The 27-inch Apple iMac Review (2011)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 27, 2011 2:30 AM ESTFunky Cables and SSDs
Apple doesn't just use the extra chassis volume in the iMac for heat dissipation, the system also comes equipped with a single 3.5" hard drive rather than the smaller 2.5" drives you find in notebooks. With the exception of the entry level iMac which comes with a 500GB drive, the remaining iMacs ship with a 1TB hard drive. By today's standards 1TB isn't anything to be excited about, particularly if you're storing a lot of music, photos and videos. The drives are all 7200RPM and come from either Seagate or Western Digital.
Retail drive cost is around $65 and the cost to Apple is likely even lower than that as an OEM ordering in bulk. With less than 3% of the cost of the high end 27-inch iMac being devoted to the hard drive it's clear that Apple doesn't view storage as anything other than a commodity. This philosophy extends to Apple's take on SSDs as well. While my review system didn't come with a SSD, Apple tells me that the 2011 iMacs use the same SSDs that the 2010 iMacs offered as an option (apparently a Toshiba based SSD - confirmed it's the same Toshiba SSD used in the 2011 MacBook Pro). The SSD isn't available on the $1199 iMac.
There's only one drive offered: a 256GB Apple branded drive for $500 in lieu of your internal hard drive. If you want it in addition to the 1TB hard drive it'll be $600 or $750 if paired with a 2TB hard drive. I don't have to tell you that while I believe an SSD is worth that much money, the drive Apple will sell you isn't exactly worth its upgrade cost.
While it's possible to add an SSD on your own, doing so requires a pretty lengthy teardown process. There are great tutorials online that help show you the way as well as provide you links to all additional cables that you'd need. There's no tray for the SSD to live in by default so you either have to cleverly adhere it to the inside of the chassis or order a part specifically designed to do so.
Apple opted for high quality fairly standard SATA cables for the iMac so I don't believe we'll see the compatibility issues on the iMac that we've seen in the MacBook Pro. In typical Apple fashion there are no spare power cables just laying around inside the iMac, instead you'll have to split power off from the hard drive to power both it and your aftermarket SSD. The whole process looks doable with a bit of patience and the right tools.
Apparently Apple likes to query HDD temperature quite frequently and uses that data in determining fan speed. In order to keep those requests off the SATA bus Apple supplies a custom power cable with surprisingly low gauge wires to not only power the hard drive but also return temperature data to Apple's fan controllers. The cable looks like this:
The standard SATA power cable is five pins. There's one pin for each voltage rail (3.3V, 5V and 12V) and two pins for ground. Apple's custom cable has seven pins, the remaining two are for temperature data. If you replace the iMac's internal hard drive with a drive that doesn't provide the appropriate temperature data, Apple's fan controller will go bonkers and try to cool what it assumes is an overheating drive.
When presented with this information, our own Brian Klug had a simple suggestion: short the two temperature pins to fool them into thinking all is good. It turns out that Apple provides a similar suggestion if you have a SSD-only iMac. Awesomely-named-site Hardmac.com has the scoop.
On the iMac, HDD power is provided through a proprietary connector on the motherboard. Short pins 2 and 7 (just connect the two using a simple wire) and you'll be able to run the iMac with no HDD plugged in and avoid the uber-spinning-fans. I'm guessing if you want to run with your own 3.5" drive in there that doesn't work with Apple's sensor setup simply short those two pins on the power cable itself (you'll have to tap into and modify the cable for this to work) and you should be good to go. Given that this is a review sample from Apple, and that Apple isn't too fond of me taking their review samples apart, I haven't tried the solution. But if shorting pins 2-7 on the motherboard header works, then shorting those two pins on the cable should work as well.
Now it's a pain that we even have to have this discussion, in fact it's the lack of easy upgrades that makes me so uncertain about the iMac. It's a fast machine with a great display but what happens in a couple of years when I need a faster GPU or even sooner when I want an SSD or larger HDD. At least the latter is possible.
With PCIe it's completely feasible to bring some modularity to these components. If anyone is willing to break the mold and explore something unique it's Apple, unfortunately I'm just not seeing that here.
