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Apple updates its iMac line

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Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#141

Post by scarface74 »

feelix wrote: post #99
tosh wrote: post #63

I find it curious that Apple is starting to communicate major product updates decoupled from an event. Just good old press releases. Maybe they already have too many announcements to fit into the narrative of the handful of events per year.

they want to push iOS. They are begrudgingly updating their Mac line, with horrible specs such as 5400 RPM drives, and are avoiding holding an event for the announcements. This way they get to ward off accusations that they have forgotten about the Mac, and they get the profits from the sales, while still trying to drive consumers to iPads.

The Mac line still makes enough revenue to be a f100 company by itself.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#142

Post by patrickg_zill »

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.

On an older iMac running 10.11, going from 4gb to 6gb was a big improvement.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#143

Post by duado »

resters wrote: post #126
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library. My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now. Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost o…

Get a thunderbolt drive caddy and boot from external Thunderbolt disk. Refreshed an old iMac this wayz

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#145

Post by Kudos »

joncrane wrote: post #140
scarface74 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you couldn’t just by an SSD external drive and boot off of that?

So now you have to carry an external HDD around with you and plug it in every time you want it to boot up?

We're talking about iMacs. In case it's not clear, that's a desktop system not a portable one.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#147

Post by acdha »

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?

Yes, and not just initially. Right now you can save something like $600 over the 64GB price but in a year those numbers will probably have improved and Apple won't have lowered the stock price at all.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#148

Post by owenwil »

It seems to me this product is on life support and Apple is simply doing performance bumps to avoid big capex expenses on designing/tooling for something new? It ships with a 5,400 RPM disk, an outdated display technology, omits T2 chipset, doesn't include Face ID, nor any of their other innovations over the last year. It's actually egregious to stuff old hardware in a workable form factor and hock it, while ignoring that they're not backporting _any_ of their other innovations back to these devices.

And that's not to mention: buying a $3500 screen glued to a computer is massively risky.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#149

Post by js2 »

resters wrote: post #126
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library. My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now. Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost o…

Something sounds wrong. I have an older 21.5 with the first generation 1 TB fusion and it is not at all slow.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#150

Post by owenwil »

syn0byte wrote: post #104
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 reco…

Have you used the 5,400 RPM iMac? It's incredibly laggy out of the box. Even booting takes 1-3 full minutes. It crunches just opening apps. With all that other hardware, it's just a waste: you're drinking an i7 through a straw.
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