First Look: Apple's New 24-Inch iMac

The biggest and most immediately recognizable feature of the iMac is the 24-inch high-res display. If you’re stepping up from a laptop, you’ll wonder how you ever managed to live with a small display.

Just how high-res are we talking? Apple calls it a 4.5K Retina display, and it measures 4480x2520 pixels. That’s roughly 36 percent more pixels than you’ll find in 4K TVs (which typically measure 3840x2160 pixels) crammed into a space that’s probably less than half the physical size. Packing so many pixels into those 24 inches means content, from text to photos to videos, appears almost impossibly crisp. While watching some of my favorite YouTubers in 4K, as well as “real” shows like “Ted Lasso,” it felt as if I had gotten a new pair of glasses. I definitely exclaimed “Holy smokes!” more than once.

For me, the iMac also completely transformed what it’s like to work in applications such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Gmail, which are the apps I use most frequently. All those densely packed pixels make text look so sharp, you half-think you’re looking at a high-end printed book rather than a computer screen. 

When CR buys our own iMac, our professional testers will evaluate the screen in our labs. But for me, it was a huge step up: The computer I use for 95 percent of my workday is a gaming PC attached to a 24-inch Acer gaming monitor. The monitor produces very smooth motion—animations like scrolling windows look incredible, to be fair—but it’s only 1080p. Compared with what I saw on the new iMac, the text on my own monitor can look almost distractingly fuzzy. 

Text can look supersharp on a laptop, of course, but the difference here is that you’re not confined to a small display. You can sit back and soak it all in instead of having to lean into the display like you might with a laptop.

Another benefit of such a high resolution is that, because you’re fitting so much more into the display at once, you don’t end up panning around and scrolling as much as you might have, coming from a laptop or lower-res display. That’s welcome news if you regularly edit photos or videos with apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Gimp (a free and open-source Photoshop alternative), carefully piece together spreadsheets in apps like Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers, or merely find yourself “doomscrolling” through social media. Don’t do that, by the way.

Now there is one problem I have with the display, and that’s the relative lack of physical adjustment options. You can tilt the display up and down but you can’t adjust the height. Sure, maybe you can stack the iMac on a couple of books, or perhaps adjust the height of your chair, but this is supposed to be a premium product. Considering that lots of monitors let you make these sorts of finer adjustments, it’s somewhat disappointing. Long live the old “lamp” iMac, I guess.

It wasn’t too long ago that webcams were treated like an afterthought, something you’d use every now and then but hardly thought about. And then the pandemic happened, forcing so many of us to learn and work remotely using apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and whatever Google is calling Meet this week. Suddenly, webcams mattered to more than just Twitch streamers.

In recent years, the webcams found in Macs (including the M1-based MacBooks from last fall) were . . . serviceable. They worked, but unless you were in ideal lighting conditions, or had invested in a couple of ring lights, picture quality wasn’t great. The iMac and its 1080p HD webcam completely flips the script, and it’s so good you’ll probably never consider upgrading to a dedicated external webcam. The camera is high-res, sure, but what’s even more impressive is how the picture is automatically tuned to make me look bright and clear no matter the lighting conditions. 

I am used to having to fiddle with the auto-balance setting of my dedicated external webcam to get my skin tone to look accurate, but that’s something the iMac’s built-in webcam handles on its own. It’s sort of funny, in a way: I was so used to messing with my webcam’s settings that I felt almost like the iMac’s camera was artificially limiting. “Where do I adjust the settings? Oh, I don’t need to. Wow!”

Ever try to watch a movie on a laptop with its built-in speakers? Not a great experience. What about a Zoom call? You can almost hear the ghost of Steve Jobs shout, “Terrible!” 

That’s not the case with the new iMac’s speakers.

I ordinarily use a computer with a pair of headphones but forced myself out of my comfort zone by using only the built-in speakers while watching videos from services including Apple TV+ and YouTube, conducting video calls, and listening to music on Spotify. And while my preference would still be to use a pair of headphones for these activities (old habits die hard), the difference here is that I wouldn’t feel obligated to do so. That’s because these speakers sound clear and powerful . . . for computer speakers. Are they as good as, say, my Sonos One speaker? Well, no, but I’m not sure they’re intended to be, either.

So they sound good, but it’s perhaps not as transformative an improvement as other aspects of the iMac.

The new iMac is powered by Apple’s homegrown M1 processor, which debuted last fall with the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. 

I wasn’t expecting too many surprises here, and I didn’t get any. Performance while tackling the sorts of everyday productivity and creator-y work that Apple envisions as key iMac use cases was totally fine. I never once noticed any untimely slowdowns, and doing everything from editing audio in Audacity to playing the odd (albeit not especially demanding) game like “Cities: Skylines” went off without a hitch. Apple isn’t marketing the iMac as some uber-powerful rig, but rather an easy-to-use desktop that has enough oomph for the Zoom era. So far, so good, though testers in CR’s computer labs will be able to tell us exactly how the iMac compares with popular Intel-based all-in-one PCs like the HP Envy and Dell Inspiron.

Is an iMac right for you? Well, the first question is whether you really want a desktop computer. They’re not ideal for everyone, especially for consumers who want to own only a single computer. For them, the benefits of being able to take a laptop to class, to the local coffee shop, or merely from the living room to the backyard probably do give the edge to a laptop. 

But for a consumer who’s building out a dedicated home office, or who is otherwise prepared to use the computer in a single location, a desktop makes sense. And this particular one makes a strong case for itself. 

The iMac’s large, high-res display makes work and play a treat, its vastly improved webcam means you won’t look like a smeary mess to your colleagues even in suboptimal lighting conditions, and in a week of casual use, I felt like its overall snappy performance was more than adequate for getting stuff done without waiting forever and a day. Our official test results will reveal more. But for now, it seems like the new iMac might just be the Mac to get if you’re planning to work from home for any length of time in the future.