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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dagamer34 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
It's a desktop CPU, but a laptop GPU, and it really shows on page 4 when comparing the 6970M against desktop card. When you've spent $2000 on a machine with the same graphical performance as a $160 video card, that's when you REALLY know that Macs are NOT meant for gaming.That's why instead of buying an 27" iMac for gaming, I bought a 27" ACD and built a gaming PC. Same price, but PC parts (especially GPU) are upgradable, and since the computer isn't attached to the monitor, it retains it's value a LOT more.
Penti - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
I would prefer the Dell U2711 here, as it's about 450 dollars less here in Sweden with Apples fucked up pricing tied to old exchange rate. Neither is it too fun with a 1650 dollar screen with just mini-displayport input. (Of which 25% VAT is included).Kristian Vättö - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Not a big deal but I thought I would add them anyway. On first page, you say 15" MBP has AMD 6770M while it really has 6750M. Scroll down to the HD part of the first page and it says the base 21.5" comes with 512GB HD, while it is a 500GB.For anyone who says I'm nitpicking, I'm not. I have written articles myself and I have made typos too. Look at the Ivy Bridge/Panther Point article's comments if you don't believe (I typoed that IB IGP will have OpenCL 10.1 :D). Like I said, it isn't a big deal but personally, I appreciate if someone points out my typos in a friendly matter.
BTW, Anand, you look like the mafia boss of SSDs in the FaceTime pic :D SSDs for every finger.
tipoo - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Also on the GPU page, "The entry level 21.5-inch MacBook Pro "...Now that would be an interesting product, lol.awaken688 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
"I've always kept displays through several upgrades, but you can't really do that with an iMac. I'm not really sure how to come to terms with that aspect of what Apple is offering here."That is the key statement. You have a nice $1000 monitor, but you have to sell it to upgrade (yeah, you can use it again, but you have a whole computer in the back). So you take depreciation on your hardware and depreciation on your monitor. Then you get another iMac and repeat. In the PC world of desktops, you get a nice monitor and only take depreciation one time on the monitor. Over 3 upgrade cycles, that can be $500-$1000 in savings over the iMac solution depending on the quality of the monitors. That is a big deal. MacBook Pros make perfect sense to me, but Apple just does not offer a desktop model that fits my needs. Mini is too slow and Mac Pro has Xeon cores which I refuse to pay for as I don't need them. I won't hold my breath for Apple to fill in my needs.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Mac Pros just have an extremely fat profit margin, nothing else. Xeon 3000-series CPUs cost as much as their Core iX counterparts. For example the W3530 used in base Mac Pro costs 294$, which is the same as what i7-930 costs. Dell sells a similarly equipped workstation for around 1500$, and yes, that includes Xeons, ECC RAM, workstation GPU (something that MP doesn't have) etc.It's obvious that iMac is Apple's flagship in consumer desktop market. They have shown zero interest towards a mid-tower though why would they? iMac is selling brilliantly.
dagamer34 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
At this point, Mac Pros are pretty much in dire need for a price adjustment. Even if you really do need all that power, I think buying it makes you feel silly compared to what is available in the MacBook Pros and iMacs of today. And with Thunderbolt, the biggest reason to buy a Mac Pro has disappeared (high speed i/o cards).Penti - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Well when they still where new, the dual processor models where priced competitively against real HP and Dell workstations which often even did cost a bit more. The problem here are two things, the single processor model is just rubbish and priced about 1000 dollars too much (a year ago or even two years ago) and that Apple never adjusts the price of a model but instead replaced them with a new one. With a new price.A single socket Mac pro shouldn't be more then a C i7 2600K for like 1200 dollars now, a extreme edition SNB would cost some additional 700 dollars, dual processor model should use something like Westmere-EX by now. 10-core (6-10C) two socket support and quad-channel memory. Why mess around with LGA2011 or LGA1366 today? They pretty much have no choice but to go real high-end or use normal desktop parts with the Mac Pro update. There are no Sandy-Bridge workstation class processors. And dual 8C Westmere-EX would end up costing something like 6000 dollars for the machine though. There's just no good workstation hardware competitively priced there to begin with right now. Right now it doesn't get better then dual Westmere 2.93GHz as the Mac Pro uses. AMD HD6970, two 8-core Westmere-EX is pretty much as far they could go today/this year and that would end up costing at least above 5000 dollars. Just leaving iMac comfortably under that as workstation. But they probably won't upgrade that until sometime after Lion any way.
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
The thing is that depreciation on the iMac is much much slower than it is with PC parts. I sell my iMac and my gaming PC components at roughly the same time, and what I make back selling the old iMac is significantly higher than what I sell my PC parts for.Getting a high resale return on my old 24" iMac and using the proceeds to get a new 27" iMac with that gorgeous display was a great deal, and it actually sold me (I was skeptical too) on the idea of upgrading all-in-ones by selling the whole thing on ebay. Getting a similar return on my PC is just not possible.
tipoo - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
Does anyone know if the GPU switching is enabled in the iMac's? They didn't mention the HD graphics on the spec page unlike the MBP's, so maybe they didn't bother with it since there is no battery. Also most of them use the HD2000 which is half as powerful as the HD3000, so maybe it didn't meet their requirements even for basic desktop work.