Apple iMac and Mac mini review (late 2012)
From its smallest desktop to its largest, Apple's computers get a 2012 refresh — As soon as it was unveiled on stage in October, I started looking forward to getting the new iMac in for review. See, my main machine is a 13-inch MacBook Air, which I mostly love.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple closed out its 2012 hardware year the way it opened it: a full-desktop refresh following hard on the heels of the iPad mini review cycle, with both machines unveiled on stage in October and the redesigned iMac reaching US, Canadian, and European shelves just before the holiday quarter. The pickup was broad — Ars Technica, MacRumors, AppleInsider, The Next Web and others all carried the story within days — which is typical for an Apple desktop launch but notable given how much of the coverage fixated on the inside rather than the outside.
The detail that separated this refresh from a routine spec bump was the 21-inch iMac teardown showing newly rearranged innards: the machine's dramatically thinner profile came at the cost of a fundamentally reorganized interior, making the review question less 'is it faster?' and more 'what did the redesign trade away?'
First-order effects
- Holiday shoppers can buy the redesigned iMac immediately — 21.5-inch models ship in 1–3 days — while the Mac mini gives Apple a refreshed entry point at the low end of the Mac line for the gift-buying season.
Second-order effects
- Windows all-in-one makers head into the same holiday quarter against an iMac whose thinness is the headline feature, pushing industrial design rather than component specs to the front of desktop marketing.
Third-order effects
- If thinness-at-the-cost-of-serviceability becomes the template, consumer desktops follow laptops down the path of sealed, design-led products where upgrade and repair are sacrificed for form — a structural shift in what a desktop even is.
The trend: Desktops are converging with laptops on integrated, non-upgradeable industrial design, with Apple's thin-iMac redesign as the clearest data point yet.