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Apple's new iMac has 5mm edge, no optical drive, measures 27 or 21.5 inches, and starts at $1,299

Apple's new iMac has 5mm edge, no optical drive, measures 27 or 21.5 inches, and starts at $1,299

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At Apple's event today in San Jose, California, the company refreshed most of its lineup of Mac computers, including the iMac, which Phil Schiller called the "flagship of the product line." The eighth model is insanely thin, though it's still unmistakably an iMac. "There's an entire computer in there," Phil Schiller said as he pointed to the iMac's tiny 5mm edge. Apple used a technique called friction stir welding to create the new machine, which it says has much less reflection than previous displays.

Apple's new 21.5 and 27-inch iMac press images

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The new iMac comes in two sizes: 27 inches, with a 2560 x 1440 display, and 21.5 inches with a 1920 x 1080 screen. Both have 178-degree viewing angles, Schiller said — as you might expect from a device like this, the iMac's display is the star of the show. In fact, there's no optical drive: As with the Mac Mini and MacBook Pro with Retina Display, some of that thinness comes from reducing components inside. But there's still some computing power within: Core i5 or i7 processors, up to 3TB of storage, and four USB 3.0 ports. It also has a new Apple Fusion Drive, a 128GB SSD and a 1TB or 3TB hard drive that are, as Schiller put it, "fused together with software." It's a single drive, with applications and OS stored on the SSD and documents on the spinning drive — it's not a new technology, certainly, but it's a clever way to pair the speed of an SSD with the capacity of a traditional drive.

The new iMac comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse, as always. A 21.5-inch iMac with a 2.7GHz i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1 TB hard drive starts at just $1,299. The larger 27-inch model will start at $1,799. The smaller model ships next month, the larger in December.

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