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

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.