Apple refreshes iMac line

The new line, available immediately in New Zealand, features Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 processors.

By Gregg Keizer and James Heffield / Wednesday, July 28 2010

Apple has refreshed its iMac line, adopting Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 processors across the board and abandoning NVidia's integrated graphics chipset for ATI-branded graphics processors.

The new line, announced in an Apple media release yesterday, is available immediately through the Apple Store. "We took the world's best all-in-one and made it even better," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With the latest processors, high-performance graphics and signature aluminium and glass design, customers are going to love the latest iMac."

Apple has dumped the Core 2 Duo for Intel's Core i3 on the three-lowest priced iMac models, with speed bumps on two of the three new configurations. The higher-priced of the two 21.5-in. iMacs, for instance, now sports a 3.2GHz i3 rather than a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo. The top-end 27-inch iMac comes with a 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, a slightly faster version of last year's chip; an upgrade to a 2.93GHz i7 quad-core is also available. The highest priced iMac remains the only model that can be equipped with a quad-core processor.

Apple also tossed the last Nvidia graphics chipset from the iMac line, replacing it on the lower-priced 21.5-inch model with an ATI-labelled discrete graphics processor from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). All four iMac models now boast ATI graphics processors, running from an HD 4760 with 256MB of memory on the low end to the HD 5750 with 1GB of graphics RAM on the high.

Nvidia remains an Apple supplier, however: All the company's laptops, as well as its compact Mac Mini, sport graphics chipsets from the Santa Clara, California company.

Storage space has remained static in the new models. The lowest spec iMac starts from $1,999 and comes with a 500GB hard drive, while the other three models come with a 1TB drive as standard. Options on the 27-inch iMac include a bump to a 2TB drive or a swap for a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). All iMacs include 4GB of RAM, with options to increase that to 8GB -- and on the 27-inch models, to a maximum of 16GB.

In the second quarter of 2010, Apple sold 1 million desktops worldwide, down from 1.15 million the quarter before, and also off from the 1.23 million it sold in the final three months of 2009, the quarter when it last revised the iMac.

During a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week to discuss its second-quarter earnings, Apple said that the slower desktop sales were due to the long interval since the last refresh, as well as the continued move toward laptops.