A couple of weeks ago, a big box showed up at my doorstep. Inside? The new 2011 high-end 27-inch iMac. More or less it's the 2011 MacBook Pro mated to a 27-inch LED backlit Cinema Display. It's basically my personal setup but in an all-in-one desktop.

I never liked the iMac. I understood the appeal, but it wasn't for me. The CPUs and GPUs weren't fast enough, there weren't enough drive bays and the display was always worse than what I already had on my desk. However the same series of events that allowed me to dump the Mac Pro and use a Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro have made the iMac that much more interesting.

Moore's Law (or more specifically, hundreds of super smart process and chip engineers) have more or less solved the performance problem in these integrated machines. We've been on the longest run I can remember of software being outpaced by hardware and as a result machines like the iMac look a whole lot more powerful than they did just a few years ago.

SSDs and very high capacity mechanical drives fixed the storage problem, while the advent of 27-inch high resolution LCD panels fixed the display problem. The new iMac can easily be a real workstation for users today, when in the past it was more of a machine you'd give to your parents. To be honest, after using it for a while, I actually like the new iMac.

Read on for our full review of the new 27-inch iMac.

Last year at the iPad introduction Steve Jobs announced that Apple is a mobile device company. Just last week Steve returned to introduce the iPad 2 and point out that the majority of Apple's revenue now comes from products that run iOS. The breakdown is as follows:

Just looking at iPad and iPhone, that's 56% of Apple's sales. All Macs put together? Only 20%. Granted 20% of $26.7 billion in sales is still $5.3 billion, but the iOS crew gets most of the attention these days.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that when Apple launched its 2011 MacBook Pro lineup last week that it did so with little fanfare. There was no special press event and no video of an unusually charismatic man on a white background describing the latest features of the systems. All we got two weeks ago were a few pages describing the high level features of the lineup, a short outage on the Mac Store and five new configurations available for sale.

We've been working non-stop since the launch on our review of the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros. Despite the lack of fanfare, this is a pretty serious upgrade. Read on for our in-depth analysis!

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Apple's new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. We came away happy with the upgrades, however a little disappointed at the performance of the 11-inch system. Today we take a look at what $400 in upgrades will get you. Is it enough to make the 11-inch MBA more of a workhorse? Read on to find out.

Last week Apple introduced its first significant upgrade to the MacBook Air since it was introduced two years ago. The announcement was met with the arrival of a new form factor for Apple: the 11.6-inch MacBook Air starting at just $999. The 13.3-inch model got an update and a price drop as well. It starts at $1299.

The hardware has both remained the same and changed significantly. The CPUs are mostly unchanged in terms of specs, but differ wildly in performance. The GPU is much faster and the battery life is improved. Weight is down, the chassis loses some features and gains others.

There's a lot to talk about, so read on for our full review of these two notebooks.

Apple fans, please forgive me, and feel free to skip this post. I have been testing out a MacBook Pro 13 running Windows 7 and have put it through our entire PC notebook benchmark suite. We were pretty interested to see how the NVIDIA 320M IGP in the MacBook and MacBook Pro 13 fared compared to low end dedicated cards like the G 310M and the HD 4330, and also to see how much the old Core 2 Duo processor hamstrung the MacBook Pro compared to newer and faster PC notebooks. And on a more subjective level, we wanted to see how the latest MacBooks were as BootCamped systems running mostly in Windows. For those willing to fathom the idea of running Windows 7 as the primary operating system on a Mac portable, keep reading to see how the latest MacBook Pro 13 fares as a Windows 7 laptop.

It’s the fastest Mac you can buy and it's a desktop. These days, the Mac Pro is basically the un-Mac. But it's fast and nothing beats the flexibility of a desktop. If you need a lot of cores, it's actually Apple's most price competitive system on the market. We take a look at the Westmere update to the Mac Pro, read on.

The new Apple TV is a lot like the old Apple TV, at least functionally. You get the same limitations and the same plays-well-with-others* behavior (if by others you mean Apple products and iTunes). Technically, the new Apple TV is a significant improvement over the original - it doesn’t get stupidly hot, it’s very compact and it’s a lot cheaper.

