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27-inch iMac gets a major update

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Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#321

Post by baddox »

BurningFrog wrote: post #308
avianlyric wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices? The kind where Apple can make a 300% or more margin, knowing that people will still pay. Don't think Apple have ever sold SSD upgrades at anything remotely resembling competitive $/TB prices. Clearly they don't need too because people still buy their machines.

> people still buy their machines Sure, but more would buy at lower prices. That said I don't doubt that Apple has researched this a zillion ways, and this price point is there for solid reasons.

> Sure, but more would buy at lower prices.

Well, sure, that's just the law of demand. If Apple's goal was simply to ship the most products as possible in the short term, they would sell them for a penny until they ran out of money.

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#322

Post by chipotle_coyote »

smnrchrds wrote: post #292
snapetom wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iMac and Mac Pro has user upgradeable RAM. https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

You are right. But you used to be able to do that to any Mac. And I fully expect the ARM Macs to get rid of this feature. Though I would be happily surprised if they don't.

I don't expect them to, but I don't not expect them to, if that makes sense -- it feels like an "all bets are off" kind of thing to me. The industrial design of the iMac is likely to finally change when it goes ARM, and it doesn't strike me as impossible that they'll make it slightly more open, or at least not make it worse.

On the one hand, Apple loves to eliminate options and lock things down, both for quasi-defensible reasons like simplifying product lines and for less defensible ones like increasing profit margins (and making everything obsessively thinner, like they're in the grip of some industrial design anorexia). On the other, their most recent hardware design changes have often shown response to customer complaints (e.g., replacing the butterfly keyboard with an improved iteration of the "Magic" keyboard) -- and, if they really intended to lock down the Mac like iOS, the move to ARM and the sweeping UX changes in macOS Big Sur would almost certainly have been when that happened. The fact that it hadn't happened makes me considerably more skeptical it's going to. (I'm also more skeptical now that iOS will ever be allowed to blossom into a full general-purpose OS, but that's a different topic.)

As an aside, I'm not sure whether adding the T2 chip would make it more complicated to use a third-party SSD. It's my understanding they function as the SSD controller and do some kind of wonky things, but I am not taking the time to look that up and could be completely wrong. :)

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#323

Post by [deleted] »

snapetom wrote: post #260
smnrchrds wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They learned their lesson and made storage, RAM, etc. non-user replaceable in newer versions. You used to be able to buy a Mac from Apple and upgrade its RAM at a reasonable price on your own. Not anymore.

The iMac and Mac Pro has user upgradeable RAM. https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

[deleted]

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#325

Post by PopeDotNinja »

skohan wrote: post #219
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my favorite computer was my late-2010 MacBook Air. It was such a departure from the big & clunky Windows laptops I'd owned up until that time. And of course I have fond memories of my first computer, an IBM PC Jr (although I really wanted the 2nd disk drive, and copying floppy disks with only one drive & 128kb of RAM was suboptimal).

The Air series we’re solid machines for a good while until they stopped updating them. It was such a good price/performance/portability balance that I didn’t miss having a Pro machine for a few years there, even doing relatively heavy tasks like photo editing and development.

I have a 2019 Macbook Pro now. The only reason I bought it was a friend really needed a computer any computer, and I gave her my 2014 Macbook Air. I bought the pro because it's a bit nicer for mobile development & running VMs.

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#326

Post by Veedrac »

bayindirh wrote: post #229
jandrese wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all of the handwringing over SSD endurance figures over the years, the fact of the matter is that normal use won't ever get close to using it up. The only people who ever really needed to worry about those figures were doing heavy data processing every day.

I actually do heavy data processing but not every day. It can be hundreds of RAW images (50MB/image) or the simulation software I'm working on which can generate GBs of output in 3 seconds if I leave the wrong flags on. In my other workstation I can actually see the big jumps of write accumulation when I do these tasks via SMART (I log the data periodically). So mine was a honest question rather than covert fanboyism…

The Sabrent Rocket 1TB, a reasonable, fast $130 SSD, has an endurance rating of 1665 TBW. To have hit that rating, you'd have to have written 760 GB to it every day over those six years. At 5%, that's still 38 GB a day, every day.

If you were spending more to get better endurance, you could have just bought the 2TB version, which would have guaranteed 1422 GB/day.

(NB: SSDs suffer write amplification, so if you actually need 1.4TB of writes per day you should choose an enterprise drive instead.)

Endurance isn't a problem with SSDs for consumers, at all. Even QLC, which has significantly worse endurance than TLC, has plenty.

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#327

Post by vondur »

osrec wrote: post #248
smnrchrds wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They learned their lesson and made storage, RAM, etc. non-user replaceable in newer versions. You used to be able to buy a Mac from Apple and upgrade its RAM at a reasonable price on your own. Not anymore.

Why do their customers tolerate this?! I know some people love Apple (their hardware does look great), but this is extremely annoying.

I agree it is. I still build all my desktop PC's for myself. I've been doing it for over 20 years, and will do so in the future. Back in the day you could really upgrade Mac's. I had a PowerMac 7500 in which I had upgraded the CPU, storage, memory and Video Cards, even the older MacPro's you could do this. I think you can upgrade the CPU's on the newer Mac Pro's although, it's a decent amount of work to do so.

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#328

Post by phaus »

enterprise1 wrote: post #272
osrec wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do their customers tolerate this?! I know some people love Apple (their hardware does look great), but this is extremely annoying.

Because not everyone can be a computer nerd. Apple has put a huge amount of real effort into direct outreach and support of their customers, really. Microsoft chased business. Apple chased people. Google is chasing its own tail. For the markup over the retail price of the SSD, someone else does the installation, validation, built dumb stupid restore and backup services to boot. Dell? Lenovo? Microsoft? Still ramming…

>Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters.

I work at a network security company and a very small percentage fit your ignorant stereotype of them. Overall its the best group of people I have met in my entire life.

You run into way more "Alpha bro sausage fests" when you hang out with "normies".

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#329

Post by tjoff »

hellofunk wrote: post #300
avianlyric wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky I don’t think people upgrading their own machines ever played into this. I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. If you’re someone who didn’t want to pay the Apple premium before they took user upgrades away, it seems a little unlikely you’ll be happy to stomach t…

> I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. Yes exactly. The premium on my time has been gradually edging out in my priorities. I'd rather pay a little extra to have something already there than spend the same amount in my own time instead. It's a fair tradeoff. "But there…

One example, just so you know how much you are being ripped off... Yes, this is actually a trivial amount of time even if you do it once a decade.

Last time I checked buying 32 GB of ram for the imac was about $175, apple took $850 to upgrade from the base 8 GB to 32 GB...

Replacing them wouldn't take many minutes.

(Or - you could buy 64 GB for $350 (something apple didn't even offer, I guess the uint32 would overflow)).

Re: 27-inch iMac gets a major update

#330

Post by laurencerowe »

mamon wrote: post #217
onepointsixC wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but having an integrated camera that is absolutely awful completely defeats the point of having that there in the first place. It really noticeable when you Facetime with someone on an iPhone and you compare the video quality of the two.

Which is riddiculous, because if they can fit good front camera in iPhone they should be able to do that in the much bigger device, like laptop, right?

An iPhone is much deeper than a laptop lid. Perhaps they'll have to redesign the lid not to taper at the edge to provide more space for a better camera.
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