I thought iMacs have an easy way to upgrade the RAM no?
Depends which model. Some require taking the screen off, which unlike earlier models is taped on and some have soldered in RAM. Until someone has seen a hole in the back or has torn one down you just don’t know.
A friend of mine upgraded his 21 inch one out of the box because Apple RAM pricing and turn around is terrible. However he damaged the screen ribbon cable at the same time. Happens a lot.
> but you can buy 32GB of RAM for $150 and install it yourself. what? Since when did they offer a DIY upgrade path?
Haven't the iMac and Mac Mini always offered (relatively) easy memory upgrades? I've upgraded probably 10-15 of them at work. They just use the samller laptop modules instead of a desktop module, and (usually?) only support 2 modules. Mac Pro offers it too, though that's a different style of computer entirely.
The post-lamp iMac has always offered user-replaceable SODIMM slots in a number sufficient to occupy all of the CPU's memory channels. The late 2009 model had 4 on the bottom, the 2015 has 2 one the back, these new ones have 2 and the Pro model has 4 (because the Pro CPU has 4 channels).
It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon).
>It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon,
I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
Solid spec bump. Interesting how much emphasis they put on the camera, speakers, and mic; makes total sense in the age of Zoom. I’d also speculate this means iMac won’t be the first computer getting Apple Silicon. I wonder if it will be the last? What’s the consensus guess now? Perhaps a new MacBook Air with good performance but the real “breakthrough” is > 12 hours battery life?
There should be at least one mid-range machine coming out early, so that the developers have really a machine they can work on. Also, Apple needs to demonstrate that they can make some powerful CPUs beyond what they do already for the iPhone and iPad. So the rumor of the smaller MB Pro sounds plausible, the 16" would be migrated in a second generation of Apple Silicon, likewise the large iMacs and the Mac Pro.
Solid spec bump. Interesting how much emphasis they put on the camera, speakers, and mic; makes total sense in the age of Zoom. I’d also speculate this means iMac won’t be the first computer getting Apple Silicon. I wonder if it will be the last? What’s the consensus guess now? Perhaps a new MacBook Air with good performance but the real “breakthrough” is > 12 hours battery life?
Consensus is that the first ARM devices will be 13.3-inch MacBook Pro and a new redesigned 24" iMac, based mostly on Ming Chi Kuo's report from just before WWDC2020.
Solid spec bump. Interesting how much emphasis they put on the camera, speakers, and mic; makes total sense in the age of Zoom. I’d also speculate this means iMac won’t be the first computer getting Apple Silicon. I wonder if it will be the last? What’s the consensus guess now? Perhaps a new MacBook Air with good performance but the real “breakthrough” is > 12 hours battery life?
It will almost certainly be a low end macbook. In fact, there's a non-pro 'macbook'[0] that already exists which would be perfect, it was discontinued a year ago, but used ultra-low power CPUs. In fact when they were talking about them (prior to release) they thought they would have ARM CPU's back then. They are fanless and have a 5W thermal envelope, which fits in with the current A12X too. The major criticisms of t…
> Single USB-C port
Are their hubs yet that can turn one USB C port into several? Or do they still only turn one USB C port into several USB A ports?
A couple years ago what I read was that the hold up was that this required more complicated chipsets that would not be available for a few months and would be expensive. More recently, I've read that this won't happen until USB4.
Likely this is the machine to buy if you want one of the last Intel Macs that can natively run x86 code
erm, no. During the introduction of Apple SOC they stated that they will produce and support Intel based macs for some time together with the apple SOC versions.
They could continue to produce this model for some time without making it any better.
It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon).
When buying a Mac one should factor in that they'll get a new one in 5-6 years (or earlier). In which case, buying an Intel now is fine -- there will be too many Intel Mac in 2-3-4-5-6 years for it not to be supported, and when it's near its last legs, it would be time to buy a new laptop anyway...
Apple today also announced that its 21.5-inch iMac will come standard with SSDs across the line for the first time. I wonder what took them so long.
price. they could sell the iMac pro for $$$ while the 'budget' version used HDD.
IMHO they should build some hysteresis into their cost structure, so when something much better has just crashed in price, they can install that much better thing even though they may have contracted their parts inventory at a higher price. They can eat the cost difference in order to deliver a better machine to the customer. It will be made up in time. For example, over a year ago (maybe two?) I was able to buy a 1 TB SSD, top speed available at the time, and a top brand, for just over $100, retail. They probably plan out their costs ahead of time, so they may have considered the equivalent to be a $200 part. Ignoring the fact that they don't pay retail, they could eat the $100 difference on paper, because future inventory will cost them even less. Sure prices go up sometimes too, but the general trend is down for tech as we know. Not sure why they are so stingy with putting the best into their products when I have the dollar cost amounts in front of me and they are not that high. /rant
Haven't the iMac and Mac Mini always offered (relatively) easy memory upgrades? I've upgraded probably 10-15 of them at work. They just use the samller laptop modules instead of a desktop module, and (usually?) only support 2 modules. Mac Pro offers it too, though that's a different style of computer entirely.
The post-lamp iMac has always offered user-replaceable SODIMM slots in a number sufficient to occupy all of the CPU's memory channels. The late 2009 model had 4 on the bottom, the 2015 has 2 one the back, these new ones have 2 and the Pro model has 4 (because the Pro CPU has 4 channels).
They took the panel out of the 21" version for some reason.