I don't get the craving for a new design, the form-factor is pretty great as it is. Surely they'll eventually update it as well, but I'm a lot more interested in the internals/display/IO than the chassis.
The non-Retina version wasn't updated so it's rocking some pretty old hardware now. It's probably going to be quietly dropped from the store once the remaining stock runs out.
For my part: I've thought about it, but I have huge hands. Sometimes, when I'm reaching for Shift or Tab, I hit Caps Lock on accident. I would be frustrated if I hit Caps Lock on accident and it broke me out of insert mode.
I can understand how it can be more ergonomic and usable for some people, though.
The irony is that I do have capslock mapped to escape, but my fingers frequently rest where the esc key should be, so I catch it when I wasn't expecting it.
Sure, this is my problem, its just only my problem on MacBook Pros.
You should probably stop using the tiny escape key long before that happens.
Either swap out caps for esc (my pref), start using ^[ or do one of these tricks: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
I don't know if you've tried this, but consider using caps lock for ctrl (the other tiny harder to reach key) and jk for esc. The home row reachability of jk is actually really nice and having ctrl remapped seals the deal for me.
Vim user as well. My 2014 rMBP died in 2017 and I've had the 13" MBP w/ touch bar ever since. I'm utterly disappointed with the machine. I don't like anything about the touch bar, it's literally completely useless to me, however, the escape key doesn't drive me insane. I work about half of my day using my laptop keyboard and the other half docked w/ a mechanical keyboard.
I've tried mapping esc to the backtick (`) key and tried 60% keyboards - I can't get used to it.
Depending on what you do you could look into the MacBook Air?
I considered that a month ago for doing some graphic stuff which doesn't run on Linux (on my XPS 13 main machine). But the Air w/ 16 GB is a bad deal compared to the MB Pro, and the low-end MB Pro (the only one without the freaking Touch Bar) has a worse display and specs than the high-end so I didn't buy anything. I'm wondering why Apple can not just get over the idea of coupling "Pro" machines with the Touch Bar. As a touch typist and vi hard-core user, I'm never going to buy a Touch Bar device, period.
I purchased a new laptop this year to replace my 2014 MBA and decided to go with the Razer blade. I like it a lot, and am glad I didn't go with a current MBP or MBA
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 <Leader> 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.
Was in the same boat... except my 2014 rMBP did die and I had to replace it with a 2018 model.
I also dreaded the soft-escape, but that turned out to be the least of my problems. Remapping caps lock to escape wasn't hard to get used to at all (even after 30+ years of vi use). Within a couple days that felt fine. Seemed like an OK trade for getting touch-ID unlocking.
What is absolutely not ok is this keyboard. It's the third generation "membrane" version that supposedly is better, but it's near unusable for any real work. So many keystrokes double register that my overall typing speed is probably but in half. I'm just having to backspace over the keyboard's mistakes so much! (Twice in that last sentence, for example)
I've become so used to Apple being the premium laptop brand -- yes I had to pay a bit more for a given machine spec but the overall build quality was top notch. Now they're still premium priced but are delivering the worst laptop hardware in the industry. After being sucked into the Apple ecosystem for so long I'm being forced to switch back to linux simply because they no longer sell a minimally functional laptop at any price.
So please treat that rMBP well -- you'll definitely miss it when its gone. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple never makes a laptop as good as that one again.
I get that people don't like that. I do, however, have no problems with it, coming from a developer perspective. It's in the same position, but without the tactile feedback. You'll get only visual feedback in the app you're running.
I love the touchbar, mainly because you can customise it any way you want. I have a lot of macros and shortcuts put on there for while I'm programming. Of course, I did that with the F1-F12 keys before, but now it's just more intuitive for me and aesthetically pleasing.
I would like to hear your thoughts on why a tactile device, the keyboard, is better when tactile feedback is replaced with visual clues. And why a device you touch and don't look at is more aesthetically pleasing when you remove the bits that the way you use it more pleasant.
For my money the innovation we're missing is more tactile feedback. A device that allows you to modify the click of a key, the amount of force required, the position and shape of those keys.
This has been the case ever since I can remember. When I was buying a MBP in 2012, this was the case as well. Of course, at that time, you could say 'screw it' and buy your own ram stick. Good ol' times. Nowadays, Apple is just not worth it (especially in Europe).
I don't think so at least as of mid-2017, I just searched and found videos on how to do the upgrade. Basically turn the thing over, open a latch, and swap out the ram.
It's been user-replaceable on all but a very few models. Apple even puts a little panel on the 27" models that you can easily pop out to replace on your own
OWC has been selling iMac upgrades for a long time, but you can use any brand memory.
I don’t think so - but you used to have to separate the screen from the base of the computer which while very doable was much more involved than popping open a case and inserting an additional stick of of ram
iMacs still have a latch to swap out RAM [1]. That, too, may soon be gone. Because on the iMac "Pro"s you have to disassemble the whole unit to get to RAM [2].
right at the top, if you scroll past “27-inch” you’ll see this gem:
“*Memory is not removable by users on iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2014), iMac (21.5-inch, 2017), and iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017). If the memory in one of these computers needs repair service, contact an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.”
Those price have nothing in common with logic. 16 -> 32: +$400, 32 -> 64: +$400. They just put random prices based on marketing research, not on component cost.
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.
Soldering in the RAM amounts to apple resorting to extortion. Where else are you gonna get this RAM other than paying the toll troll hundreds of dollars over what it should cost solely because apple greedily removed alternatives.
I hear some models they have a nice little door but some models involve a lot more frankensteining. At least on macbook's its been impossible for a while.
I would never buy an iMac but from what I hear, storage options and their pricing are even more frustrating than RAM (which you can upgrade yourself on the iMac 5K). While a neat trick when it first came out, I don't think fusion drive makes sense in 2019, so you're left with very expensive NVMe SSDs, when a 500GB or 1TB SATA SSD would be plenty enough to most people, for a fraction of the cost.
You can get a 500 GB Samsung nVME for about $150 now, not much more than what a regular SSD was a couple years ago... but totally agreed that a regular SSD is more than fast enough for most people. If it was manufactured this decade, it should probably boot to desktop in less than 20 seconds.
I hope this is indicative of Apple starting to get it, no one wants to buy a machine that is 3-4 years behind the curve. I could live with having a fast hardware refresh cycle and a slower design one.
Agreed. Updates 2 days in a row is a bit of a new thing for Apple. It is a good change if they are setting a precedence for doing more frequent spec bumps outside of events. We will not know for sure until 6-9-12 months from now.
Huh... The title of their press release seems to me somewhat clickbait-y... Why not 'iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance'? When I read this, I thought, 'oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations'.
Overall, I'm kinda disappointed that the 21' and 27' macs get different CPU gens. Why? Why not just have the latest gen in both of them? Is it price, or is it more about artificial performance impediment?
have you never seen apple reviews by third parties? Their performance and battery estimates nearly always pan out, if they aren't a little pessimistic.
In this case it's not just marketing speech: the new top end CPU is i9-9900k, it's ALMOST 2x faster than the previous top end CPU (i7-7700k) for multi-core benchmark.
Of course it's almost 2x faster; it has 2x the cores. Meanwhile the single-core score is almost the same for both. I've never seen anyone try to put together a good breakdown on how various common workflows stack up, but I would bet that most benefit very little from the extra 4 cores.
To me, it makes no sense that only the latest CPU generation should be used in new hardware. It’s not like the latest generation is a big improvement, not since the 2000s or so, and older CPUs are cheaper to manufacture (because problems in the manufacturing process have been fixed)
>Why not 'iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance'? When I read this, I thought, 'oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations'.
To me it is obvious it's about HW. These are new iMac release notes, not new macOS announcement.
First, new OS releases are in WWDC in June. Not on random days.
Second, OS optimizations of the kind that yield such a big speedup would have applied to the whole Mac range, it makes no sense how they'd be only applicable to iMacs which run more or less the same hardware.
Third, the very first words of the PR is: "Cupertino, California — Apple today updated its iMac line with up to 8-core Intel 9th-generation processors for the first time and powerful Vega graphics options, delivering dramatic increases in both compute and graphics performance. "
Because it mentions the specific hardware line in the title and doesn't mention the OS at all. If it was a software boost, it's hard to see why it would only apply to the iMac line specifically and not say MacBook Pros or Mac Minis as well.
