Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple updates its iMac line

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 480 posts

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#101

Post by javagram »

dijit wrote: post #71
tambourine_man wrote: post #24

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019. It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.

it's SATA so you can replace it with anything you like; if you're not fond of paying the extra $200 for 25% of the storage capacity. A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.

Replacing the hard drive in these macs requires separating the display. Possible but a delicate operation. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...

I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#102

Post by Tepix »

lesss365 wrote: post #96
tambourine_man wrote: post #24

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019. It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.

Does it still hold that SSDs are harder to recover data from than HDDs? Or is that out the window?

Apple had a backup solution that was easy to use.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#104

Post by syn0byte »

tambourine_man wrote: post #24

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019. It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.

Meh, not defending Apple in any way but RPM isn't a very useful metric without other specs on the drive.

Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.

This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#105

Post by aczerepinski »

I really wish I could buy a headless Mac with similar performance (including a real video card) and price. The mini doesn't quite meet my needs and the pro at $3k+ is way too expensive. These specs look good (although I would greatly prefer SSD) but I really don't want an extra monitor on my desk.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#106

Post by jorvi »

_red wrote: post #73
pixl97 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But we cant compromise profits of our high end line"

Sometime around 2013-2014 it began to be visible that Apple stopped trying to make "the best hardware in its class" and migrated to "how does this fit in a marketing matrix". Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cos…

2015 to be exact. Both the iPhone 6S and MacBook Pro 2015 are the absolute pinnacle of Apple tech before they started to do absurd year-on-year price raises and introducing backgrades (no 3.5mm port, bad keyboard, touchbar, no magsafe).

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#108

Post by o10449366 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #23
fiblye wrote: post #13

Bought my iMac 7 years ago with 8GB as the default memory option and a 1TB fusion drive. And here we are, nearly a decade later. Still 8 GB in the newest models. Still 1 TB fusion drives. GPUs haven't even seemed to take a jump over last year's models.

Plenty of folks use an iMac as the primary family machine - email, homework, some Netflix, kids' basic games. 8 GB is entirely sufficient for that. Hell, four probably is. If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.

Chrome + Slack alone took up ~3 GB of RAM on my 4 GB machine and forced me to upgrade.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#109

Post by k2enemy »

BossingAround wrote: post #11

Huh... The title of their press release seems to me somewhat clickbait-y... Why not 'iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance'? When I read this, I thought, 'oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations'. Overall, I'm kinda disappointed that the 21' and 27' macs get different CPU gens. Why? Why not just have the latest gen in both of them? Is it price, or is it more about artificial perf…

My guess is that many edu and corp customers buy hundreds at a time for computer labs, low demand office jobs, etc. The purchaser isn't the one that has to suffer from obsolete CPUs and slow spinning drives. The purchaser just wants to stay within budget.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#110

Post by PedroBatista »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #79
ppetty wrote: post #61

Maybe the best feature: > 8GB (two 4GB) of 2666MHz DDR4 memory; four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible

I haven't needed to touch my memory in forever; why is this still apparently weighed so heavily? Or is that one of those things where you try to go around the Apple tax of more memory by installing your own?

Because when RAM was dirt cheap, you would pay triple the price if ordered from Apple. It's ridiculous.
Post reply on HN