Surprise: New, Cheaper iMac Takes a Performance Hit

By Emily Dreyfuss 06.18.14 | 9:37 am | Permalink

If you’ve been wanting an Apple desktop but didn’t want to shell out the cash for either an iMac or the Mac Pro, you’re in luck: a new, cheaper iMac goes on sale today. For $1,099 (that’s $200 less than the previous bottom model) the new 21.5-inch desktop looks just like every other iMac from the outside, but its Core i5 chip is dual-core with merely 1.4Ghz.

That’s roughly half the processing speed of other quad-core iMacs. In fact, it is the same chip that is in  MacBook Airs. In almost every way the specs of this new, cheaper iMac compare to those of the higher-end 11-inch Air–from price (identical) to chip (identical) to graphics card (identical). The new iMac does boast one better feature than the Air: 8GB of memory versus 4.

A new iMac was rumored last week, but no one expected it to get… worse ».