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In light of Apple's recent delisting of their 27" iMac range, I thought to talk about some interesting alternatives to the 27" iMac.
1) Dell 7780 All-in-One
10th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-10900
Windows 11 Pro
Intel® Integrated Graphics
16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR4
M.2 2230 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 35 Solid State Drive
27.0-in. display
$1,929.00 (Dell website)
Whilst it doesn't have Thunderbolt 3, this system has plenty of room for upgrade, has good performance (top tier Intel Core i9-10900 fitted) and is one of the better looking and built AIOs around. On the Dell site, it has a vast amount of configuration options including adding a secondary drive plus using PCIe4 NVMe SSDs and/or an extra RAID 1 drive. With two drive slots this makes it something of an ideal for dual booting setup. For macOS compatibility (High Sierra upwards) it would be best to stick with the base integrated Intel graphics version as Nvidia cards (on the higher tier discrete card version) are no longer supported on macOS.
2) HP Pavilion All-in-One - 27-d0255xt
27" Display
Windows 11 Home
10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 processor
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX 350 4 GB
8 GB memory; 1 TB HDD storage
Integrated 10/100/1000 GbE LAN
$899.00 base price (HP website)
The HP Pavilion AIO is one of the cheapest Comet Lake standalone systems available. It has a litany of upgrade options including an Intel Core i7-10700 CPU upgrade option and a plethora of storage and GPU upgrades including 1 TB Intel® SSD + 32 GB Intel® Optane™ memory, a secondary drive (up to 2 TB 5400 rpm SATA HDD) plus upgrade to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR5). On macOS we will have to disable the Nvidia dGPU in order to run it from the Comet Lake iGPU.
3) HP Envy 32" with Thunderbolt 3 (2020)
Intel Core i7 10th Gen 10700 (2.90GHz)
16GB DDR4 1 TB PCIe SSD, max 32GB
31.5" 4K/UHD 3840 x 2160
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB GDDR5
Bang & Olufsen 2.1 channel system with 3-way design
Quad array digital microphone
Integrated 10/100/1000 GbE LAN
$2,559.99 for Core i7-10700 + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB GDDR5 (Newegg)
$3,199 with Core i9-10900K + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super 8GB (Amazon)
The HP Envy 32" is one of the few non-Apple branded systems that has Thunderbolt 3 support built in. While a bit more expensive than the 27" iMac with 5K Retina display, it also sports a 31.5" 4K/UHD screen making it really good alternative to the smaller 27" iMac. With the Comet Lake chip up to i9-10900K, it means that aside from running Windows or Linux great it also works fully with macOS Catalina 10.15.5 onwards (with the Nvidia card disabled). As it has Thunderbolt built-in, it means you could theoretically also run an eGPU box with it, allowing you to use 3rd party AMD cards with macOS.
4) Laptop alternatives with Thunderbolt I/O
If an AIO is not your ideal choice, there are also these eGPU friendly Thunderbolt laptops to choose from:
1) Dell 7780 All-in-One
10th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-10900
Windows 11 Pro
Intel® Integrated Graphics
16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR4
M.2 2230 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 35 Solid State Drive
27.0-in. display
$1,929.00 (Dell website)
Whilst it doesn't have Thunderbolt 3, this system has plenty of room for upgrade, has good performance (top tier Intel Core i9-10900 fitted) and is one of the better looking and built AIOs around. On the Dell site, it has a vast amount of configuration options including adding a secondary drive plus using PCIe4 NVMe SSDs and/or an extra RAID 1 drive. With two drive slots this makes it something of an ideal for dual booting setup. For macOS compatibility (High Sierra upwards) it would be best to stick with the base integrated Intel graphics version as Nvidia cards (on the higher tier discrete card version) are no longer supported on macOS.
2) HP Pavilion All-in-One - 27-d0255xt
27" Display
Windows 11 Home
10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5 processor
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX 350 4 GB
8 GB memory; 1 TB HDD storage
Integrated 10/100/1000 GbE LAN
$899.00 base price (HP website)
The HP Pavilion AIO is one of the cheapest Comet Lake standalone systems available. It has a litany of upgrade options including an Intel Core i7-10700 CPU upgrade option and a plethora of storage and GPU upgrades including 1 TB Intel® SSD + 32 GB Intel® Optane™ memory, a secondary drive (up to 2 TB 5400 rpm SATA HDD) plus upgrade to Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR5). On macOS we will have to disable the Nvidia dGPU in order to run it from the Comet Lake iGPU.
3) HP Envy 32" with Thunderbolt 3 (2020)
Intel Core i7 10th Gen 10700 (2.90GHz)
16GB DDR4 1 TB PCIe SSD, max 32GB
31.5" 4K/UHD 3840 x 2160
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB GDDR5
Bang & Olufsen 2.1 channel system with 3-way design
Quad array digital microphone
Integrated 10/100/1000 GbE LAN
$2,559.99 for Core i7-10700 + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB GDDR5 (Newegg)
$3,199 with Core i9-10900K + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super 8GB (Amazon)
The HP Envy 32" is one of the few non-Apple branded systems that has Thunderbolt 3 support built in. While a bit more expensive than the 27" iMac with 5K Retina display, it also sports a 31.5" 4K/UHD screen making it really good alternative to the smaller 27" iMac. With the Comet Lake chip up to i9-10900K, it means that aside from running Windows or Linux great it also works fully with macOS Catalina 10.15.5 onwards (with the Nvidia card disabled). As it has Thunderbolt built-in, it means you could theoretically also run an eGPU box with it, allowing you to use 3rd party AMD cards with macOS.
4) Laptop alternatives with Thunderbolt I/O
If an AIO is not your ideal choice, there are also these eGPU friendly Thunderbolt laptops to choose from: