AppleInsider Staff
Some consumers who ordered Apple's top-end, non-Retina 27-inch iMac in advance of Tuesday's iMac lineup shuffle have seen their orders automatically upgraded to the new, less costly Retina 5K base model.
The new $1,999 Retina 5K iMac replaced the older, top-end 27-inch version that was sold for the same price without a Retina-quality display. One commenter on Reddit said that they were notified of the upgrade by Apple via email late Tuesday afternoon.
"You may not have heard, but we just announced the new iMac with Retina 5K display," the message read. "Since your order has yet to ship, we automatically upgraded you to the new iMac with Retina 5K display."
Apple's newest 5K iMac ships with Intel's 3.3-gigahertz quad-core Core i5 and a 1-terabyte hard drie as standard, compared to a 3.4-gigahertz chip and 1-terabyte hard drive for the older model.
Apple revealed its new iMac lineup on Tuesday morning, introducing the new $1,999 model while chopping $200 off the price for the standard high-end Retina 5K configuration. At the same time, the 15-inch MacBook Pro line was refreshed with Force Touch trackpads, faster processors and flash memory, and longer battery life.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
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Christine McKee
56 Comments
I'm confused. And why couldn't Apple wait until WWDC to announce these and the new MacBook Pro? Is it by hat Apple has so many hit products that they can't announce them all at the event?* *I know Apple has done this for years but surprise refreshes always seemed weird to me. Especially so close to one of their events.
That is one expensive monitor.
The model that is being substituted does not have a faster processor. The new $1999 model has a 3.3GHz i5 processor and the same 1TB HDD, as shown in the image in the post. You're comparing the $2299 configuration to the old $1999 model, if in fact the old one had a 3.4GHz processor. The old non-Retina had a slightly faster processor. The only thing that is different is the display and the GPU.
They do these types of minor hardware bumps/price adjustments all of the time in between events. The changes aren't significant enough to warrant stage time at WWDC when they probably have a ton of things to cover, from the possible music streaming service, iOS 9, Watch OS and Watch SDK news, possible OS X 10.11, and even Apple TV upgrades or Apple television service.
[quote name="cali" url="/t/186347/apple-upgrades-some-27-non-retina-imac-orders-to-5k-model-following-price-cut#post_2725368"]I'm confused. And why couldn't Apple wait until WWDC to announce these and the new MacBook Pro? Is it by hat Apple has so many hit products that they can't announce them all at the event?* *I know Apple has done this for years but surprise refreshes always seemed weird to me. Especially so close to one of their events.[/quote] This means Apple wanted them out of the way. Some people are surprised by this; remember that Apple introduced the iBook G4 and the white MacBooks by just dumping them on the website too.