Apple's 2017 iMac versus the Surface Studio: the competition just went quiet

John DavidsonColumnist

Jul 3, 2017 – 11.00pm

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I probably shouldn't be saying this as someone who makes his living working in the media, but has Apple just given us a compelling reason to go back to the Mac? Or, if not compelling, then at least some reason?

We've had the 2017 iMac in our Labs for a few days, and honestly we've been pondering whether it was even worth a column in this newspaper. I mean, it's more or less the same computer that Apple released in 2014, only with significantly faster internals (it really is very fast, this new iMac) and with a display that's brighter and better than ever (if that's even possible) thanks to the addition of some "dithering" technology that lets it display more colours.

Don't get me wrong. The iMac was an incredible all-in-one PC when it was released in 2014, and it's still a great machine today, for sure. It's just that it's not all that interesting any more, and there's not that much to say about it other than the screen is better and the guts are faster. Unbelievably in this era of touch screens, the 2017 iMac still doesn't have a touch screen. It's got a very nice keyboard, a pretty good mouse, and that's it.

Meanwhile, in the years between the awesome 2014 iMac and the still pretty great 2017 iMac, Microsoft has come out with an iMac-style, all-in-one PC, the Surface Studio, that has a touchscreen that tilts almost all the way flat, creating a radically new and very satisfying way to interact with your desktop PC. It has a Surface Pen that's almost as good to draw with as the Pencil on the iPad Pro. (We've tested the new Surface Pen on a Surface Pro, which uses the same technology the Surface Studio will use when it's upgraded for the new Pen later this year.) The Surface Studio also has a giant, tactile knob known as the Surface Dial that gives your left hand something to do while your right hand is busy with the Surface Pen. Or vice versa.

If there were ever an exam question on which company is innovating the most in the PC space, a) Microsoft or b) Apple, it would be a gimme. Nobody could get it wrong.

So why am I writing about the new iMac?

Well over the weekend, Apple released the beta version of a soon-to-be-released upgrade to the macOS operating system that runs on the iMac, and while it's superficially as uninteresting as much of the other stuff Apple has been up to lately (most of its changes are internal ones, in preparation for interesting stuff to come, such as virtual reality), it does have one feature that is verging on life changing.

The new version of Safari that comes in this beta doesn't play videos automatically.

I'm saying this as someone who works in the media, for a company that makes liberal usage of auto-playing videos on its websites, both in the main content and in the advertising that plays around the edges of the content.

MacOS High Sierra is mostly a forward-looking redesign. But there are some worthwhile changes here and now.

I hate auto-playing videos. Oh my god I hate them. I hate it when they play in foreground browser tabs without asking, on web pages you're actually looking at, and I hate it tenfold when they play in background browser tabs, so that you're suddenly jolted out of whatever it is you're doing by this horrible, loud sound that is coming unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere.

Did someone just get run over in the street outside my house? Oh no, not to worry, it's just an AAMI ad that has mysteriously sprung to life in some tab I haven't looked at in hours.

Chrome puts a little icon on any tabs that are auto-playing a video, so at least it's easy enough to find the culprit and wring its filthy little neck, but even so it's annoying.

Or, rather, it was annoying up until this weekend, when Apple really did think about what its customers want for a change and gave us a browser that simply refuses to automatically play videos.

High Sierra makes changes, such as the ability to add external GPUs, that will be necessary for applications such as virtual reality.

Now, when visiting the offending websites I can see the auto-play videos trying to load, I can see the little progress dial spin all the way around to the ready-to-annoy-you position, but I don't see the videos play and, more importantly, I don't hear them play. There is just what I like to imagine as the silent scream of the auto-play feature as it is bundled into the airlock and jettisoned into deep space.

It's enough to make me use Safari again, something I never thought I'd say.

Of course, it would only take Google to do the same with its Chrome browser, to disabuse media companies of the notion that auto-playing videos were ever a good idea, and I would immediately be back to preferring the Surface Studio to iMac, but for now the iMac is my new best friend.

Not that that's the only new thing in the new version of macOS, which is known as High Sierra and which is due in spring. It's got a new file system, known as Apple File System, which is designed for solid state drives, which apparently operate very differently from the floppy disks that the current Apple file system, known as HFS+, was designed for. There are also changes to the graphics system, to make it faster than ever and to enable GPU over Thunderbolt ... and there's HEVC support that lets you work with highly compressed 4K videos ... not to mention ... zzzzz ... zzzzz ... zzzzzzz

Just as pretty as an iMac: Microsoft's marvellous Surface Studio

Ooh, sorry! Dozed off for a moment there! Where are those screeching auto-playing videos when you need to stay awake?

But can the iMac do this? It's not just a gimmick: the Studio is fabulous to work with in its draft table position.

John Davidson is an award-winning columnist, reviewer, and senior writer based in Sydney and in the Digital Life Laboratories, from where he writes about personal technology. Connect with John on Twitter. Email John at jdavidson@afr.com