Close to perfection: Apple’s late-2015 27 inch iMac reviewed

Testing it with our benchmarking software, we found the machine flies, and while Apple’s Fusion drive technology doesn’t include the super slick Samsung M2 SSD inside, the drive is still fairly fast, offering a good 2TB of storage interchanging files to an extra bit of flash memory to speed up the system where you need it.

Games may struggle, that said, though not for the reasons you expect. Rather, the massive resolution and new system configuration may end up playing havoc with the titles, which is what we found with “Bioshock Infinite” when it crashed every time we tried to launch it. That’s not necessarily indicative of every game out there, and testing both “Poker Night at the Inventory 2” and “This War of Mine” found no problems whatsoever, with the AMD Radeon M395 in our review model showing some pretty good results.

If your game suffers, it could be something that is patched later on. Overall, however, the iMac with Skylake offers a solid experience, and that’s partly something Mac OS X 10.11 can be thanked for.

A little cleaner, a little quicker, and a little better seems to be the way we’re describing this one, and while it’s a free update for Mac owners, it runs all the more nicely on the new hardware.

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Apple is also bringing its new accessories to the iMac, and that’s a good thing.

Open the box of the late-2015 iMac and you’ll find two new wireless devices waiting for you, with the Magic Keyboard 2 and the Magic Mouse 2.

Little about the latter of these has changed, with a slightly different form, some better tracking on the bottom, and no need for AA batteries, letting you recharge the mouse directly from a Lightning cable found in the box.

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The keyboard on the other hand, now that has changed.

In the previous generation of the keyboard, Apple had an increased gradient to write on, and that was partly because of the batteries, with two AAs loaded into a small barrel that sat at the top of the keyboard.

New keyboard on the left, old on the right.
New keyboard on the left, old on the right.

This new version of the keyboard doesn’t need that, as Apple has ditched the replaceable batteries altogether and gone with a built-in battery similar to its phones and tablets, with the entire thing — much like the new Magic Mouse — recharged from a Lightning cable included in the box.

Plug it in to pair wirelessly, and provided the keyboard is on (switch on the front), you can unplug it and it will be properly paired to your computer. Easy.
Plug it in to pair wirelessly, and provided the keyboard is on (switch on the front), you can unplug it and it will be properly paired to your computer. Easy.

Both accessories will pair immediately with the iMac once you plug them into the computer, with Bluetooth on Mac OS X 10.11 able to find the right information about its accessories, connect to them, and let you unplug the devices practically immediately once they start operating on the wireless technology.

This can happen from the setup screen (which is handy since that’s where you’ll start with a brand new iMac), and while you can use the keyboard with the Lightning cable, you don’t need to, as both are as wireless as they get.

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There is also a slight design change to the keyboard, too, with lower keys that still have a little travel as you type, though not as much as the regular Mac keyboard normally offers. Apple tells us this is because of a newer smaller scissor keyboard mechanism which is different from the butterfly mechanism used on the ultra-thin Apple MacBook.

Despite the change, the keyboard is still quite comfortable to type on, even though it feels like the keys aren’t going as far when you press down quickly.

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And then there’s the screen, and that has changed in this version of the iMac as well.

If you can believe it, this is the third 27 inch iMac we’ve reviewed this year, and in this model, is really feels like that Apple has complete the whole “third times the charm” saying, even if the other two were pretty stellar to begin with.

Now it might not look a lot different, and really, to the naked eye, there’s very little difference between the models until you look on the inside.

But this screen manages to be a little different, with Apple moving to a slightly different variant of the iMac display.

Technically, Apple is still offering a 5K 5120×2880 screen, a resolution which packs in a stunning 14.7 million pixels and a pixel clarity of 217 pixels per inch, but Apple has also changed a few things.

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