The tech-pundits will of course hate the new iMac because it will be harder to repair and parts replacements will be more expensive. All I know is that my current refurb iMac 24" has been running 24/7 for about three years and if it does eventually needs to have parts replaced, it will be well worth the repairs. I only had AppleCare on it for three years and I'm willing to bet the only thing that will be need to be replaced is the hard drive which I'll likely do myself. I want to get another iMac so I'll probably pick up a 27" current high-end refurb instead of the coming model. This 24" iMac is the most reliable and trouble-free Mac I've ever owned mainly because I've never bothered to tinker inside of it.

I agree mostly.

I purchased my 27" top-end i7 (2.93ghz, 20GB ram) 2010 iMac in early 2011 as a refurb for $1899 and it has been the single most stable PC I've ever had. I run Bootcamp on occasion but mostly I am a true OSX user. The experience has been fast and trouble free.

My only complaint is the difficulty and expense at getting a different drive in the iMac. All over town it's $500 to swap out the HDD with a SDD and relocate the HDD. The only part of that price that has changed with time is the size of the SSD you get. Which is to say, larger, as they get cheaper every couple of months. So I've not done it and it's only now starting to be noticeable in day to day use. Since I use computers at work with SSDs.

However here we are in late 2012 and I do think it's finally time to place this iMac in the "other" room. I await a new refreshed iMac with SSD, faster graphics, ram, cpus and of course an SSD!

Modifying this older iMac is not worth the money. It's a fine machine and a three-year "more than usable life-span" is all I ever ask for and it delivers!

who cares how thin or how thick a desktop computer is?

Oh, no.

I love iMacs, I've seen just about every single iteration of them in actual use, and I am probably going to buy another one at some point in the not-too-distant future.

But every single time Apple makes the iMac thinner, the first generation which is thinner ends up having some kind of embarrassing, stupid hardware issue which turns out to be caused by the new form factor and can't be repaired without huge cost because "thinner" means "uses a bunch of custom or super-expensive parts".

Honestly, isn't the current iMac thin enough?

Like nobody saw this coming.
Thank you Captain Obvious!