Apple Announces Thinnest iMac Ever with Fusion Drive, Starting at $1299
Posted 10/23/2012 at 10:40am
| by J.R. Bookwalter
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing "the most beautiful Mac" Apple has ever made! At the San Jose media event, the folks in Cupertino have announced the company's latest iMac, which is impossibly thin and "stunning from every side."
Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller moved like lightning through a flurry of new Macs, including a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display and a refresh of the Mac mini before spending the bulk of his time on an incredibly thin update of the iMac.
"This is the brand new iMac," Schiller announced to huge applause as he pulled the curtain on a stunning upgrade with edge-to-edge glass, calling it "the most beautiful Mac we've ever made."
While noting "there's an entire computer in here," Schiller rattled off an impressive list of specs, stopping to detail the company's new Fusion Drive, a combination of 128GB of flash storage combined with either a 1GB or 3GB traditional hard drive.
Completely redesigned inside as well as out, the new iMacs feature an aluminum and glass enclosure that's up to 40 percent smaller than the previous model while reducing the screen reflections by 75 percent.
Available in both 21.5-inch (starting at $1299) and 27-inch versions (starting at $1799), the new iMac features a stunning design coupled with a brilliant reflection-reducing display, faster Intel quad-core processors and powerful NVIDIA graphics. Each model can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM, a 3TB hard drive or 768GB of flash storage.
The 21.5-inch model will be available in November, while the 27-inch iMac arrives in December. Optical drive users will want to pick up one of the company's external USB SuperDrives, because Apple has officially killed the built-in option with the latest models.
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