The main improvements Apple has made to its 2019 iMac all-in-ones (AIOs) are their upgraded silicon engines. The best of these—an Intel Core i9 CPU and an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 48 GPU—are the sole province of the 27-inch 2019 iMac, and you have to pay significant upcharges for them. Apple's smaller-sibling 21.5-inch iMac, on the other hand, doesn't have quite the same lofty aspirations. The least-expensive model starts at just $1,099, but it hasn't changed inside or out this go-around; it comes with a CPU that's several generations old, behind a relatively low-resolution screen that doesn't elicit the oohs and aahs that the Retina display does on our dialed-up $1,849 test model. If you're in the market for an iMac but don't have the budget or desk space for the 27-inch one, the 21.5-incher is worth a look, especially in a component- and screen-upticked version like our review unit. Otherwise, we recommend you go with the bigger model.
A Classic Due for Some Body Work?
The iMac is an iconic PC, having morphed through several iterations in its 21 years. The physical design of the current generation dates to 2015, and it has received two updates since then: one in 2017, and one last month.
This latest update brings new CPU and graphics options to the 21.5-inch model, including 8th Generation Intel Core i5 processors and Radeon Pro Vega graphics. As with the 27-inch version, these alternate CPUs and GPUs are optional extras. The base model 21.5-inch iMac is still available, unchanged from its 2017 version: a 1TB straight-up hard drive, a 7th Generation Core i5 with integrated graphics, a 1080p screen. Screen resolution, storage, CPU, and graphics are all options that rise from that base.
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The exterior also remains unchanged from 2017, no matter which processor, storage, and memory options you select. The chassis, measuring 17.7 by 20.8 by 6.9 inches (HWD), has an aesthetic that's sleek, classic, or both, depending on which elements you glance at first. The silver aluminum and the clean lines are responsible for the sleek look, and there's nothing to mar the front—no buttons, no LEDs, no ports, just the usual shiny, reflective Apple logo beneath the screen.
The thick black borders around the screen are the most "classic" part of the iMacs, and if you're used to the vanishingly thin screen borders (known as bezels) of Apple's iPhone XR and iPad, you might think the nearly inch-thick black strips more antiquated than classic. They do seem large and incongruous in a world of ever-slimming bezels on competing all-in-ones and large PC monitors, let alone other Apple products. Slimming down the borders would be a bold redesign, but one that Apple apparently isn't ready to jump into.
The thick-bezel situation fuels, in part, my preference for the 27-inch iMac over the 21.5-incher. In the 27-inch iMac, the bezels are the same thickness as the ones on the 21.5-inch, but they surround a much larger screen, making them seem better proportioned. On the smaller iMac, they just look ungainly.
Many people, though, simply have no room for a 27-inch display on their desks or kitchen counters. If this is you, you'll find few new all-in-ones on the market today with screen sizes similar to the 21.5-inch iMac's, making it one of your only good options if going small. Most competing Windows 10 AIOs have screens that start at 23.8 inches.
This small screen is not an especially flexible option, though. The sole stand adjustment is tilting; there's no height adjustment, and you can't lay the iMac nearly flat on the desk as you can with the Microsoft Surface Studio 2 or Dell XPS 27 ($1,399.99 at Dell Technologies) . Fortunately, the iMac weighs only 12 pounds, so it's easy to swivel around to access the rear ports. If you want to use a third-party stand for more flexibility, you can special-order an iMac with a VESA mounting bracket instead of the default stand.
The I/O complement is adequate, if not particularly generous. The lot comprises four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, two USB Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support, a 3.5mm audio jack, a full-size SD card slot, and a Gigabit Ethernet jack. All of these ports are in a marching line on the lower right of the chassis (assuming you are viewing it from the front). The inclusion of USB Type-A ports is especially notable, since they're needed to charge Apple mobile devices using their included power adapters, but are absent from all but one of Apple's MacBook laptop models. The iMac also includes a Kensington-style cable-lockdown notch behind the stand, and a power button near the lower left corner.
Notably absent from the port array is a dedicated video output. The iMac can drive up to two external 4K monitors with 60Hz refresh rates, but you'll need USB Type-C-to-DisplayPort or USB Type-C-to-HDMI adapters to connect them.
As for the wireless connectivity, the iMac features 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2, the latter of which enables Apple to include a wireless Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2 as the standard peripherals. They're upgradable to a larger Magic Keyboard (with a number pad) and a Magic Trackpad 2 ($129.00 at Amazon) for an additional charge. The peripherals look as minimal and sophisticated as the rest of the iMac, and I appreciate that they come charged and paired with the computer right out of the box.
They're not particularly comfortable to use, however. While typing most of this story, I found the keyboard to be cramped. Also, it offers very short key travel, if not quite as short as the beleaguered butterfly-switch board on the Apple MacBook Pro.
The mouse, meanwhile, is a bit too flat for my liking. Also, it can't be charged and used at the same time, because its Lightning charging port is located on the bottom. You have to flip the mouse like an inverted turtle while it's filling up.
The iMac ships with macOS Mojave, a largely bloatware-free operating system as sensibly designed as the iMac itself. For more on the extensive app collection and new features included with Mojave, check out our deep-dive review of the OS.
Clinging to the Fusion Drive
As I alluded to earlier, the base $1,099 version of the 21.5-inch iMac comes with 8GB of RAM, a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor, and a 1TB hard drive. Our $1,849 test unit has the same amount of RAM, but a faster-clocked 3GHz Core i5 8th Generation "Coffee Lake" CPU. Although Apple doesn't divulge the specific CPU models it uses, the specs it does publish suggest that this iMac is using Intel's Core i5-8500, a six-core, 3GHz chip launched in mid-2018, or something custom and close to it. (A third starting-point version of this iMac, positioned between the $1,099 base model and the $1,499 Core i5 one that PC Labs' test unit is built up from, is $1,299 and uses an 8th Generation Core i3.)
On the test unit I have on hand, a Radeon Pro Vega 20 chip (a new GPU, with this model) handles the graphics processing, and the primary storage is a 1TB Fusion Drive. The latter is Apple's own long-running SSD/hard drive hybrid, an uptick from the traditional hard drive. The 32GB SSD component of the Fusion Drive helps the desktop boot and launch oft-used apps faster, especially compared with hard drive-only systems. The Fusion Drive is still slower than an SSD, however, and with ever-decreasing SSD prices, I wish Apple would ditch the Fusion Drive option altogether and move exclusively to superior solid-state drives. You can get an SSD boot drive, but the cheapest is a $100 step up from the Fusion Drive (and just 256GB), while Apple's 512GB SSD option is a $300 upsell and a 1TB option is a whopping $700 extra.
Memory options include 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of either 2,133MHz or 2,666MHz RAM. All 4K iMacs come with the faster RAM. (It's tied to the 8th Generation CPU support.)
In addition to upgraded internal components, our review unit's biggest optional extra is its display. The base model has a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch display, while all other models feature a 4K (4,096-by-2,304-pixel) display.
The difference between the two is vast. The 4K display is exceedingly bright (Apple rates it at 500 nits), displays pin-sharp text, and supports 1 billion colors. It's one of the best screens I've seen in an all-in-one, though not vastly better than the also-excellent displays on the Dell XPS 27 or Inspiron 27 7000 ( at Dell) . macOS automatically scales the text in icons and app windows so that you're not squinting to read them. As with Windows 10, you can manually configure the degree of scaling in the System Preferences app, though I found the default setting that the 21.5-inch iMac shipped with to be ideally suited for a typical desk setup where my eyes were about 1.5 feet from the screen.
If you run your fingers along the bottom of the iMac, you can feel the downward-firing grilles for the stereo speakers, which are otherwise undetectable. Audio quality is decent, though not nearly as good as what the Dell XPS 27's giant bank of 10 speakers offers. Similarly, the webcam mounted above the display offers a decent FaceTime experience, although its picture quality pales in comparison with the 1080p camera on the Apple iMac Pro ($4,249.99 at Best Buy) . The webcam also lacks infrared sensors to facilitate face-recognition logins, a key feature on the iPhone, iPad, and many Windows laptops and all-in-ones.
Apple includes a one-year warranty for the iMac, extendable to three years for an additional charge.