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tipoo - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Nevermind me, it was answered in the article.tipoo - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I heard that unlike previous iMacs, the new ones can only use another mac with Thunderbolt to use the iMac as a targeted display. Is that true? I wouldn't feel so bad about discarding such a system when the GPU and CPU feel too old in two or three years like Anand mentioned if I could use it as an external display, but I think the new ones are limited to only being used by other Macs. And that's also assuming Mac's in 3 years will use compatible Thunderbolt ports.TegiriNenashi - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
What is wrong with this display? Just one number: 16:9.QuietOC - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I have used a 20" white iMac and 24" aluminum iMac. The later has a big persistent image problem. Evidently IPS pixels don't work well in a hot environment. The low noise level of the iMac is nice to mostly not hear, but the visual noise might be worse.Also the cheap 320GB WD Caviar failed by randomly disappearing which may have be heat related, and the USB ports have also started randomly disconnecting. The mouse and keyboard just stop working during the day and I have to unplug them and plug them back in. So, no, I would not recommend getting a $1000 monitor with a computer mounted inside it.
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I've owned both the 24" iMac you talk about and a 27" from late 2009. Image persistence became a problem with the 24" models, as well as the CCFL losing some of its brightness by the two year mark.The new 27" models do not have either issue. Image persistence has been fixed, and I don't expect there to be any fading since LED backlights don't suffer from the same degredation issues that CCFL backlit displays do over time. On a related note, I have a NEC 2490WUXi as my secondary display. That monitor uses the same 24" H-IPS panel that the old 24" iMac did. It has minor image retention issues, but not to the same degree as the iMac had. Whatever LG did with their new 27" panels seems to have addressed that problem.
zhill - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
First off, nice article Anand. Well presented and I think your perspective is a common one in this case. I agree that the lack of upgrade options and rather mediocre gpu performance are certainly off-putting for a machine in this price range, but I also think that your observation that if you are willing to spend $1800 for a laptop with a reasonably short lifecycle then the iMac is not much different. I think you've really hit the point there--the iMac's target customer.I would argue that most iMac users are not highly technical, power users. They are people that want a big screen and don't need the portability of a laptop. These people, like my parents, value the simplicity and ease of use of the iMac and the fact that their workspace is often small and would rather it not be covered in cords and cables. In that case not only does the iMac make sense but it's lifespan is substantially longer and all the GPU they need is enough to drive the system and maybe do some video editing. Gaming prowess has never been an apple concern and I doubt it will be until Steve Jobs decides to buy Activision or EA. I do like the iMac from a compute appliance perspective, just plug it in and compute--no fuss. Also, trying to make a reasonable gaming rig with a 2560x1440 display is a fairly daunting task even with today's cards. You would have to be near the top-end and that's a whole lot of power and heat to dissipate in a reasonably small enclosure (considering the size of a 6970 or 580 card by itself).
I also have to say that Intel's recent willingness to keep switching chip sockets has made upgrades far more painful than they should be (yes, I have a core i7-920 with socket 1366 that is now essentially orphaned).
Alberts - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Securedoc for Mac from a company called Winmagic supports SSD's with encryption hardware as long they adhire to the opal specification from the trusted computing groupJimmiG - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
You can't upgrade the hardware and you can't separate the computer from the display so you can keep using the display long after the hardware has become obsolete.That's pretty much the oposite of "green".
Spazweasel - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
This may be old news (I'm not going to wade through 6 pages of Apple-hating trolls to see), but you CAN use your 27" iMac as a monitor:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3924
It's called "Target Display Mode".
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Note that it is only talking about the 2009 and 2010 models with mini-DP ports. Those can take an external source so you can use the 27" iMac as a monitor. I use it every day as the primary monitor for my gaming PC.The new 2011 iMacs have different requirements since they switched to Thunderbolt ports. Until an adapter or something comes out, the only sources that can output a video signal to the 2011 iMacs are Thunderbolt equipped computers. For the time being this only limits them to 2011 Macbook Pros and other iMacs (which would be a weird application).
I love the iMacs, but as someone who uses Target Display Mode every day, the new requirements bother me. It won't be a problem in a year or so when Thunderbolt becomes more common, but for the time being it is pretty limiting.