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Apple updates its iMac line

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Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#251

Post by asdff »

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.

They will sell you a brand new macbook air with 128gb of storage that you can't upgrade. I can't even back up my phone with that. They literally don't care at all.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#253

Post by derefr »

todd8 wrote: post #201

It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me. I've been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I'm comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and in…

If someone could figure out a legal way to offer recommended-hardware Hackintosh builds as a service†, that'd be pretty ideal for what you're talking about, in the sense of "you could buy one for your mom", and it would "just work" (and hopefully continue to "just work" through updates, if they do it right.)

† I guess, if you were to operate a "Hackintosh OEM", you could sell the hardware build itself without actually doing the step of installing macOS onto it. You'd have a team that would continuously figure out what drivers + config would work best for each given macOS update (with a perfected DSDT, etc.), and then that team would package those patches up and hand them off to e.g. the UniBeast team, such that the regular Hackintoshing process that everyone uses would detect your build by the CMOS vendor+model ID, and just plop that OEM package in instead of requiring any config. And would also install an updater that would update your patch-package, and also delay macOS's own OS updates until a tested patch-package is available.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#254

Post by ariabuckles »

pier25 wrote: post #203
o10449366 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use Slack in the browser instead. No more Electron crap.

I turned slack into a chrome “shortcut” (which seems to be a PWA minus the service worker), which lets it run in chrome instead of a separate electron instance, but also have a separate app window.

Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#255

Post by dijit »

xavieralexandre wrote: post #95
dijit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting max performance is not that obvious. You'll want to go through the the PCIe port and find a M2 NVME/PCIe Mac adapter.

Sure. But the drive that is inside is listed as being SATA. I haven’t seen a tear down but it’s not soldered or proprietary at least.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#256

Post by [deleted] »

SteveNuts wrote: post #187
dessant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market. https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat... https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...

I was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available". A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.

[deleted]

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#257

Post by hollerith »

fredsted wrote: post #174
subpixel wrote: post #68

re: 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…

It's probably bogged down by the harddrive, not the RAM.

Agree. My 2011 Mac mini with only 2 gigs of RAM is almost as comfortable for web browsing as the 1350-usd brand-new Windows 10 box in the office with 8 gigs of RAM.

A recent experience qualifies me to say that using a recent version of MacOS on a 5400-rpm hard drive is infuriating compared to using the same version of MacOS running on the same Mac with an SSD.

My 2011 Mac mini has an SSD in it. Everything is fine with my Mac till a few months ago, when I get careless during an upgrade of MacOS with the result that my system is unbootable and I cannot wipe the SSD and re-install because there is data on the SSD I don't have backed up, so to recover I install an empty 5400-rpm hard drive I have lying around next to the SSD, then install the new version of MacOS onto that.

Like others here, it amazes me that Apple still sells computers where even the system files are stored on spinning rust. Right after installation (of High Sierra) the aforementioned hard drive had less than 32 gigs of data on it. I am mystified why Apple doesn't solder at least that much solid-state memory to the motherboard.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#258

Post by asdff »

scarface74 wrote: post #162
owenwil wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Colleges aren’t buying labs full of Chromebooks...

They aren't buying iMacs, either. I work at one of the largest unis in the US and everything is dell optiplex from the libraries, to the lecture halls, to the research labs, and the hospitals. The only iMacs I've seen are requested specifically by faculty for their office, or are 10 years old in some windowless back room hooked up to a random microscope running snow leopard. That being said, I've never set foot near any art buildings so I don't know what happens in there regarding their machines.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#259

Post by mpweiher »

turtlebits wrote: post #248
todd8 wrote: post #201

It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me. I've been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I'm comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and in…

Since you're using a desktop, what's wrong with the 2018 Mac Mini? Upgradable RAM, storage and GPU can be added externally. Dual 4k support out of the box or a single 5k should be enough for your single monitor?

Came here to say exactly that. Replaced my big 2008 MacPro with a mini and couldn't be happier. I do wish the storage were upgradable internally, but so far it hasn't really been a problem.

One big plus: it's quiet, so I can leave it on.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#260

Post by robmaister »

drewg123 wrote: post #53
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.

What seems worse to me is that the default drive for the 21.5" is a 1TB 5400 spinning rust drive, not even a fusion drive. This is just shameful. People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance. This is exactly what happened to an older friend of my wife. And since it is an iMac, it is next to impossible to replace the drive later (on some models, you need to unseal the LCD…

I've felt this pain too. 2 years ago I bought a Mac mini (2014 model) off eBay for $340 mainly as a build machine for iOS binaries. It was the lowest end model which had a 5400rpm HDD in it and 4GB of RAM.

It took ~3 minutes to get to a usable desktop. Opening XCode took long enough for me to go grab a coffee or scroll through Facebook. It was swapping like crazy. I honestly couldn't believe they were selling this configuration new for $500 in 2018.

I bought some iFixit tools and used their guide to fully disassemble my Mac and slot in a new SSD. Time to usable desktop dropped to like 20 seconds, things were snappier. Doing more than one thing at a time still uses swap but it's much less noticable now.

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