Apple iMac and Mac mini review (late 2012)

This year's iMac appears to have undergone the computer version of elective cosmetic surgery – it doesn’t look different, just better. It’s still very much an iMac, with a big black bezel surrounding a big screen, an aluminum chin below with a glossy Apple logo in its center, and a tilting aluminum stand sticking out of the back. But it’s smaller, lighter, and thinner than ever. Apple’s claim of it being 5mm thin is a bit misleading — the back bulges out from the razor-thin edges almost like an old CRT television, and in the center it’s about four times as thick. It's almost an optical illusion, astonishingly thin if you look at it from the front but much fatter if you catch it at the wrong angle. It's not quite as light as the HDTV-like Vizio All-in-One PC, but it’s still thinner than most computer monitors you’ll find, and there’s, you know, a whole computer inside. It’s incredibly sleek — almost every single person who saw it on my desk started stroking it absent-mindedly. That part was weird, but it just goes to show how good-looking this thing is.

Since a 5mm edge doesn’t leave room for much of anything, the iMac's other parts had to get shifted around a bit. For starters, there’s no optical drive in the iMac anymore. That decision makes some sense on laptops, where every ounce and millimeter matters, but I miss it here. The iMac's screen should make it a perfect device for watching movies, and its huge hard drive should make a perfect storage machine for your photos or movies, but without an optical drive, both my Blu-ray collection and the decade's worth of home movies sit untouched. The SD card slot has also been moved to the back, joining the headphone jack in the row of other ports (four USB 3.0, two Thunderbolt, and one Gigabit Ethernet). Having every single port on the back is a little annoying, but the SD card slot is particularly bad since I pop cards in and out so often after taking pictures.

While the iMac got lifts here and tucks there, the Mac mini decided it was happy with its body. Its look hasn't changed in a couple of years, and I see no reason why it should: it's simple and beautiful, and how many ways are there to make a rounded rectangle anyway? The whole package is 2.7 pounds, 1.4 inches tall and 7.7 inches square, and should fit just about anywhere you need it to. It sits on a tiny built-in stand, which helps both with airflow and access to the Wi-Fi antenna on the bottom. That bottom stand twists off, revealing the RAM slots — you can upgrade the RAM yourself, easily, but everything else about the mini is designed to be touched by Apple hands only. There's a tiny LED on the front that blinks when the mini is turned on, next to a small circular IR port — other than that and the Apple logo, all you'll see is aluminum. It's probably the best-looking thing sitting on my desk, and looked pretty good sitting next to my TV too.

Complainers be damned, Apple's sticking to its guns and leaving an optical drive off the mini as well. I'm one of those complainers, and I'd be thrilled to be able to toss my external disc drives and my gigantic Blu-ray player in favor of the mini, but no dice — Apple wants to make very certain that no one mistakes the mini for a home theater PC. In retaliation, I ripped my Blu-rays onto another computer, transferred them to the Mac mini, and watched them on my TV anyway, which somehow felt like a victory. Sort of.

I don't even think Apple changed its production of the Mac mini chassis; the company just upgraded a few new internals and let the assembly line keep chugging. It also downgraded one part, the GPU, but I'll get to that in a minute. The port configuration hasn't changed a bit, right down to the Firewire port on the back — the company's evidently not as happy to let its own standards go. Joining it on the black rear rubber panel are Thunderbolt, HDMI, and Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus four USB 3.0 slots, audio in/out, an SD card slot, and a power adapter and button. My only wish is that the power button were a little easier to find: it's hidden on the curved edge, and can be tough to track with your finger, so I sometimes had to jam my head behind my monitor to turn on the computer. It's not a good look for me.

There's only one technological upgrade in this year's desktop lineup that's more than just a keeping-up-with-progress change. Apple's new Fusion Drive is the company's attempt to offer it all: the speed of solid-state storage and the inexpensive capacity of a spinning hard drive.

This kind of setup has long been possible to create yourself, but Apple's trying to make it totally seamless and automatic. Basically, here's how it works: the first 128GB of data you put onto the hard drive of your iMac or Mac mini (including the OS itself) goes onto the computer's SSD. For most people, the 1TB spinning drive will be totally superfluous because 128GB is a lot of storage, but if you do fill it up, anything you add after goes onto the regular hard drive. Then, if you access something from the spinning disk often enough (Apple reps say two or three times in a reasonably short period), it gets moved to the solid-state drive so it can be accessed and used more easily. Apple's software figures out which data on the SSD you haven't accessed in a while, and moves it to the larger drive to make room for the files you need.

It seems to work, too. The first clue came when I copied 400GB of movies, music, and TV shows from an external drive — it absolutely flew for the first 100GB or so, at which point I noticed a pretty significant slowdown in the copy speeds. Then I added an iPhoto library to the drive, knowing it would be stored off the SSD. I opened it a couple of times over the next hour, and by the third or fourth time noticed it loading significantly faster. The SSD’s biggest benefits are definitely faster boot times — the new iMac boots completely in about 15 seconds — and general system speed, but even working with regular files I noticed the difference between hard drive and SSD. The drive works just as it should, and especially if you're coming from a hard drive-based machine, the Fusion Drive feels blisteringly fast.

It's a very good idea, and is well-executed on both the Mac mini and the iMac. But it doesn't come cheap.

If you buy the base-level, cheapest model of either the iMac or the Mac mini, you'll miss out on some of the best features — like the Fusion Drive. The $599 Mac mini gets you a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM (which you can upgrade yourself, likely for less than it costs to buy more when you buy the machine), Intel's Integrated HD 4000 graphics, and a 500GB hard drive. $799 buys bumps those specs up to a 2.3GHz quad-core processor and a 1TB hard drive. But here's where it gets weird: to get a Fusion Drive, you have to buy the $799 model, despite the fact that the $599 mini seems eminently capable of running the drive as well. Then you have to pay a $250 premium for the Fusion Drive (which essentially just adds a 128GB SSD to the spinning drive you already get), meaning the cheapest Mac mini with a Fusion Drive is $1,049. 128GB SSDs surely aren't costing Apple $250 a pop, and there's no good reason for requiring the quad-core model in the first place — it all makes the $450 premium on the mini is a seriously tough pill to swallow.

$1,299 gets you a 21.5-inch iMac with a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT 640M graphics, and a 1TB hard drive. For $1,499, you get a 2.9GHz processor and the slightly better GT 650M Nvidia graphics. To get a Fusion Drive, you have to buy the $1,499 model and spend an extra $250 on the drive itself. The fact that the iMac has a quad-core processor across the board makes the high-end requirement even harder to justify.

The 27-inch iMac starts at $1,799, for a 2.9GHz processor (the same as on the more expensive 21.5-inch model), 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive with 7200rpm instead of 5400 on the other models, and even better graphics chips. This is the only one of Apple's three new desktops that doesn't force a processor bump to get the Fusion Drive — you just pay the $250. That means the cheapest Fusion Drive-capable 21.5-inch iMac is $1,749, and the cheapest 27-inch model will cost you $2,049. That's some serious cash, especially when neither the technology nor the hardware have to be so elitist.