Does The Mid-2011 27-Inch iMac Bridge The Laptop/Desktop Divide?

AnandTech’s thoughtfully authoritative Anand Lal Shimpi has posted one of his amazingly thorough and detailed reviews – this one of the recently-refreshed Thunderbolt iMac, but prefaces his comments noting that a year ago he briefly tried using an Arrandale MacBook Pro notebook as a desktop replacement, but lasted less than a day before having to switch back to the Mac Pro. a second try earlier this year, with a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro seemed to be a better recipe for success, and it proved to be, with the switch from an 8-core Mac Pro to a 4-core Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro having stuck for two months now.

Shimpi notes that this past month alone he’s been in the air for 90 hours, which would’ve otherwise meant having to frantically copy articles, benchmarks, notes and other important documents between machines before I left home on his next flight. However, using the laptop as his primary platform he’s able to pull an all-nighter testing, grab the notebook and head to the airport without worrying whether or not he forgot to copy something over.

Regrets? He has a a few.

Notably that the MacBook Pro is a thermally constrained platform that he says is always running way too hot with the cooling fans always annoyingly audible, his workload requiring that he always seems to have just enough programs open to keep the CPU just busy enough to keep the fans activated. I can identify, living with the same phenomenon with even my Core 2 Dup MacBook, and that’s with a Targus Chill Mat cooling pad running constantly underneath it at my home office workstation.

Shimpi also notes that despite having the upgraded AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5, his 15-inch MacBook Pro just isn’t fast enough to drive a 2560 x 1440 external display when playing most modern games, not to mention that the discrete GPU running full tilt causes temperatures to hit their highest and the fans to really spin.

Does the added portability make up for the downsides? When he’s traveling a lot he says absolutely. Between trips? He’s tempted back to a desktop, and a couple of weeks ago, the potentially ideal solution arrived in the form of a new 2011 upgraded 27-inch iMac, which Shimpi observes is more or less a 2011 MacBook Pro mated to a 27-inch LED backlit Cinema Display – basically his MacBook Pro office setup in an all-in-one desktop.

Shimpi concedes that he’s never liked the iMac. He understood its appeal, but it wasn’t for him for a variety of reasons he cites. However the same series of developments that allowed him to dump his Mac Pro and use a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro have made the iMac that much more interesting.

He also notes that while Apple has never been a value player, the 27-inch iMac is especially tempting as the display alone is worth $999, which means that you’re getting a Sandy Bridge Mac integrated for only an additional $699 “downright Dell pricing.”

There’s much, much MUCH! more in this review, which has to be regarded as the definitive 2011 iMac review among those I’ve scanned.

Shimpi concludes that having gone the mobile route and now using a MacBook Pro as his desktop substitute cum road platform, he’s very tempted by this iMac, which he says addresses all of the issues he has with his MacBook Pro while maintaining most of the benefits but that it reintroduces the problem of portability (which has to be regarded as the elephant in the room in this context), so there’s still no perfect solution, no one-size-fits all. He suggests that ultimately this is perhaps where tablets will eventually fit in, at lest for users who don’t travel a lot but still need mobile access, there’s the tablet – but when at home, there’s the iMac, but the more you need or want to travel, or for that matter simply like changing locations, the more the balance shifts towards portable computing.

For the full review visit here:
http://bit.ly/kyrRLl