One word: hackintosh.
Apple updates its iMac line
151–160 of 480 posts
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#152Still 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 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 mean... they will notice that their computer sucks, but they might not know why. 5400 rpm is a joke considering you can buy a 7200 rpm drive with belly button lint and a serviceable SSD for $100 or less. There are budget laptops at Best Buy you can get with 7200 rpm drives standard, and even that is borderline unacceptable with how cheap SSDs are now.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#153I 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.
spec bumps don't get anything more than a news release. I figure they are leaning towards only new product debut or when devices get more health related features which is where Apple seems to trying to position themselves.
pcs, tablets, and phones, pretty much are well developed markets.
now if the air pods get some new health monitoring ability I expect them to get a presentation but right now the only remaining product is air power; their charging mat.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#154re: RAM, I bought a 2015 iMac with a 1TB drive on Craiglist last month, thinking it might be the perfect machine to edit and store/serve family photos (mac --> Google Photos and mac --> BackBlaze). It never in a million years would have occurred to me that 1) 8GB on a 2015 machine would be utterly, pathetically underpowered for even browsing the web, or 2) that an iMac would be sold in 2015 that would not let you upg…
You misconfigured aomething if social media taxed your 8GB. Or had a performance bottleneck elsewhere.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#155Still 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.
Horrible. I bought a 2010 iMac with a 5400 HD and a MacBook Pro with an SSD at the same time. The iMac became unusable long before the MacBook Pro because of its spinning drive. In fact, the laptop is still usable.
It's not an easy upgrade, but you could swap it out for an SSD. Checkout OWC (macsales) and/or iFixit for guides.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#156Still 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.
Apple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.
Lab settings? What school is buying hardware these days? The majority in my area are either investing in Chromebooks and dropping purchases of their own devices, or making kids buy Chromebooks.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The iMac has other configs and if you are a power user, you can get the specs you want. Maybe Apple does have some customers for the low end config that’s not obvious. Why should your opinions limit their choices?
Because "ignoring your customers' opinions" isn't a particularly effective marketing strategy?
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#158Still 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.
Apple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.
> It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting.
So why buy Apple?
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#159Still 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.
The weird thing is that slow spinning-rust is still highly usable in linux, at least in my experience. It helps that linux tends to leave a lot more RAM available as a disk cache.
Re: Apple updates its iMac line
#160Earlier 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?
They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.