I'm pretty sure it's a cooling issue. An 8-core CPU running at 5GHz generates a lot of heat - it's likely they can't dissipate it fast enough and encounter thermal throttling issues with higher end chips. I would _assume_ the 9th gen chips are more power efficient than the 8th gen, however, so who knows...
My guess is that many edu and corp customers buy hundreds at a time for computer labs, low demand office jobs, etc. The purchaser isn't the one that has to suffer from obsolete CPUs and slow spinning drives. The purchaser just wants to stay within budget.
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.
Plenty of folks use an iMac as the primary family machine - email, homework, some Netflix, kids' basic games. 8 GB is entirely sufficient for that. Hell, four probably is.
If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.
In 2019 how many apple products have user (or technician for that matter) upgrade-able anything? honest question. I'm not a Mac person and all I see is anecdotal reports of "soldered in RAM here" "fully bonded case there" etc.
The 27" iMac used to have upgradable RAM, but the text for the new version says "configurable to 64 GB", not "upgradable" like it used to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, I'm considering getting an iMac.
Unless something changed with today's update, it should be upgradeable via a hatch on the back of the machine. I upgraded my 2018 model to 40GB less than a year ago.
Has there ever been an investigation in how the average consumer app - email, browsers, word processing, etc - has changed over the years in terms of memory usage? I mean browsers are memory hungry (but that's because they use as much as is available, doesn't mean they reserve it from other applications), but a lot of modern-day apps are Electron ones, which easily cost a few hundred MB. Office has also moved from a set of native apps to heavier webapps.
OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.
You'd think so, right? See my comment elsewhere on this thread - I had to re-sell an iMac b/c 8GB (combined with the latest OS) was a disaster for simple tasks.
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
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 )
Yes. However we forget that 8GB was an ungodly amount of memory in the late 90's; it required industrial gear like an SGI Origin to get that much. That a browser would fill it is another abomination.
Is $11/GB a high DRAM price? That's the cost of a standalone stick. Apple DRAM costs 2x, and any other PC vendor's DRAM costs 1.5x-2x but that's vendor lock-in, not collusion.
I used to get more life out of my MBP by spending about $400 on max memory and a faster hard drive. Even with inflation $350 for memory seems a bit high (assuming there comes a day when you can put 32G in one of these things :/ )
It's the lowest option, you can upgrade to 32GB or 64GB on the 27-inch version.
You can upgrade the drive to an 2TB SSD, or a 3TB fusion drive.
If you only buy an iMac for the basic things like browsing, emailing and watching youtube, 8GB is more than enough, especially on macOS.
I don't get the hate for having a lower-budget option.
i don't think the ram is as much of an issue as the drive speed these days. it's not "lower budget", it's just a "low budget" option, but it damages the brand experience to have such a poor performing option available (speaking of drive speed specifically).
I find interesting that you say "especially on macOS", personally I feel that macOS has the highest memory requirements of the major OSs, but I haven't used macOS in a while, so that may have changed...
The day they take out the entry-level option people on here will be complaining about how they just want a decent desktop for their parents to browse on, or for them to upgrade themselves. I have 8gb and keep big music projects in Ableton open, a ton of Chrome tabs and several Electron apps open all the time, and I haven't had any issues yet.
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 screen to open it).
That's just a weird decision on Apple's part - don't they want the best perceived performance? I mean they could just put some soldered storage in there for the OS at the very least.
Not even soldered, they could came up with some fancy marketing name for slowest SSD drive in their line up (lets call it eSSD) and just drop-in 2.5" SATA SSD for $20 (retail cost of 120GB SSD on Amazon) instead of spinning rust. No need of redesigning chassis, no need of changing any factory procedures, machines, robots etc. Just give a box of SSDs instead of HDDs to the person that is responsible for putting them in. Here, job done, and Apple could "brag" about having SSDs in entry level options. Standard SATA SSD would increase massively performance on those machines.
