M1 iMac Review: Ultra Thin Design Choice!

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The new M1 iMac is the most popular desktop by Apple. It was introduced in 2021 to replace the base line 21.5-inch iMac.  It is a retro throwback to the colorful ‘90s iMacs coming in seven colors but a more friendly and accessible computer design. Usable in an office and also a perfect fit at home.

Its screen is bigger and it comes much closer to the edges than the old iMac design being 23.5 inches, 4.5K display, 500 nits, LCD and P3 color. It is a great screen that is verry glossy, really reflective display and there is no matte version. There are white Bezels and a huge glossy chin which are perfect for people who don’t prefer bright environments with a lot of windows.

Most of the iMac’s computer is right down in the chin. The coolers and speakers are also in the chin. This enabled the manufacturer to make it razor thin being 11.5 mm thin. It is thinner than a MacBook pro, an apple watch, thinner than any other 24-inch monitor and even thinner than a headphone jack, they had to have it on the side of the computer otherwise it won’t fit.

The speakers are pretty good, a downward firing high-fidelity six-speaker system with force cancelling woofers and are much louder than you would expect from such a small frame. It has Dolby Atmos support and a pretty wide stereo. No base though.

Unlike all other iMac desktops, they decided to go with an external power brick with this one which is 143w. It has color matching cables, magnetic pins into the back and a built in ethernet port.

The iMac AIO is pretty much the gold standard for built in accessories and components. The studio quality microphones and webcam which is awesomely 1080p FaceTime HD camera are pretty good.

The color and contrast are better than they were in the M1 laptops.

The baseline iMac which is probably the cheapest at $1299 has almost no ports at all. It just has a headphone jack and two thunderbolt USB C ports, no ethernet on the power brick no SD card slot either. You just connect a wired mouse and keyboard and that’s it.

The higher spec model that starts at $1499 has two more USB C ports but no HDMI, no USB a.  

The accessories are all Bluetooth. The keyboard is magic and has numeric keypad a touch ID which is useful for login in, switching between users, authorizing payments etc.

the base model doesn’t have a touch ID, has two less GPU cores and USB-C Ports. Though it is a great computer.

Conclusion.

The new iMac is clearly a far better computer than the baseline 21.5-inch iMac it replaces.

You run out of ports quick if you have to plug in external storage, card reader or one or two things right at the back. This being the only downside of this new generation. To minimize the impact of this red flag the iMac has wireless options with Wi-Fi 6E (802.11) and Bluetooth 5.3.

The only reason you might decide to go with mac mini or another monitor is just if you don’t like the design or a glossy display or the white bezels but its not easy to find a monitor which is appealingly good as the iMac.