ran graphics bench metal here,
and you can see the Radeon Pro 5,300, four gigabytes of RAM,
how that compares to a MacBook Pro slash eGPU set up
so you can pause right here.
It's actually fairly impressive what you get
out of this GPU.
But of course, what I am very passionate about
is Final Cut Pro 10 performance, right.
Here is one of my favorite benchmarks.
It's an oldie but goodie.
It is of course, Bruce X.
So this runs the Bruce X benchmark,
which basically has a really short,
but very complex timeline there
and it exports in about 18 seconds
and that's actually pretty decent for an entry level iMac,
but one of the cool things is that this is a Navi-based GPU
so it's gonna have enhanced
HEVC slash H.265 encoding slash decoding for 4K and 8K,
so you're gonna have improved performance exporting
and playing back high resolution H.265 video files,
but I also wanted to concentrate
just on timeline performance and Final Cut Pro 10,
so I have an unrendered timeline
that's playing back at full resolution here
and look you can see it's unrendered
and I just click and it plays immediately.
There's no hesitation there.
Media starts playing back as soon as I click,
you can see the Radeon Pro 5,300 doing its thing
and as you can see,
playback is pretty smooth
for this is H.264 video
I've imported from my Canon EOS R
and it's playing back without having to be
transcoded and no rendering.
Also try out a few games like Sonic Racing.
Now this is gonna look a little choppy
because this is a 24 frames per second video,
so just keep that in mind.
But that was a pretty smooth experience
as were other games that I tried out.
Now, let's talk about the display
because actually some things have changed,
even though it looks the same.
Some things have changed with this 2020 iMac.
First of all, you get True Tone support,
so it's gonna automatically adjust
the white point of the display based on ambient lighting
for more accurate colors.
You also get for the very first time
Pro Display XDR native resolution support.
Last year's model was capped at 5K,
so here you see pixel doubled 3008 by 1692,
which translates into the real 6K resolution.
If you double it here,
it's obviously running in retina mode,
but if you want to straight up 6K,
you can do that as well by using the scaled options.
Now watch how smoothly I can enter and exit full screen mode
on this 6K display, it's butter smooth.
That's impressive.
Now as a Pro Display XDR user,
I definitely noticed there's more reflectivity
with this iMac.
It's very noticeable,
but the cool thing is,
this year you get the option
to configure nano-textured glass
and this was previously exclusive
to the $5,000 Pro Display XDR,
so you can get this option for 500 bucks.
So it etches into the glass
at a nanometer level to reduce reflectivity,
but it also allows you to maintain higher fidelity
than your typical matte display.
If you wanna see a review of that, leave me a thumbs up.
So the 2020 5K iMac,
it's kind of a weird release because we know
that this is probably
I mean very likely the last iMac
that we're gonna see with an Intel CPU inside.
Apple is transitioning over to
their own CPUs in future Mac releases.
So that means it's very likely as well
that we're gonna see, yes indeed,
a brand new iMac designed to correspond
with that new Apple Silicon,
so if you buy this Mac,
you're gonna have to be okay
with having something that looks super outdated
in possibly the next year.
It's akin to buying the last model year of a vehicle
and then having to watch everyone else
have the newest version of that vehicle
the very next year.
You may not even care about that,
but it's something to keep in mind,
but here's the thing,
it's possible that the CPUs and GPUs
that we're gonna see in this next iMac
are gonna have much better performance
than what we've seen from Intel and AMD
over the last few years,
so keep that in mind as well,
but here's something else
since Apple is transitioning over to their own chips,
that means that Boot Camp will likely be left behind
with the old Intel chips.
So that means you're not gonna be able
to install Windows and dual boot Windows.
Like you can currently on this iMac
and that depending on your needs,
how you use your Mac could be a definite disappointment,
so just keep that in mind,
be prepared to give up Windows Boot Camp support
and that means all your favorite Windows games,
if you like to game on Windows on your Mac,
that's gonna be a thing of the past.
Now here's another potential negative of a redesigned iMac.
It's likely that Apple is gonna get rid of the ability
to upgrade the RAM yourself.
So that's such a nice feature on this 5K iMacs,
but that's probably gonna go away too.
Now, one thing I don't like about this iMac
and all the 5K iMacs is that they lack
an extra Thunderbolt three Bus,
so you get just one Thunderbolt three Bus
shared between two Thunderbolt three ports
and that's okay.
But for instance, if I have a Pro Display XDR connected,
and I have an SSD connected, Thunderbolt three SSD,
I'm completely out of Thunderbolt three ports
because there's no Daisy chaining with those two devices
and there's the fact that if you connect
two bandwidth hogging devices like two SSDs, for instance,
they're gonna compete for bandwidth over that single bus,
which will reduce performance
and that's why it just kind of annoys me
because even the Mac mini has four Thunderbolt three ports
and two Thunderbolt three buses,
so I know that was a lot to digest,
but I had to say, overall,
this entry level $1,800 iMac is a great,
it's a phenomenal value for what you get.
You get a 5K display,
still one of the nicest displays you can buy.
You get solid CPU and GPU performance
even on the base model.
The ability to upgrade RAM, a better webcam,
a better three array microphone, slightly better speakers.
It's just of overall great value,
but all that comes with one big catch
and that is,
this is probably the last iMac
we'll see with this design
and with Intel CPUs.
If you really need a new machine,
you could do far worse than the 2020 iMac.
But if you can wait, I think you should wait.
Be sure to leave me a thumbs up
because that helps other people find this video
and let me know what you guys think
down below in the comments.
This is Jeff with 9to5Mac.