Apple on Thursday revealed the “next step” in Retina display technology by packing what it calls the “world’s highest resolution display” into its popular all-in-one desktop. The all-new iMac with Retina display boasts a 5,120-by-2,880 pixel resolution with a total of 14.7 million pixels crammed into a 27-inch panel, which Apple calls “Retina 5K display.” Compared to a 4K display, Retina 5K has 67 percent more pixels, or seven times the pixels of a normal HD display. The pixel-dense panel is shoehorned into a chassis that is only 5mm thick at its thinnest edge.
Apple loves making the iMac easier on the eyes. It was made much sleeker, then much thinner, and today Apple focused not on the shell but on the screen. And what a screen: the new 27-inch iMac with Retina display’s 5K, 5120 x 2880 display looks incredible. Like, incredible. How much more can you really say? The screen is gorgeous. It’s quite reflective, but it’s crisp and sharp and accurate. Watching a 4K video back pixel-for-pixel with room to spare is a pretty fun thing to do. The big worry with a screen this good, and this high-res, is that it would cause performance problems. It’s hard to say for sure in a demonstration, but based on what we’ve seen performance doesn’t seem to be an issue. The iMac with Retina display comes with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB Fusion Drive, and it’s upgradeable to a crazy degree — the model we saw was scrubbing seamlessly through dozens of clips of 4K video, moving through photos and edits with ease, and generally behaving like it wasn’t also powering a 5K display.
