http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/technology/personaltech/retina-5k-imac-powerful-proof-of-the-pc-renaissance.html 2014-12-24 20:46:10 Retina 5K iMac: Powerful Proof of the PC Renaissance Defying predictions of their demise, personal computers are making a comeback, enticing a niche audience of professional users with power and beauty, and an Apple machine stands out. === About a year before he died, He reached for an analogy. “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Four years later, Mr. Jobs’s predictions have pretty much panned out. Benedict Evans, an analyst at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, estimates that the number of smartphones and tablets in use around the world We saw the rise of Responding to the potential threat posed by Chromebooks, Microsoft released a version of its Windows operating system that manufacturers began to include in inexpensive machines. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, released the You can think of Chromebooks, inexpensive Windows machines, mobile phones and tablets as the cars of the tech business. And this year, low-priced Chromebooks and Windows machines helped the PC industry hold steady against the rise of phones. But there’s a question of long-term viability. How long can PC makers survive by selling cut-rate devices? Enter As phones and tablets become more powerful and useful, and as they begin to occupy more of our time, PC manufacturers will have to create computers that take advantage of PCs’ shape, size and power. They’ll have to find new features that can’t be mimicked by smartphones. With a display unmatched by any other computing device you can buy today, the new iMac does just that. That’s why, of the dozens of new tech devices I tried this year, it was my favorite. Playing the high end has proved lucrative for Apple. In the third quarter of 2014, by Mr. Mainelli argued that the ubiquity of smartphones had increased the appeal of Macs. Because people are shifting more of their computing to mobile devices, they’re waiting longer to replace their PCs. The longer ownership period helps people justify buying Apple’s high-end machines. “Consumers are saying, ‘Well, if I’m going to hold on to this thing for five years, I should buy a good one,’ ” Mr. Mainelli said. “Apple has really benefited from that.” The new iMac has a 27-inch, Retina 5K display, meaning that its screen has about 5,000 lines of resolution horizontally and nearly 15 million pixels across the entire display. That’s about seven times as many as you’d find on a high-definition television set — and a few million more on than the latest ultra-high-definition TVs. All those pixels make for a luxuriously sharp picture. Text sparkles and images pop, and when you to switch back to a computer with a normal screen, your eyes beg you to reconsider. At least, mine did. Years of staring at bad screens has turned my eyes into ruined orbs, but now, finally, I’d encountered a computer display that was good to them. When it was time to return the review model that Apple sent me, I hated to part with it. So I did something crazy: I bought a Retina 5K iMac of my own. These machines aren’t cheap. The Retina 5K iMac starts at $2,500, which is $700 more than the non-Retina 27-inch iMac, and thousands more than you’d pay for a run-of-the-mill desktop computer. Still, for what you get, it’s not all that much. Last year Dell introduced a stand-alone 5K monitor that it planned to sell for $2,500 — the same price as Apple’s entire computer, for just the screen. Shortly after the iMac was announced, Apple is unlikely to sell the new iMac in high volumes. It’s a computer intended specifically for a small niche audience of photographers, video editors, animators, digital producers and Web-addled writers like me — people who spend a lot of time on their machines and are willing to pay for high-end tools. Still, even if Apple doesn’t sell millions, the new iMac is an object lesson. If you’re a casual computer user — looking only to surf the web, check email and do other light tasks — you don’t need much more than a Chromebook or a tablet these days. You could probably get by with just a phone. But as the low end of the PC business is swallowed by cheap devices, the only people left in the market for traditional PCs will be professionals. Apple’s recent success shows that professionals still love PCs, and they’ll even pay large sums for them. Some people will always need trucks.