What’s New And What’s Notable: The 2011 iMac

For those of you that haven’t yet heard, Apple released new, refreshed versions of the iMac today. We’ll look at what’s new and notable (besides the obvious spec bump).

The New iMacs Have 2 ThunderBolt Ports, which means that they can power 2 hi-res monitors simultaneously right out of the box. It also means they’ll be posed to do some serious data-crunching with Thunderbolt devices start coming out in a month or two.

Also particularly notable with the new iMacs is their ability to be used as an external monitor for the Thunderbolt MacBook Pro (both versions, not just the 27″), and all future Thunderbolt-enabled macs, although sadly this will not be supported in older Macs that only tout Mini DisplayPort connectivity.

Furthermore, the new line of iMacs can support two hard drives – and can be configured with an SSD hybrid option directly from Apple, so you can store your OS and most-used apps and files on an SSD, and have a built-in hard drive to handle the rest of your data. This may have implications for future Macs, such as the MacBook Pro.

As always, we’ll bring you more tidbits as we discover them – but this is looking like an amazing new refresh for the iMac.

J. Glenn Künzler

Glenn is Managing Editor at MacTrast, and has been using a Mac since he bought his first MacBook Pro in 2006. He lives in a small town in Utah, enjoys bacon more than you can possibly imagine, and is severely addicted to pie.