Some 27-inch iMac orders upgraded to Retina, but not everyone is pleased

By Jon Martindale May 20, 2015

iMac with Retina — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Apple recently announced that it’s lowering the price of the 27-inch Retina equipped iMacs by a full $500, bringing it down to a much more competitive $2,000. This brought it in-line with the non-Retina iMacs it had been selling just a few hours before, so there was likely, as with any price reduction of hardware, a few people that missed out on the deal. To make sure that those buyers didn’t feel too jaded by the experience, Apple has upgraded many of these orders to the new, entry-level Retina model.

That might seem like a great deal, and in many ways it is, as some people who went to bed having ordered a $2,000 piece of kit woke up to find they were being sent a $2,500 computer with a higher resolution display.

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“You may not have heard, but we just announced the new iMac with Retina 5K display. Since your order has yet to ship, we automatically upgraded you to the new iMac with Retina 5K display,” posted one Redditor from an email he received from Apple.

So, what’s the problem? The new Retina iMac comes with a different GPU. The original system was set to come with a Nvidia GTX 780M whereas the new Retina equipped iMac has an AMD R9 M290 GPU instead.

The latter chip from AMD comes behind the GTX 780M in some benchmarks. Combine that with Retina’s higher resolution and you arguably have a combination that delivers less impressive overall performance. That could be an issue for Mac gamers, or workstation users looking to run software that benefits from a fast GPU. There’s no word yet on whether Apple will let buyers upgraded from the older 27-inch iMac opt for it instead of the new Retina models.

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