Mac Pro? More like mac LOL —

Fully loaded new 27-inch iMac will cost over $4,200—before tax

Top model starts at $1,999, but those build-to-order options really add up.

Apple's newer, thinner iMacs are due to be released tomorrow, with the 21-inch models showing up in stores and shipping immediately, and 27-inch models shipping some time in December. While base model pricing and configuration options have been known ever since the new models were announced in October, Apple has not yet officially announced the pricing of any of the add-on options like video cards and extra storage, so potential purchasers haven't yet been able to nail down their total pocketbook impact.

Base pricing for the new iMacs.
Enlarge / Base pricing for the new iMacs.
Image from store.apple.com

However, earlier this week MacRumors posted news from an Apple reseller named Expercom, which reportedly contains the entire set of iMac build-to-order upgrade prices. According to that list, a fully loaded 27-inch iMac will cost an eye-watering $4,249, before tax:

  • Base price, 27-inch iMac, 3.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX video card, 1TB HDD, 8GB RAM: $1,999
  • Upgrade to 3.4GHz Intel Core i7: $200
  • Upgrade to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX video card: $150
  • Upgrade to 768GB SSD: $1,300
  • Upgrade to 32GB of RAM: $600

Tossing in 6 percent for a guess at sales tax (obviously, this varies by state and even city) yields a grand total of $4,503.94 for an iMac with every single upgrade box checked. Hope you brought a second pair of underwear... preferably one stuffed with $100 bills.

It's easy to take one of those options off the table immediately—paying Apple $600 for 32GB of RAM is absolutely ludicrous. It's long been an axiom that buying RAM from a computer OEM is a fool's game, and Apple fits that more than most. A quick bit of Googling shows that the 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SODIMMs the iMac needs can be had for about $40 each, and so you can add 32GB yourself for $160-ish, and maybe a lot lower if you keep your eyes peeled for deals on RAM.

Forgoing this option saves us $600, but what about the SSD? There are several storage options for iMacs, including the much-discussed Fusion Drive, which welds together a large hard disk and smaller SSD into a single volume and tiers data between the two of them. According to the MacRumors price list, Fusion Drive adds $250 to the price of the storage (you can tack it onto the 27-inch iMac's base 1TB drive, or upgrade to a 3TB drive for $150 and then add Fusion Drive on top of that). However, annoyingly, the only all-SSD option is for the same 768GB SSD that Apple includes in its retina Macbook Pros. That carries a gut-punching $1,300 price tag. SSD prices are fluctuating around the holidays, but $1 per gigabyte is still reasonable for a consumer SSD with decent performance; this storage option, at a bit under $2 per gigabyte (and 65 percent of the cost of the entire rest of the computer before other options), is just too expensive for most buyers to reasonably consider.

As for the other two BTO options—the CPU and video card—it's a little murkier. If you're buying the iMac with an eye toward gaming, either natively or via Boot Camp, it's worth the extra scratch to at least get the video card upgrade. The Kepler-powered GeForce GTX 680MX is actually a pretty darn good video card, and the $150 premium is worth paying for the frame rate boost (though if you're focused primarily on gaming, you should just buy or part together a Windows box). The jump from i5 to i7 CPU will benefit you if you're doing CPU-intensive tasks like 3D rendering or video editing, but general desktop users won't notice the difference.

Still, if you need the add-ons, or if you just want to have the most expensive computer on the block, get ready to open your wallet wide. The iMac's difficult-to-open nature has in the past made adding things besides RAM difficult, and we have no idea yet how tough the new models will be to open up and modify. Previously, accessing the iMac's internals required removing the plastic screen cover with suction cups and then unscrewing the LCD and swinging it out of the way; the new laminated display doesn't have a removable front cover (the glass is bonded directly to the LCD panel), so the method for opening the thing isn't yet public. We'll have to wait on our buddies at iFixit to crack one open before we know for sure.

Both the 21-inch and 27-inch iMacs should go on sale tomorrow, with the larger model arriving in consumers' hands in December. Look for our review once we've had the chance to play with it.

Channel Ars Technica