Things are buzzing around the OWC Campus here in Woodstock, Illinois. Apple just released the new 21.5” iMacs this morning and we’re on our way to getting them in, opening them up, and taking a look inside to see what can be upgraded and how easily.

With a new iMac, the obvious thing to do is to compare it to the previous generation. The main thing that stands out is that the new iMac is considerably thinner than the previous generation. The most noticeable side effect to this is the elimination of an internal optical drive on the new iMacs, though this is easily remedied by simply adding an external optical drive if you need one.

A slightly faster i5 processor (2.7GHz, vs 2.5GHz) is in the stock model, as well as twice the stock RAM and official maximum RAM. They also double the stock hard drive to a 1TB drive, and will be offering a Fusion Drive as well, which wasn’t available on the previous models. There also seems to be a SSD port similar to those in the latest MacBook Pros and Mac Book Air, so we’ll be looking into that, too. Graphics has been switched over to an nVidia GeForceGT 640M vs the old AMD Radeon 6750M.

For connectivity, say goodbye to FireWire 800, as Apple has removed that port entirely. However, they added an extra Thunderbolt port, so you can always use an adapter to connect your legacy peripherals. There are still four USB ports, though, and they’re USB 3.0 versus the USB 2.0 in the older models, so you can get a little more speed out of those peripherals that will support it.

Here’s a first look at the new iMac as we picked it up from the store.

Make sure you stick around for the unboxing photos, videos, and more as the day unfolds.