[Closed] New iMac: thoughts & recommendations please

I’ll probably be upping the RAM if I go 2019, which might help offset the lack of SSD drive in terms of speed – or am I wrong?

Yes.

Back in the day, like 15 years ago, adding more RAM to many computers was very important because a typical setup would use more than you had available, so it'd swap data to the hard drive which was very slow. So more RAM, to accomodate what you were using with your software, made a huge difference. More RAM beyond that didn't do much however, and that's where we are these days. Most computers have enough, so adding more does nothing.

SSDs though are revolutionary, because normal HDs are very very slow compared to the rest of the system so they are the bottleneck. SSDs are vastly quicker so your system gets much much faster.

Having said that a Fusion drive is a small SSD and a large HD merged together, so they are quicker, but still IMO not as good as a full SSD.

Now ones possibly announced tomorrow (or not) so hold fire on pressing buy until then if I were you.

I wouldn’t buy any computer with a HDD these days, SSDs are cheap enough, one less (mechanical) thing to go wrong!

Now ones possibly announced tomorrow (or not) so hold fire on pressing buy until then if I were you.

there's a mac event tomorrow, id wait and see what the role out program with Silicon macs is

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/02/apple-november-event/

There's an Apple Event later this week (I think its tomorrow) thats widely expected to focus on Macs as they planned to release their first non-intel based computer before the end of 2020. I'd wait to see what happens as this could reduce the prices of the 2020 iMac range if they release an update. I did see a concept of iMacs that followed the design cues from the recent iPad/iPhone releases so there could be a significant change (or it could just be a concept).

I would pay a little more to avoid fusion drives, they are a compromise technology and I'd prefer a small SSD with a large external USB drive (mounted on a twelve south shelf on the back of the iMac) for file storage.

The fusion drive in my 2012 iMac has just started playing up. Given, a) that a fusion drive is two drives and if either develops a fault it's toast b) the cost of SSD's now, I'd try and avoid the Fusion drive.

Though, looking at the cost of 1-2 Tb SSD options in iMacs though, they are pretty steep. I would go with a small internal SSD as the boot drive, and then rely on either cloud/network storage, or external drive, for bulk storage.

I have a 2017 with a fusion drive.  The first one went with 2 months which of course Apple replaced for free.  The second one has been OK for three years.   Make sure you have an external SSD connected with DR going on thats all.

reduce the prices of the 2020 iMac range

Ha Ha Ha very funny!

Costco seemed quite good when I was looking a week or so ago. Bought 27” iMac. Was cheaper than Apple store, not much more than a much older model with fusion drive Refurb from apple website. Costco also good for returns / issues with electrical.
HTH

Fusion drives are/were a cop out… no need to settle for one now… solid state or dead.

Fusion drives are/were a cop out… no need to settle for one now… solid state or dead.

Basically - isn't 'fusion drive' just Apples way for making a hybrid HDD sound cool?
Hybrid drives in the PC world were a bit like the Panda, an evolutionary mistake.

Hybrid drives in the PC world were a bit like the Panda, an evolutionary mistake.

they weren’t a mistake - they were the best option at the time because SSDs were small and expensive. If the Mac I use now had been specced with ssd instead of hybrid it would have needed to have 8 ssd drives instead of one hybrid. The drives on their own would have cost a couple of grand .

I had an old 2009 MacBook and upgraded the to a 8GB + 1TB hybrid drive instead of SSD. SSD's were silly money at the time for a 1TB drive and reliability was not great. It was awesome. The thing booted up in about 10 seconds as it booted from the SSD element and for the rest of what I used the machine for the mechanical HDD speeds were great, so not sure a full SSD would have offered any more performance benefits for me.

Not sure if SSD's are more reliable now or not....but its not as if decent mechanical HDD's are unreliable. I suspect an SSD might be better in a laptop where it is subjected to movement, knocks and drops, but in a desktop I really think that a decent mechanical drive is so reliable that its really not a consideration. But a hybrid drive might be the best compromise unless SSD's have come right down in prices since I last looked.

I think if you are looking at other upgrades and you don't have an unlimited budget, then saving some budget on getting a hybrid drive over an SSD drive and spending the savings on more RAM or an upgraded graphics cars or something else would give you a better overall package.

Not sure if SSD’s are more reliable now or not….but its not as if decent mechanical HDD’s are unreliable.

Not so much that HDDs are unreliable but they have a mean Time to failure of about 5 years in normal use - ie they *will* fail mechanically at some point. In theory an SSD should last much longer. My late 2013 iMac had the mech part of the Fusion Drive fail in late 2019. The fusion drive is actually apple stitching together an SSD and a spinning disc rather than buying an off the shelf hybrid drive as far as I can work out.

Speed is great - it's near as dammit an SSD with a lot of storage. But when it goes it's a trip to apple to replace. Issue is that 256Gb still wouldn't be enough for me (the SSD size) to keep full mp3 music collection and photos

Yes but SSD's still fail so you still need a process of backing up your drives just in case they fail as nobody really has a proactive HDD replacement schedule in place based on MTBF numbers...we all wait till our hard drives actually fail or start showing signs of failure (if you're lucky) so no real benefit to going SSD - they still fail and have an MTBR too.

Its risk vs benefit isn't it. A hybrid drive will deliver all the speed benefits of SSD for most people. They are cheaper but need more frequent replacement, but for normal home use they will still last many many years. My point being that peoples budget might be better invested in other components and upgrades like RAM and graphics cards or processor upgrade. SSD vs hybrid drive as far as I'm concerned is a secondary consideration.

Of course all depends on how you're going to use the machine. If you're doing things that are drive heavy then an SSD will give you real performance benefits so significant photo or video editing. But the hardest workout my drive gets is boot up and shut down and a hybrid drive delvers the same performance as SSD in that case.

Horses for courses. Spec your machine for how you're going to use it.

Everyone - thanks for the input, really useful stuff.

Wobbli - you've read my mind. I ended up buying yesterday - went for a 2019 27" model at £1,299 (saving £335 off RRP), as I can use the extra screen space for work and will appreciate the extra quality of the 5k screen. Also, extra Ram is DIY upgradable, not £200, and the storage is massive. Heaviest thing I'll use the computer for is some photo editing (not loads as I'm not a pro, and I won't be doing video or very complex photo editing). I figured the benefits of all the other bells & whistles outweighed SSD, for me personally. Plus I was on a budget, and getting the same processor and a Retina screen on a 2020 model was going to cost £1,700, and that was with the smaller, lower-quality (4k) screen. Time will tell. Fingers crossed! Ta for you help.

Most people's usage is drive-heavy though. You don't need a better CPU unless you are specifically doing video editing of large files or something. Given that storage is the bottleneck in most systems, when you sit there waiting for something to happen the CPU is also sitting there waiting for the storage to respond. So a faster CPU isn't going to make any difference.

Slightly off topic but following the general idea... I've run out of space (Macbook Pro 2011) and the laptop has a changeable drive so a 1Tb ssd is on the way.

If I clone it before the swap does it keep all the passwords in place from the old drive or do I need to re-enter all these again when I use password protected websites..?

If you clone it - it is functionally identical, so passwords will be retained. Restoring from a Time Machine backup also retains all passwords. I would go for the clone option though as that way you can boot from the new drive after cloning before you install it to check everything is OK.

If you clone it with CCCloner or the like it'll be exactly the same - its a disk image. I just did this on my Mini to move the boot volume from HDD to an M.2. NVMe drive which has basically made it useful again. You'll need a USB caddy (or rip an old one apart as long as its SATA) for the copy.

Personally I'd be looking for as much Ram as you can get, even 16gb barely cuts it these days. A SSD is always a good place to start too, however, depending on what you're using it for, I'd probably wouldn't pay loads for a massive one, External HD's are so cheap now and so is cloud storage.

Just an aside, to add to confusion, Do you definitely need to go for an iMac? I'm currently WFH running a 13inch MacBook Pro, running in clamshell mode plugged into an LG ultra wide monitor via USB-C and bluetooth keyboard/mouse and it works brilliantly. If you're not a ultra-power user with video etc, a MacBook/MacBook Pro and a 30inch 4k monitor may well set you back less than the iMac. Likewise a decent spec Mac-Mini.

even 16gb barely cuts it these days

Not my experience. I'm on 16Gb on my Macbook Pro and I have no issues. Lots of web browsing, Word, Excel, various messaging apps, VS code editor, eclipse, and the occasional VM.

Re cloning, thanks for the info.

16Gb RAM here and all fine but ran out of space with GoPro edits so 2Tb Crucial SSD going in this weekend.

I've got 16gb on my Macbook Pro and 32gb on my iMac - can't tell any difference to be honest.

And Time Machine is great! Only downside is you never feel like you have a new computer - all my files and random shit is as it was from nearly 10 years ago! 🙂

Should have qualified that I use a lot of GIS and subsurface data, big files that are incredibly RAM intensive and also VMs - my Work computer (windows) has 128gb of ram and still falls over frequently.

My MacBook Pro runs fine on 16gb, but all the hefty stuff gets done via the VM's in the cloud.

Personally I’d be looking for as much Ram as you can get, even 16gb barely cuts it these days.

I have 32Gb on my ageing iMac, would get 128Gb personally minimum on a new machine 😃... future proofing innit... I do deal with very large graphic files though... keep toying with the idea of a refurb Mac Pro which can have up to 768GB (or 1.5Tb on the 16+ core machines 😂)

Personally I’d be looking for as much Ram as you can get, even 16gb barely cuts it these days.

As has been said, depends what you're doing. Only 8gb on this iMac and it doesn't seem to struggle with normal use.

Yes but SSD’s still fail

wobbliscott

For sure, but isn't the life of them meant to be significantly longer - ie unlikely to happen in the life of the rest of the machine?

I'm still debating this one - with the spining disc replaced this iMac has given me another year but it had a patch of spontaneous reboots and does some weird things on the graphics at times that makes me think the motherboard might be slowly be expiring and it looks unlikely that 1Tb SSDs are going to be standard in low end iMacs any time soon.

On memory, interestingly the brand new, announced today, AppleSilicon Macbook Air comes with just 8Gb of RAM (upgradable to 16GB for lots of money) so Apple still don't think lots of RAM is necessary.

My colleague has struggled with an 8Gb Macbook - although we do most of our dev on the cloud he uses dev tools like Atom (text editor) and apparently because it and other trendy apps are written in JavaScript they use up plenty of RAM.

About 13Gb of RAM in use now on this machine with nothing demanding open; 1.7Gb is cached files.

This thread has been a very bizarre read. 16GB as a minimum and SSDs in the order of terabytes to run a web browser and do a bit of photo editing. Did MacOS suddenly turn into what the fanboys have been accusing Windows of since 3.1 days when I wasn't looking?

I've just upgraded my girlfriend's laptop tonight from 4GB to 8GB. It didn't really need it but for £17 it was worth the extravagance. I've got a 250GB Samsung Evo SSD to fit also, that was another £30.

Those new Apple Silicon Macs have the RAM as part of the M1 processor if my understanding of the graphics was correct. (A quick check shows I had comprehended correctly).

It looks like 16GB is maxed RAM on the new machines.

@sandwich yeah they look extremely impressive especially in terms of video/photo editing, 3d stuff etc and the fact they are so power efficient means incredible battery life. Mac Mini very interesting too, cheap & powerful, could make a great little server. Will be interesting to see what they come up with in terms of pro desktop Macs... guessing they are a few years away yet

The battery life attracted a comment that it was longer than I'm normally awake from one 'slacker'. 😉

20 hours on the new MacBook Pro is quite impressive stuff.

@zilog6128 there's mini in my shopping bag waiting to go!