The comment below you is dead and downvoted to hell, but it's correct even though I agree with you. I can't convince the IT person at my job that SSDs are faster than HDDs. He had never heard of them until we were looking at new PCs and he refused to approve any orders with SSDs since he thinks they're a scam. I even brought in my laptop with a PCIe SSD and he said he didn't notice a difference in boot time, and if there was one it was probably just a coincidence. He genuinely thinks that a terabyte of slow rust is better than a smaller amount of insanely fast storage. And that's even before he started ranting about how SSDs will all fail in a year anyway. I wish Apple would do what you said but there really are some lost souls out there.
To me as a tech person, this would feel as talking to a flat-earther. I switched to SSDs in all my machines literally a decade ago and never looked back, the performance was just that much better. Early models for sure had reliability issues but if an IT professional would claim today that SSDs are scams, he'd lose all my respect in a second.
It's a marketing decision. They don't want you to buy the cheapest model. They want to drive people towards the middle model by making the cheap model look less attractive.
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.
This isn't the config for Mac Mini in 2018 though? Unless you're talking about the earlier half of 2018 when the new Mac Mini hasn't been released yet.
Yeah, just that the base 2014 Mac Mini was being sold $500 new up until the point in 2018 when the new model came out. Even by 2016 and 2017 standards, 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 and 500GB 5400rpm spinning disk is abysmal.
I would expect the base model of any product (really the cheapest way to experience macOS without fiddling with VMs or hackintosh) would provide a usable experience and not one where you have to wait several minutes to open Chrome.
I could live with it mainly because I had another machine to go to while my 30m Unity build was running (and because I knew I was going to have to swap the HDD), but for a normal person who wants to browse the web and manage pictures, the $500 Mac Mini would have been an incredibly frustrating experience.
Even worse, the upgrades are insultingly overpriced. $100 for 32GB of flash to get a Fusion drive, and $700 (again, extra) to get a 1TB when you can get a nice Samsung for $350 in that size. Ridiculous.
Those are probably QLC drives at those prices, while I would think apple would be selling TLC or even MLC drives given their speeds. To properly compare against apple' storage, you have to look at the prices of things like the samsung pro series, which is about $350/TB
The iMac takes 2.5 inch drives, including hard drives. Apple's website doesn't list what the SSD is, and we cannot infer much from the iMac Pro since it has different lineage.
My world has been totally SSD for the past decade. (Yes at a premium during times when I had an abundance of money and times when I had little. Priorities.)
I am A LOT rougher with computers. I don't think twice about picking up my NAS in mid operation.
I like your style. I also try to be rough with my computers, but on purpose because I want to live in a world where that's typical and designed for. I specifically pull USB drives out without ejecting, because we shouldn't have to do that.
>People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance.
That's an unintended side-effect that is overshadowed by volume sales. All bulk orders for domains non related to performance (think libraries, hotels, basic desktops in enterprise), happen with a budget constraint without particular regard for price/performance ratio. So the lowest end model for all computers may have poor price/performance ratio but lower absolute price. That's also why thinkpads have poor screens, spinning rust drives, 4 GB memory, etc in the cheapest config. So that the procurement dept. can say in the spreadsheet that we replaced our inventory of n computers from 2012 to macs from 2019.
That's strange. If you can keep an iMac Pro for 7 years, then you don't need the power of the iMac Pro, or your needs are extremely high now yet won't grow over time.
Why not get a 27" iMac for half price, and another one in 4 years with whatever new thing is invented then?
Honestly I think you are overthinking this. At the time of purchase iMac had dinky video card and I wanted extra powerful processor and memory. This thing was perfect just pricy.
But Apple does not support macOS for most Macs that long. E.g. last year's Mojave does not support iMacs from before 2012. You may be lucky and they might support the iMac Pro a bit longer, but it is unlikely that you'll get an up-to-date secure OS for ten years.
If they transition to ARM at some point, the lifetimes of Intel Macs may even be shorter.
Yeah, my "main" personal machine is a 2011 Air that no longer can run the latest OS. My 2006 Mac Pro got replaced on its 10th birthday with a new iMac as it was an OS or two behind. I'd say 8 years is sorta the outer limit.
* 10.8 (2012) dropped support for original Core 2 Duo (2006) — 6 years
* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2009 MacBook Pro — 7 years
* 10.14 (2018) dropped support for 2011 MacBook Pro — 7 years
The releases in between didn't drop support for any (mbp) hardware.
