 It's so thin. It's so pretty. It's so light. Apple doesn't really get into the performance of the 24 inch M1 iMac until over halfway down the product page. And I get it. This is a lifestyle product. I'm just supposed to be happy it's available in my favorite color, but I'm not happy. As it turns out, Apple quietly crippled the performance of the entry level tier without disclosing it on the product page. So I'm pretty peeved right now to the point where not even an adorable pink computer could cheer me up. Although it is really cute. Okay, maybe it's cheering me up a little bit. You know what else cheers me up? It's almost father's day and iFixit wants to help you save on the perfect father's day gift. Get $10 off your order of $50 or more with code dads2021 until June 20th. Learn more at the end of this video or check out the link in the video description. Apple designed the new M1 iMac to be the first thing that catches your eye when you wander into a big box store and spot it amongst a sea of silver and black monoliths, its own previous generation iMacs included. It's bright, cheerful and fundamentally different from what you'd expect from a computer or even a computer monitor these days. The thickness or rather the thinness is awe inspiring and the all glass front gives the machine an unusual flatness with no seams to disrupt the aesthetic. Unfortunately, to achieve this, Apple needed to provide an external power brick for the first time ever on the iMac. And surprisingly, it's not as cute as the computer itself. I mean, if the appeal of the machine is supposed to be its awe inspiring thinness and lightness, I wish it was a bit smaller, though the color matching cord does make the cable run to the adapter itself less intrusive. And what's more, the optional ethernet adapter also lives here for perfect cable management. This really is some cool stuff here. Power and networking both go through the braided cable to a Megsafe-esque round plug that's keyed so it can only go in the right way. It's super easy to connect and frankly also really satisfying, but it kind of raises the question, what makes the ethernet go? If you look closely, you can see a number of contacts on the outer ring of the connector. And this is where the signals are carried, at least from a physical standpoint. But then logically, as far as the iMac is concerned, it's just an extension of the M1 SoC's I.O. So it's not attached to any of the USB or Thunderbolt controllers, which is both unexpected and fascinating. There's not too much else for us to say about it other than that, whatever Apple's done here, not having to worry about hot plug capabilities probably made it simpler since unplugging the ethernet adapter would also cut power to the machine. Then there's the elephant in the room, the bezels. It seems these white bezels surrounding the display have divided both Apple fans and haters alike, with many pointing out, not entirely incorrectly, that having white around your display can upset the eye's perception of contrast on the screen. But because liking or hating it is considered a hot take at this time, I wanna take a step back and try to objectively examine the effect that Apple intended and the effect that it actually has. Apple's stated intention for the 24-inch iMac was to make it blend in with its surroundings, not so much like a chameleon so you don't notice it, you notice it, but you're supposed to notice it in a more organic way, unless like it's a piece of tech sitting on the table. And Apple's history of doing things like this goes way back, with the iMac G3 being a notable example. At that time, black bezels hadn't even caught on yet, and we were still living with beige bezel CRTs. Then through the early to mid-2000s, Apple continued to differentiate itself by using a purer white than anyone else. And then in mid-2007, Apple followed the rest of the industry and moved to black. This arguably was the first time we saw the now iconic black and silver design language that Apple has used up until now. And how long they stuck with it is, I think, a big part of what makes the shift back to lighter colors so jarring. But if we're being honest, it's not as bad as it first appeared to be. Yes, I saw it and immediately went, boy, that's ugly. But as Anthony was working on benchmarking the machine, he noticed that, well, he just stopped noticing it. Partly because the slightly off-white was blending in with the white wall behind to the point where, once he was focused on the display itself, it almost appeared to be floating. And the effect can be a little disorienting at first. It's certainly easier to focus on a display when it's surrounded by a distinct black border. But after a while, neither of us found it distracting, and you can just use dark mode if you wanna make it easier to distinguish. So our new take is that, coupled with the very pastel color of the chin bar, the white bezel really does make the screen pop. And it does pop. Peak brightness is 500 nits, which is higher than most displays that aren't HDR certified, meaning that it is plenty bright enough to be readable in a bright, sunlit room, which, especially in this yellow color, seems to be exactly where Apple expected it to end up. There is some panel uniformity trouble along the edges that's plainly obvious, especially off-axis, but the panel is otherwise pretty solid with a 4.5K resolution that is very retina at this size. You will not be making out the individual pixels. The speakers, meanwhile, are, well, what can I say? They are fantastic. They're clear at any volume with reasonably boomy bass for something without a sub, thanks to the large resonance chambers that Apple squeezed in behind the display. And, I mean, I don't know what else to say about it. I shouldn't be that surprised, given how good the speakers on recent MacBooks are, but I was still taken aback when I fired up some 5.1 content on Apple TV+. It's not quite the same feel as surround speakers, obviously, but the spatial audio effect was instantly noticeable to the point where Apple has managed to give the iMac a much wider soundstage than you would have ever expected out of desktop stereo speakers. I mean, let alone the speakers that are thinner than a USB Type-A plug and that fire downward into the surface of your desk. It is truly impressive stuff, even if it's not fully immersive or room filling in the way that Apple likes to claim that it is. Meanwhile, we claim to have the comfiest underwear around, also in a variety of colors, lttstore.com. And of course, we can't forget about the new 1080p webcam. Jonathan, over at our Mac address channel, go subscribe if you haven't already, by the way, did a test for his review. And as you can see in both his and ours, the signal processing that Apple is doing with their M1 SoC does an excellent job with this many pixels. And that's particularly true compared to the old 720p webcams that Apple used for so freaking long. Goodbye and good riddance. As for the new peripherals, they're a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the colors match perfectly with the iMac and they're plenty pleasing to look at. But on the other, fundamentally, they're the same as they've always been, right down to the lightning charging ports in sometimes interesting places. Are you still going on about that? What? The fact that it's been stupid for so long that the meme is dead, that doesn't make it less stupid. That makes it stupider. Get subscribed, by the way, because we're gonna be investigating how not all lightning cables are what they seem to be. The new keyboard is the one thing that's been genuinely updated. It's slightly more rounded than the older designs and it features a massive escape key, an emoji key that doubles as the function key and a dedicated lock key that on the upper end models doubles as a touch ID sensor. That is huge. Touch ID hasn't been a thing on the desktop up until now and it is about damn time. It works great and it can even be used for fast user switching, which is a great addition for multi-user environments like, I don't know, families or when Anthony and Jonathan need to hot seat at the computer to get their reviews on on time. Hey, that sounds great Linus, I hear you saying. But you spent five minutes talking about the design. When are you gonna talk about the benchmarks? Well, about that. The 24 inch iMac as it is right now is identical to the MacBook Pros and Mac mini in all but form factor. And while we will be testing its thermal output, there's not much point in testing its performance because we know what M1 is capable of already. It's capable of whatever Apple allows it to be capable of. That's where things get a little thorny. Not only does the base model have one fewer graphics core as Apple advertises on the product page, it also has 50% as many fans, which means at least in theory, it could be more prone to overheating and thermal throttling like the M1 MacBook Air and thermal throttle it does. For CPU performance, our Mozilla Firefox compile test has the lower end iMac taking a minute and a half longer or about 7%. Blender now has a native M1 version in 2.93 and while rendering with the M1 isn't a great experience in the first place, thanks to having just four performance cores, our properly cooler unit again manages a 7% performance advantage in the short BMW render and that extends to 8% over the longer classroom render. Now, 7% to 8%, that's not an earth shattering difference and over very short tests like Cinebench and Geekbench, it didn't even overwhelm the cooler enough to show up and your grandmother certainly isn't gonna notice it while she's browsing Facebook. But it's not the size of the discrepancy that bothers me, it's the poor disclosure. I mean, it's not like Apple doesn't know that they saved $2 on a fan. So why don't they want you to know? What is wrong with letting your customers make an informed decision? Yeah, this one's cheaper, but it's also slower, not just GPU, but also CPU because we didn't put in another fan. Like they disclosed the lower GPU core count, which unsurprisingly contributes to lower performance on the seven GPU core model. But interestingly, that lower performance wasn't as much as we'd expect either. Based on the specs alone, the difference should be 12.5%, but we ended up with more like seven or eight, which indicates that either Apple is actually clocking the cores higher to compensate for the missing core, or there could be some additional optimization that's yet to be done on the eight GPU core model. Hopefully gaming will help us shed some light on this. And that's a bit of a mixed bag on the M1 too. The way that Intel puts it, it's a hundred percent less good than any PC, but frankly that just smacks of sour grapes at this point because it really does depend on the game. I mean, it's true. AAA titles aren't a thing right now on M1, but we showed World of Warcraft running previously, and now that a dolphin port exists for M1, it's actually possible to play GameCube games as well, and at high resolution. The eight core GPU iMac managed up to 4K res with FXAA enabled in games like Super Mario Sunshine and Star Fox Assault with headroom to spare. Although some games like Rogue Squadron 3 won't run full speed no matter what you do, thanks to all the tricks that Factor 5 used to make that game what it is. As for the seven GPU core iMac, we couldn't quite do 4K in Super Mario Sunshine running just a hair below a hundred percent speed. So if you want to run that game, you're going to need to drop the resolution a little bit or buy the better iMac. Moving on to thermals. When running a 10 minute Cinebench burn-in, both iMacs pushed the performance cores to a blistering 98 degrees peak. Both machines. But that's not concerning. As we've said previously, these sensors act more like hotspot temperatures because enough heat is going to be dissipated into the SoC by the time its temperature is taken, that it's going to be down around or even below 80 degrees with the low end iMac hovering around 85 on the hottest SoC sensor. That is well within reason. The fans do end up running full tilt to maintain that temperature throughout our run. But while they're audible on both machines, they're not whiny. There's a whirring and whooshing kind of quality to the sound if you get your ear up close, but it's difficult to detect from a sitting distance. Surface temperatures also don't get uncomfortably high, which is a nice touch. Get it? Nice touch. Anyway. So what do I think about the M1 iMacs? Well, it's clear they're not for everybody. I mean, you can tell from the design, the screen size and limited IO. Yes, my friends, the entry level one is a desktop computer with only two Thunderbolt ports and a three and a half millimeter jack. And the premium one manages just two more USB three type C's. But for who they are for, it's tough to see many downsides other than maybe needing Rosetta to run some of your applications. And that's only true for now. So for home use, it's probably gonna turn a lot of heads and the feature set is gonna allow enough everyday folks to make these things desirable. As for whether you agree with the aesthetic or not, it's tough to deny that the performance is there thanks to Apple's M1 SoC. It's just kind of too bad that it's priced the way it is. At 1499 for the model with eight GPU cores, it's more expensive than an equivalent M1 MacBook Pro. And yeah, the iMacs got a bigger screen and a bit more IO, but the MacBooks got a battery so you can take it anywhere. As for my personal favorite Mac, the Mac mini, it offers identical performance while costing less than half as much. And okay, you need to supply your own keyboard, mouse and display, but you can get all of that for so much less. So please y'all, don't buy this. Get the Mac mini. It has USB type A. You can even get it with 10 gig networking. Although if there's anything I've learned after all these years making tech videos, it's that many of you had already decided you were gonna buy this product before clicking the video anyway. And only a small handful of you were even gonna make it this far in to the point where I make a product recommendation. You know what, Anthony? We need to find a way. We need like a time machine so we can go back and plant a subliminal message at the beginning of the video, telling everyone who clicks it that not to buy this, that the Mac mini is the better choice. Do you think, is there any way we could do that? We can make it happen. Maybe we could. Just like I could tell you about our sponsor, iFixit. Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video. iFixit makes compact tool kits with all the essential bits you need to fix your electronics. From mini kits with 16 bits to full repair tool kits to start your own repair business. You can use iFixit's over 70,000 repair manuals with photos and step-by-step instructions and work worry-free knowing that you've got quality parts backed by iFixit's lifetime warranty. See something on their shop you like? In honor of Father's Day, iFixit is giving you $10 off orders of $50 or more and free standard shipping with code DADS2021. The offer is available until Father's Day on June 20th. So check out iFixit.com slash LTT to get the right tools for every job. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out the Mac address review of the 24-inch iMac M1 to get a more Apple user take on things. It does touch on a lot of great points that often get missed in more technical overviews like this one.