We’re two days into Fall 2013, and Apple’s promised for months now that OS X Mavericks is “Coming this fall”. Mavericks isn’t here yet, but after a blockbuster opening weekend for the iPhone 5c and 5s and the long-anticipated iOS 7 release, Apple’s finally turning its attention back to the Mac. Nope, the anticipated Retina Display MacBook Pro isn’t here, nor is the announced revolutionary Mac Pro.
Instead, first up in Apple’s fall Mac refresh is a new iMac. This year’s refresh brings a welcome but modest spec bump to the existing thin iMac design, with the latest quad-core Intel i5 Haswell processors (at the same speeds as last year’s models), high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Intel’s Iris Pro graphics on the low end. The higher end iMacs now include NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, 755M, or GTX 775M graphics cards, respectively, for even better graphics performance, but even the base-model iMac’s Iris Pro graphics should perform better than last year’s baseline NVIDIA 600 series graphics. In a somewhat surprising move, though, Apple’s still shipping 5400rpm platter HDDs with the base iMacs, and an SSD or Fusion Drive is still an extra upgrade for all iMacs.
This year’s iMacs likely won’t prove a temptation for anyone with a 2012 iMac, but the spec upgrade at least puts them in a more competitive spot with this year’s chips. There’s still no Retina display, or anything more exotic like a touch screen, so Apple’s got plenty of stuff left to add to the iMac in coming years.
The new iMacs should be just the start of Apple’s fall Mac refresh. We’ve still got OS X Mavericks and the new Mac Pro coming for sure, and during WWDC a new iWork was mentioned as well — something we sure hope comes sooner rather than later seeing as we’re all still using iWork ’09 today. The MacBook Air was already updated this year, but both the Retina Display MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini could at least use a similar spec upgrade as the new iMacs, so hopefully we’ll at least get that this fall as well.
Now, let’s just hope Apple doesn’t wait until the last day of fall — officially December 20th — to get Mavericks onto the App Store!
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