In the midst of the ever-growing rumors and speculations regarding the new MacBook Pro refresh this autumn, one of Apple's other and iconic computers was apparently forgotten. With the exception of a new 5K Retina screen, Apple's iMac has been unchanged ever since it debuted in 2015, roughly 2 years ago. But despite the lack of love on the iMac, it's still the often go-to choice for desktop computers among a lot of PC users and even firms and business establishments.
New competition for Apple's iMac
But despite the popularity of the iMac, there is still also a big, competition-wise problem for Apple, however. Microsoft's Surface Studio PC is a brand new iMac competitor, and on the surface and from the positive feedbacks that it's also getting from the people, it should be a real, serious competitor. The Surface Studio takes all of the key points of the iMac - it has a stylish design, more than enough power, thin form factor - and adds a touch input, an amazingly useful stylus, and the innovative ability to bring the screen down to draw.
If Apple wants its iMac computers to do better than just being second fiddle to the growing-in-popularity Surface Studio, it would definitely need some freshly new features incorporated on its next iMac refresh.
Updated Processors for the upcoming iMac
As of now, there haven't been any confirmed amazing rumors regarding the upcoming iMac 2017 refresh, but there is one thing that's going to be a definite lock in terms of upgrade: updated processors.
With Intel owning and dominating the entire desktop processor market, that would only mean that the upcoming new version of the iMac will also be using the latest version of Intel's Core i7, which is the Kaby Lake i7-7700. That processor still wasn't available in time for Microsoft to include in its Surface Studio, but it would definitely be hitting some new PCs right at the beginning of 2017.
Waiting for more confirmations
More importantly, the reviewers at Tom's Hardware has appeared to have gotten their hands on an early engineering sample and put it through several paces and test to determine its true power. Although the results are still not final, it would only imply that we can now get some data on the chips that would almost certainly be powering the next iMac computers, and it is definitely going to be a game-changer.
Capabilities of the new iMac processor
Looking at it more closely, the Intel Kaby Lake i7-7700K is capable of speeds of 4.2GHz, but with a processor as good as this, you would really need to overclock. Tom's Hardware's tests results have found that on one motherboard, they could overclock the 7700K to 4.8GHz, which is, in simpler words, crazy fast.
But even without overclocking, the benchmarks show some very amazing performance improvements over the 6th-generation Intel chips, and therefore the Surface Studio. With that, the iMac 2017 is definitely going to compete once it rolls out next year.