A Robust CPU, and a Fusion Bottleneck
Because so few all-in-ones on the market match the 21.5-inch iMac on screen size, it competes with traditional PCs connected to external monitors as much as it does other all-in-ones. For the purposes of comparing computing performance, I've therefore pitted it against the latest (2018) iteration of the Apple Mac mini, as well as against a few other recently tested all-in-ones, such as the Acer Aspire Z24 and the 27-inch Apple iMac. Their core components are summarized below...
I noted few surprises in the results. On our Cinebench test, a highly multithreaded trial that stresses the CPU to render a complex image, the 21.5-inch iMac's six-core Core i5 serves up similar performance to the Core i7 in the Acer Aspire Z24...
Despite being from different Core families, both are six-core CPUs with nearly identical maximum boost clock speeds, and Cinebench results are heavily influenced by the number of processor cores. With eight cores and 16 addressable threads, the Core i9 in the 27-inch iMac does far better.
In the real world, most processing tasks aren't entirely dependent on core and thread counts; the level of dependency depends on the kind of the software you're looking at and how it is written. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, stresses the CPU, the storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost. On our Photoshop test, which measures how long it takes to apply a series of 10 filters and effects to a JPEG image, the 21.5-inch iMac performs significantly better than the Mac mini, though not quite as fast as the 27-inch iMac or the Aspire Z24.
We tested the 2017 version of the 21.5-inch iMac using an older version of this Photoshop benchmark, and therefore the results are not comparable.
Graphics and Storage Testing
Although the iMac is not a gaming rig, the upgraded Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics chip in our review model offers decent 3D graphics performance. It achieved an average 118 frames per second (fps) on the Cinebench OpenGL test, which measures graphics performance by simulating a short scene from a car-racing video game. In comparison, with a Radeon Pro Vega graphics chip that includes more than twice the number of processor cores, the 27-inch iMac served up 151fps on this test.
On the similar but more lengthy Heaven game benchmark from Unigine, which also measures OpenGL performance, the 21.5-inch iMac achieved an average 60fps, while the 27-incher recorded an average 106fps. The 60fps result, recorded at Medium graphics quality settings and a 1080p resoltuion, suggests that the Radeon Pro Vega 20 can offer comfortably smooth gameplay as long as you're willing to dial down graphics quality and screen resolution.
The Fusion Drive, though, is one significant performance bottleneck in many iMac configurations, including the one reviewed here. I tested the 27-inch and 21.5-inch iMacs simultaneously, and noticed that the former, equipped with a 512GB SSD boot drive, felt snappier when installing our benchmark tests and opening and closing apps.
The difference I perceived was small, but benchmarks illustrate it. The 27-inch iMac can write data at an average of 1,915MBps and read it at an average of 2,548MBps, as measured by the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test benchmark. Compare that with read speeds of 1,110MBps and write speeds of 700MBps for the 21.5-inch iMac and its Fusion Drive.
Good for Downsizers
If you're looking specifically for a small-screen, small-footprint AIO desktop, the 21.5-inch Apple iMac is one of your few good options. But that's not to say it couldn't use some freshening up.
Its 2017 iteration was solid in its time, but nearly two years later, its styling, as well as the hard drive and Fusion Drive storage options in the preconfigured models, flirt dangerously with the anachronistic. These are problems that the configuration of the 2019 27-inch iMac we reviewed manages to avoid; the screen-to-bezel ratio is better balanced, and it offers the option for some of today's most muscular consumer CPUs. The 27-inch version is therefore a better performance value and the best iMac you can buy right now—in fact, it's the best high-end all-in-one of the moment.
That said, the 21.5-inch model still has plenty of merits besides its niche-filling size. This design has endured so long for a reason. Our main quibble with the look—the big bezels—is largely a matter of personal taste, and many shoppers will not care how thick they are. If this describes you, and your budget allows you to spring for the 4K version with an SSD, you won't be disappointed with this latest spin on a modern, compact classic.
The 2019 reboot of Apple's iMac 21.5-inch is worth a look if you need a small-screen all-in-one desktop. On the whole, though, its 27-inch sibling is more versatile and a better performance value.
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