The longest support I found with a spot-check was:
* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2007 MacBook Pro — 9 years
Apple tends to release updates for about 3 years for each OS. 10.11 (2015) got its last patch in 2018. 10.12 (2016) got an update in January and is expected to receive updates through September.
I should have looked up desktops, since that's what most of the discussion is in this thread, but I don't have much firsthand experience with them. So assuming you buy the hardware the day its released, you can expect to have the newest software support for 6-9 years and have security updates for 9-12 years.
I'm happily using Mojave on two MBP's - 2009 (4Gb) and 2010 (8Gb) with SSD's.
Freedom to upgrade internals and the smarts and generosity of dosdude1 (google that) turned them into the best tech purchases Ive made (after previous years of throwing money at premium end PC's that didn't last)
To be fair, they support their computers for a long time and seemingly provide update as long as possible. My Late 2009 iMac still received 2017's High Sierra update.
and the reason it won't run Mohave is not caprice but rather a desire to simplify system graphics by moving it to the Metal API along with Metal's using hardware features not yet introduced in late 2009.
8 GB of RAM are fine for basic tasks. However offering a spinning drive (and I include the Fusion drives in that category) is not. For any use case.
The 5400 RPM HDD in the abse 21.5" iMac will be unbearably slow, pretty much unusable from the first day and people not interested in technology won't have any idea why their new, shiny iMac performs that slow.
It's baffling to me that Apple seems to be fine with offering such abysmal performance. Reaching that price point certainly isn't worth compromising the user experience in such a significant way.
Agree, I would want at least a Vega 64 for that amount of money (Or even a Radeon VII!). But then Apple has to think about cooling inside the small chassis, so they might not have a choice. (They managed to fix a Vega 64X in the iMac Pro, but the Pro lineup has different thermal management than the normal one)
It seems crazy to me that Apple compromised the cooling solution of their desktop machine to save 5mm of thickness. Does anyone outside of Apple's marketing department care about the thickness of their desktop machine as long as it is below an inch or two?
true. OTOH, an eGPU would be connected by Thunderbolt 3, which offers basically the same max communication speed as 4 PCIe lanes.
and so i wonder: at what point does that communication speed limit the performance of such a set up? why do people normally plug high end graphics cards into a x16 slot? how good a GPU should be used in an eGPU housing before it's a waste of money? etc
Depends on what you're doing. For playing games you're going to be getting a fair bit of texture pop and stutter. For machine learning you might be totally fine.
Both storage types will have comparable prices at 128GB, and their cost per GB will decrese at different rates as you increase storage capacity. It's not fair to compare pricing between different storage capacities across different storage types, that is why I have shared 1TB drives from the same vendor.
Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.
For EU prices also check
https://geizhals.eu/
they got acquired by Heise Gruppe some years ago and are my goto-service for model comparison and extended filtering, also very useful outside EU.
Haven't seen a comparable service yet for US with price trend and consistent feature tagging.
1TB HDDS are generally the most expensive. At such a low capacity it makes more sense to just get a 500GB SSD for $50. Alternatively if you really need the capacity of an HDD: for just $90 you can get a 3TB HDD. triple the capacity, less than double the price.
Edit: Apparently 3TB HDDs cost as low as 60€ nowadays...
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 cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.
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?
There's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it.
I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.
But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.
The problem in the 80s was that the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow. When Windows became good enough, no one bought Macs and it almost killed Apple.
Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.
You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.
Not the same iMac. If all iMacs should be for consumers and Pros should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?
So, yes, Apple describes some iMacs that are not iMac-Pros as "for Pros".
> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?
Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.
But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."
They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.
The difference is that you could not get a Mac as fast as the then current PC at any price until the switch to Intel.
Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.
2015 to be exact. Both the iPhone 6S and MacBook Pro 2015 are the absolute pinnacle of Apple tech before they started to do absurd year-on-year price raises and introducing backgrades (no 3.5mm port, bad keyboard, touchbar, no magsafe).
I purchased a (I believe) mid or late 2014 model Macbook Air with the upgraded CPU and RAM and it's one of the best computers I've owned. