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Gadget Lab

Surprise: New, Cheaper iMac Takes a Performance Hit


Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

If you’ve been wanting an Apple desktop but didn’t want to shell out the cash for either an iMac or the Mac Pro, you’re in luck: a new, cheaper iMac goes on sale today. For $1,099 (that’s $200 less than the previous bottom model) the new 21.5-inch desktop looks just like every other iMac from the outside, but its Core i5 chip is dual-core with merely 1.4Ghz.

That’s roughly half the processing speed of other quad-core iMacs. In fact, it is the same chip that is in MacBook Airs. In almost every way the specs of this new, cheaper iMac compare to those of the higher-end 11-inch Air–from price (identical) to chip (identical) to graphics card (identical). The new iMac does boast one better feature than the Air: 8GB of memory versus 4.

A new iMac was rumored last week, but no one expected it to get…worse.

Why would you want a desktop with the power of a laptop? And not even a very powerful laptop? The Air’s specs are worse than the MacBook Pro’s because the Air emphasizes mobility. Why spend a thousand bucks on an immobile iMac when the Air is the same price and will perform nearly identically?

It’s a head-scratcher. But for people who want an OS X command center in their house where the family can do simple, everyday computing tasks–like surf the Web, manage photos, and do homework–and screen size is their first priority, the $200 price cut could be worth the drop in processing speed.

Value-wise, Apple is decidedly not ripping you off with this exchange: to buy a dual-core i5 chip on its own costs around $150, depending on the seller. A quad-core version goes for between $215 and $250. So Apple is giving you an extra $100 savings here. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the motivation behind this new model. We’ll update when we hear back.