Same design, new insides, better screen: 21.5-inch 4K Retina iMac reviewed
Fusion Drives desperately need to be standard, but otherwise this is a nice Mac. — The new 4K iMac hooked up to an external 4K display. … It's been over three years since the very first Mac went Retina …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's October 2015 iMac wave put a 4K display into the 21.5-inch iMac at $1,499 while pushing every 27-inch model to 5K, per the same-day Inside Story of the new iMacs. Ars Technica's verdict lands in that arc: same industrial design, new insides, a meaningfully better screen.
The sticking point is storage — reviewers say Fusion Drives 'desperately need to be standard,' a criticism aimed at Apple's configuration ladder rather than the hardware itself. That complaint frames how the line evolved through the 2020 refresh, which made SSDs standard across both sizes.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing the $1,499 4K iMac face a hard trade-off: the Retina-class screen arrives, but the spinning-platter Fusion Drive stays an upgrade option rather than the default.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own later moves validate the critique — by the time it refreshed the 21.5- and 27-inch Intel iMacs in 2020, SSDs were standard and a 1080p webcam added, effectively conceding the 2015 baseline configs were too thin.
Third-order effects
- Across the subsequent M1 and M4 iMacs, nothing remains upgradable after purchase, so the 2015-era question of which drive ships inside becomes moot — Apple's all-in-one line converges on fixed, screen-first configurations where the display carries the update story.
The trend: The iMac has spent a decade letting its display lead each generation while internal storage lagged behind reviewer consensus until standardization forced the issue.