But Apple has to compete with more than itself in this field. The Boxee Box and Google TV are both due to arrive later this year. Not to mention the many other devices that already do much of what Apple promises with the new ATV.

Read on for our full review of the Apple TV.

Honestly, Roku's price drop and yesterday's announcement of Hulu Plus coming to the platform probably stole much if any remaining thunder from the imminent arrival of the new Apple TV. While we'll still give the Apple TV a thorough treatment, it's still clearly a very niche product from Apple (until it gets jailbroken, then all bets are off). It's one of the easiest devices to test simply because it doesn't work with the vast majority of downloadable video content. We can't even run our media streamer test suite on the device since it doesn't  support streaming anything outside of iTunes.

To tide you over until our review is done however we've got a full gallery of the new Apple TV dissected. There aren't many surprises installed. The thing is tiny, there are no fans and the entire chassis is used as a heatsink. Apple makes liberal use of thermal conductive pads within the device. 

The new ATV does use the A4, but the markings on the chip in my unit are very faint so I couldn't tell how much memory was integrated onto the package. There don't seem to be many other surprises inside, the new Apple TV is a $99 iPod Touch without the display and speaker/mic. The real potential for this platform (much like its predecessor) is realized if/when it's hacked. Until then it'll be a tough sell for many. Update: Looks like it has already been jailbroken (thanks crimson117), it's just a matter of time for folks to put the freedom to good use.

Check out the gallery!

I've wanted a higher density, more compact alternative to the 30-inch 2560 x 1600 panels that I've seen for the past 6 years. Apple was the first to intrigue me with the 27-inch iMac, however I didn't need another computer, I just wanted a monitor. Earlier this year we reviewed Dell's U2711, a 27-inch CCFL backlit LCD display with a 2560 x 1440 resolution and loved it. 

Recently Apple presented us with an alternative. An LED backlit, 27-inch Cinema Display similar to what's used in the new iMac but without the Mac part. Priced at $999 it's actually $100 cheaper than the Dell, but lacks the input flexibility of the U2711. What Apple does give you is an integrated MagSafe power adapter useful for charging your MacBook Pro in a very sleek package. But how well does it do as a monitor? Read on for our full review.

For the first time since its introduction in 2005 Apple has significantly updated the design of the Mac mini. The new model is thinner, although it requires a bit more surface area. Basically a 13-inch MacBook Pro without the display, this new $699 Mac promises to be the most energy efficient desktop on the market. We look at its performance, power consumption and even compare it to a five year old Power Mac G5 to see how well Apple's mini update holds up.

Read on for the full review.

Earlier this year Apple updated its entire MacBook Pro lineup. The update wasn't cosmetic, the 2nd generation unibody design carried over from 2009. Instead the 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks got Core i5/i7 CPUs paired with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPUs. The 13-inch model was left with a Core 2 Duo and only saw a big improvement in GPU spec with the integrated GeForce 320M.

Clearly valuing a consistent GPU experience over a faster CPU, Apple decided to keep the Core i-family of CPUs out of its most popular MacBook Pro. As a result the new MacBook Pro offers roughly twice the 3D gaming performance of its predecessor, but only a small improvement in CPU performance. The standard memory size is now doubled to a respectable 4GB.

Battery life has also improved pretty significantly. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro now offers the best battery life in Apple's entire lineup. In our light web browsing test we measured a full 9.75 hours of battery life on a single charge. Our worst case scenario? 3.56 hours.

Check out our full review for everything from battery life to display quality and thermals.

Last month Ryan Smith published his findings on OS X Portal performance. While we're all glad that Valve ported the Steam engine to OS X, we weren't very happy with the performance of the initial release. Since then Valve has updated its Steam client and games as well as released Half Life 2 Episode 2 for the Mac. We take a look at its performance in both OS X and Windows on two different Macs, unfortunately the story isn't much better than last time.

Read on to get the full story.

Update 5/15/2010: Valve released a new patch for Portal on the 13th which resolved the blurriness issue. Please see our update for more details.

It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announced that they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.

As it stands Valve is taking a gradual approach to rolling out their back catalog to the platform. Even though Steam is out and the Source engine has been ported, this week has seen the release of only 1 Source game for the Mac: 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal.

