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Apple updates its iMac line

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Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#211

Post by iooi »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #120
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 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.

You can buy 2TB M.2 SSD drives for $220 retail now.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#212

Post by simonh »

naravara wrote: post #207
_fzslm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors, but that doesn't look like that will ever happen. You may want to keep your eyes out for the new Mac Pro that's meant to release this year.

Even if the Mac Pro is the computer of all our dreams, I doubt it will meet the poster’s needs. Seems like they want a fairly bare-bones, minimalist and simple computer. I doubt a Mac Pro is going to come in at under $3.5k at the entry level.

His current machine is a Mac Pro from 2013 and those started at $3k.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#213

Post by AnthonyMouse »

simonh wrote: post #184
crazygringo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...how is 8GB underpowered for browsing the web? My 2016 MacBook Pro has 8GB and it's perfectly fine. I can't even imagine what web you're browsing.

I would have thought it would be ok too, but I'm guessing your machine has an SSD, so when it occasionally needs to use swap space you barely even notice. On a machine with a bare spinning platter drive and no fusion drive, going to swap can be awful for performance. You’ll really notice it. So most of the time everything will be fine, but now and then it will suddenly start crawling. Also Chrome with a dozen tabs op…

It's probably not even swapping. It's that operating systems use additional memory for I/O caching. Less memory means fewer blocks in the cache which means more slow reads from spinning rust every time you open a program or document. But replacing HDD with SSD fixes that too.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#215

Post by icedchai »

The iMac is a great machine. I have a late 2014 iMac 5K 27" and it's still going strong with 32 gigs of RAM and 512G SSD. It had the max CPU for the time (4.0 ghz i7.) Apple Care expired end of 2017, so unless the thing dies or OS upgrades become unsupported, I don't have a reason to upgrade it.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#216

Post by umvi »

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?

My wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on.

I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).

At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.

But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#217

Post by tingol »

xutopia wrote: post #161
narimiran wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you tried remapping esc to capslock? (Or ctrl to capslock and esc to ctrl) ¿Why not both? I have (on Linux, not on Mac, but it shouldn't matter): * "caps lock" + key = Ctrl+key * "caps lock" (release) = Esc It works like charm and I can definitely recommend it.

How do you map it to do that?

You can use https://github.com/alols/xcape on linux.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#218

Post by kmlx »

kmlx wrote: post #17
dmitriid wrote: post #4

The price for upgrading remains as ridiculous as ever (especially if you're not in the US). RAM: 8 GB -> 16 GB is 2200 SEK (239 USD) 8 GB -> 32 GB is 6600 SEK (717 USD) You can get 32GB as low as 1689 SEK (183 USD) on Newegg.

isn't the RAM soldered in on iMacs?

thanks all for the answers.

@vbezhenar posted a link to Apple Support in his comment: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

right at the top, if you scroll past “27-inch” you’ll see this gem: “*Memory is not removable by users on iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2014), iMac (21.5-inch, 2017), and iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017). If the memory in one of these computers needs repair service, contact an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.”

i call this the “iMac pitfall”.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#219

Post by okmokmz »

jorvi wrote: post #106
_red wrote: post #73

Earlier 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…

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).

I purchased a (I believe) mid or late 2014 model Macbook Air with the upgraded CPU and RAM and it's one of the best computers I've owned. Very snappy still to this day, extremely durable, and it wasn't terribly expensive compared to other laptops with similar hardware/form factor.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#220

Post by scarface74 »

huffmsa wrote: post #208
scarface74 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don’t remember back in the first Apple heyday of the 80s when Jean-Louis Gassée was leading the charge (no he wasn’t the CEO) to sell overpriced Macs with 40% profit margins?

There's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it. I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc. But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.

The problem in the 80s was that the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow. When Windows became good enough, no one bought Macs and it almost killed Apple.

Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.

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