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Apple updates its iMac line

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Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#131

Post by lloeki »

eckza wrote: post #35
tsmarsh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No touch bar is a win IMHO. I'm not against it per se, but a soft `esc` was a mistake.

vim lifer here, I'm dreading the day my 2015 rMBP dies.

I did dread that too but then I received a brand new 13" MBP and ESC on Touch Bar has never been an issue. I did remap it caps lock out of fear but turns out I never used it, relying solely on ESC on the Touch Bar. At first I set the Touch Bar to default to the expanded control strip but two weeks in I switched back to the default Touch Bar setting. F1-F12 are a non-issue for me as I never use them (except possibly in htop, and rarely so), relying on sequences in vim for the longest time.

Also, regarding the keyboard it was weird at first, not the least because I moved from a French to a US layout but also because of the hardware. Now that I'm used to the key response it's muscle memory to hit the keys with the right amount of force and it's a very enjoyable keyboard with a seemingly impossible touch-type feeling.

I can see how that could be "not someone's thing" (like cherry blue switches vs brown vs whatever) but that's very personal and the general hatred against the keyboard and Touch Bar is pretty much overblown.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#132

Post by melling »

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.

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.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#133

Post by scarface74 »

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.

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.

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#134

Post by scarface74 »

resters wrote: post #126
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost o…

So you couldn’t just by an SSD external drive and boot off of that?

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#135

Post by acdha »

resters wrote: post #126
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost o…

That's quite the opposite of my experience where only very cold data is not SSD-level performance. Do you have anything like anti-virus software which might be interfering with the HSM mechanism?

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#136

Post by rudiv »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #48
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.

It’s very likely that the high DRAM prices from 2017 to now have been due to market collusion, similar to what happened in 2010. Like your example shows, they’ve basically set the entire industry back years for a modest profit. It’s heinous.

There were multiple lawsuits brought by regulatory and classes last year against the DRAM cartel. I think the current downward spiral in DRAM prices may be related to that, although supposedly that's the result of a production glut (I thought the point of a cartel was you wouldn't have production gluts )

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#137

Post by scarface74 »

huffmsa wrote: post #94
_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…

Cook is doing exactly what he's best at, which is what you said. Optimizing every last cent out of a process. Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.

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?

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#139

Post by rudiv »

vbezhenar wrote: post #122
coldtea wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's tons of competition in the PC space. If nobody makes alternative Mac-like machines people want to buy for cheaper (or if Macs are seen as Veblen goods), that's a different matter. But Apple doesn't charge $4000 for a MacBook Pro for lack of competition in the laptop space. "But only Apple makes MBPs" is not an argument. Only Acer makes Acer machines, and only MS makes Surfaces too.

The argument is that only Apple makes computers that run macOS well. If they would allow macOS to run on other computers (legally), they would face real competition.

Nonsense, we'll see the PC OEMs come up with their own first-class OSes to compete any day now. /s

Re: Apple updates its iMac line

#140

Post by joncrane »

scarface74 wrote: post #134
resters wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost o…

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?
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