While it’s not the most graphically intensive Source game these days (that title belonging to Left 4 Dead), at this point it’s as good as anything else for looking at the performance of the Source engine under Mac OS X, particularly considering how long it’s been since a game’s original developer did the Mac port. So with that in mind, we went ahead and took a quick look at Portal’s performance under Mac OS X.

Today the first iPad 3Gs will go on sale starting at 5PM at Apple Retail Stores and Best Buy. Those who preordered at the time of announcement should be receiving their shipments via Fedex before then. The device itself hasn't changed except for a black strip at the top where the 3G antenna is located and there's now a removable micro SIM tray along the left side.

Activation is handled entirely within the iPad OS itself and AT&T offers two domestic dataplans: $14.99 for up to 250MB of data transfers per month, and $29.99 for unlimited. If you'd like to add international data roaming the options are as follows:

Sigh. I long for the day when we'll get reasonable wireless internet pricing internationally.

The most interesting thing I've run into thus far is the fact that while operating on the 3G network we appear to be network bound rather than CPU bound. I timed simultaneous web page loads on both the iPhone 3GS and iPad 3G to get an idea of 3G performance on the devices. Each test was repeated at least 3 times and as many as 7 times to ensure repeatability. Outliers were thrown out and averages are reported below:

The iPhone 3GS is actually slightly faster over 3G. I suspect this is an OS/browser optimization issue because loading up AnandTech would occassionally come up lightning fast on the iPhone, presumably because it's loading almost entirely out of cache while I could never get the iPad 3G to do the same. If we look at the rest of the tests the race is far closer with the iPhone 3GS usually getting the slight edge over the iPad 3G. The opposite is true in one of the benchmarks. At the end of the day it seems that the A4 does nothing for web page loading performance over 3G. It's only over WiFi that you'll see a big performance gain over the iPhone 3GS (or perhaps on web pages with few images/ads).

More pics of the iPad 3G in our Gallery.

Brandon Hill, Editor in Chief of DailyTech, IMed me an hour ago with this: "OK, stop laying on the couch with your iPad and do some OS X benchmarking". He ended the IM with a link to a DT article stating that less than a week after Apple opened hooks into NVIDIA's VP2 decode engine, Adobe delivered a version of Flash 10.1 with GPU acceleration under OS X (Windows users have had it for six months now).

Impressive turnaround time for a company that has recently been thrashed by Apple quite a bit. It just goes to show one thing: there's no room for ego in engineering. Adobe claims the beta only supports Flash acceleration on the GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M, however in my testing it worked fine on EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition. The tests below look at CPU utilization of the Flash plugin alone in Chrome (this is single core CPU utilization). The column on the left is without GPU acceleration, the one on the right with GPU acceleration:

While hardware acceleration doesn't appear to work on Hulu's website, there's definitely an improvement in CPU utilization when scaling to full screen. YouTube is a different story however. CPU utilization is cut roughly in half. The fact that it's taken this long is upsetting, but at least we're making some progress. You can tell the GPU acceleration is working if you see a little white square in the upper left hand corner of your YouTube video:

Because the GPU acceleration only works on NVIDIA hardware, owners of the new 15/17-inch MacBook Pros will tradeoff lower battery life for lower CPU utilization (the NV GPU has to be powered up during Flash video playback). Hopefully this is just the first step as there's no reason why Intel's HD graphics can't offer the same H.264 acceleration as the NVIDIA GPUs.

And to set the record straight, I wasn't laying on the couch with my iPad.

Apple is in a position that’s enviable by any consumer facing company. It drums up genuine excitement for nearly every product it launches. Apple has somehow found a way to make something as small as just another processor refresh exciting.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors though. The previous generation unibody MacBook Pro posted some incredible battery life numbers. And two weeks ago Apple paired it with Intel’s Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs, delivering the sort of desktop-like performance we’ve been waiting for.

Since the release we’ve had the time to answer a few more questions about the new systems. We updated our launch article with Core i5 vs. Core i7 results. But today, in response to many of your requests, we’ve got more battery life results and a full evaluation of the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s display quality. Apple is often the go-to manufacturer for creative professionals; we put our colorimeter on the MacBook Pro to find out if they’re making the right choice.