Call me jaded — I do get to see some very cool stuff at extremely close quarters week after week. Imagine my stupefaction when I literally had to scrape my jaw off the floor when I first pulled the new 27inch iMac out of the box. The latest revision to the iMacs, now a gold standard in all-in-one PCs, got a mega size upgrade! It’s the screen. All 27 LED-backlit inches of it, 2560 by 1440 pixels in the same 16:9 ratio as a widescreen TV, rather than the 16:10 of previous iMacs. That’s roughly equivalent to four 13.3in MacBook displays stuck together in a 2x2 grid! Consider this — if you’re sitting right in front of it, you have to physically move your head to look from one corner to the other. The resolution lets you see multiple documents at 1:1 side-by-side! Sit too close though, and you could get motion sickness akin to sitting in the front seats of a movie hall. So yes, it is a computer, but one with the soul of an internet-connected HDTV! With a clear 3 inches over the competition and even the previous generation iMac — this thing was born to play out life in high-def. Of course, a screen this size begs the question: can it be used to replace a TV set, so you have a screen that sits in your living room and does everything?

Yes, and a bit annoyingly, no. LED-backlighting on the screen certainly helps with getting the display to full luminescence immediately and consuming less power. The IPS technology behind the monitor means better side-to-side viewing angles (upto 178 degrees) without much change in color accuracy or brightness. And the rich levels of contrasty goodness one has come to expect from Apple displays mean movies really pack a punch! Where the iMac suffers is that while it comes with the ability to allow signal input from other Macs via the Mini DisplayPort, there’s no TV tuner card, and more importantly, no HDMI ports. HDMI is the sort of simple and fuss-free high-def interface that resonates with the Apple “ease of use” approach, and it’s a glaring omission in this baby. I could nitpick about the lack of Blu-ray, but with Blu-ray content not getting any cheaper, having a Blu-ray drive in a PC is pretty much of a white elephant these days. And Apple, with a screen this large, can we get a matte-option screen please? The reflectivity and glare on the screen that the iMac seems to collect from any light source around the room is maddening!

Beneath the hood, the iMac’s kept pace with the performance race, with the 27inch model packing in a 3.06GHz CPU with a 1TB hard drive and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics, with options to configure a quad-core Intel Core i5 or a Core i7 processor. Pretty bog-standard stuff, to be expected from such a release. The real innovation has happened elsewhere, with the Bluetooth wireless keyboard and a Bluetooth Magic Mouse. The mouse, simply put, is a stunning engineering marvel. Basically an extension of the track pad tech Apple employs in its laptop, the mouse is all surface! So while lesser mortals use mouse buttons or guck-collecting trackballs, all you have to do is swipe. Swipe up or down, and you move up and down a screen in your browser or document, or swipe in any direction for full 360 degree scrolling! A two fingered swipe across you between photos or act as a back button in a web browser. And it’s intuitive to use too — no relearning required. One quick demo of its features, and I was using it like I had been with it for months! The pity is that it officially works only with the MacOS, so Windows users will have to wait for the competition to play catch up and release something like this for Windows.

Buying the iMac then is a decision that will conflict the head and the heart. It is by far the classiest all-in-one around, and the display and resolution is to lust after. It has serious power on offer as well, but stops short of being perfect with the missing HDMI and the TV-tuner. And then there’s the price — a shade lower than previous top-end iMacs — but a pretty packet nonetheless. Sigh... who said the best things in life were for free?

• Rating: 9/10

• Price: 27-inch 3.06 GHz iMac with Magic Mouse: Rs. 89,900, Magic Mouse sold separately for Rs. 3,890 (21.5 in models also available)

• URL: http://www.apple.com/in/