Apple’s new iMac cuts 50% of the performance to save 19% of the cost

When Apple launched its new entry-level iMac last month, many were happy with the price, but concerned about the system’s notably less powerful hardware. To save costs and simplify production, Apple is effectively utilizing the same chipset in the $1,099 iMac as it does in the entry-level MacBook Air: a dual-core 1.4GHz i5 CPU with Intel HD 5000 graphics, and users wondered if this relatively low-end mobile platform was sufficient for powering a large 21.5-inch desktop. Early Geekbench scores revealed both good and bad news. The new $1,099 iMac held its own against the more powerful iMac models in single-core performance, as visualized in the chart below, with each iMac model represented by its base price.

Apple’s new $1,099 iMac will undoubtedly be a popular computer. People in the know who want the most computing bang for their buck would be smarter to step up to a higher-end model, but there are plenty of people—casual users, schools, businesses—who just want an iMac that’s “fast enough,” not one that’s “as fast as it could possibly be.” For those people, we obtained one of the new entry-level iMacs so we could evaluate its performance. On paper, it sounds like a big step down—you’re going from a quad-core desktop processor and GPU to a dual-core Ultrabook processor and GPU. This new iMac and the base MacBook Air models in fact use the exact same processor, even though historically there’s been a big performance gap between MacBook Airs and iMacs. In practice, the story is more complicated. Let’s talk about what the new low-end iMac changes, and then we’ll spend some time looking at processor performance. Let’s get this out of the way first: the low-cost iMac is externally identical to the model released in late 2013, which is itself identical to the redesigned model from late 2012. It has the same 21.5-inch, glare-resistant, 1080p IPS display panel and the same port layout (one audio jack, one SD card slot, four USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt ports, and one gigabit Ethernet port). Its other networking features are also unchanged—it’s got a three-stream 802.11ac implementation capable of up to 1.3Gbps connection speeds and Bluetooth 4.0. We’re not even taking new pictures of the thing. There’s nothing new to see.