Editors' Note: This version of the Apple iMac 27-Inch With Retina 5K Display has been updated. A full review of the most current Apple iMac 27-Inch With Retina 5K Display can be found here.

Often, Apple unveils a new product to great fanfare and collective fawning over the hot new thing—even when the hot new thing is just a repackaged version of an old thing. But with the latest iMac, Apple wows with a feature no one else has matched thus far, bringing the Retina display to the desktop with a dazzling 5K resolution. The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display ($2,499 as tested) is not only impressive from that standpoint alone, but solid performance and an uncharacteristically affordable price round out the package. The latest iMac easily earns our Editors' Choice for high-end all-in-one desktops. It's the system to get for video, photography, and graphics.

A Brilliant View
Let's start with the most prominent feature—the display—since it overshadows pretty much everything else. The Retina 5K display isn't just good, it's overwhelming. The 27-inch screen with 5,120-by-2,880 resolution blows past 4K (3,840-by-2,160), packing an unheard-of 14.7 million pixels. Compared with the 2,560-by-1,440 screens in the Editors' Choice Apple iMac 27-inch (Intel Core i5-4670) and the HP Z1 G2 all-in-one workstation, the difference is night and day.

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To test the display, I loaded up the new iMac with several 4K nature videos. The tiniest stars in a night sky rendered themselves as pinpricks of light; nooks and crannies in stone and wood showed up in minute detail. I also streamed House of Cards in 4K, and seeing Kevin Spacey's every pore and follicle was enough that meeting the actor in person might feel like a letdown. Whether viewing videos or still images, colors are bright and vibrant, and darker tones are rich, with very deep blacks. Even when performing more mundane tests, like gray-scale testing, image quality remains stellar, without a sign of the crushed near-blacks or washed-out whites I've seen on other displays. Text is impeccably rendered, with perfect readability at even the smallest font sizes.

When the Retina iMac was announced, a lot of time was spent discussing things like the new timing controller (TCON), which Apple had to redesign to handle the bandwidth required by so many pixels. And the photo alignment processes and organic passivation architecture that had to be reconfigured to allow all of those pixels to combine seamlessly without cross-talk muddling the detail or losing contrast. In reality, the technical details matter little, as long as picture and the video quality are good, and the Retina 5K display delivers. The result is a screen with resolution high enough to let you run 4K video at full size, at full resolution, with room to spare. Let me rephrase that: There's room to work. That extra screen space is ideal for the toolbars and timelines used in video editing. That's what the iMac with Retina is all about—working with high-resolution video and other visual media.

One thing the display doesn't deliver is touch capability. While you'll find touch-capable displays on all sorts of Windows systems, like the Dell XPS 27 Touch All-in-One (2720) or the HP Z1 G2, Mac OS X doesn't support touch input—for that, you're stuck with iOS devices like the iPad Air.

Design and Features
Aside from the upgraded display, the iMac design is relatively unchanged. In fact, with the display turned off, the new iMac can sit side-by-side with the old model and two are impossible to tell apart, without even a change in port labels to indicate which is which. The sleek aluminum design is still extremely thin, just 5mm at the edges, with a bulge in the back to accommodate larger components and the hinge for the L-shaped stand.

One of the few complaints I have about the design is that the single-hinge stand lets you adjust the angle of the display, but not the height. But while some all-in-one designs, like the HP Z1 G2, use a dual-hinge stand to add height adjustment, the majority do not, like the easel-backed MSI AG270 Gaming All-In-One (2PC-006US). In the back, there's a small access panel—opened with a button that's hidden when the desktop is plugged in—that provides the only user access inside the chassis. Open it up and you'll find four SO-DIMM slots for RAM. Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM (two 4GB RAM sticks filling two of the four slots), but you can add more for up to 32GB total.

As with past iMacs, all of the ports are found on the backside of the display, including a headphone jack, an SDXC card slot, four USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. While the rear-mounted position of the ports is sometimes inconvenient, they are never more than arm's length away. Unlike other iMacs, however, there is no option to use the Retina 5K display as an external monitor for another Mac. Inside, the iMac has 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 for wireless connectivity.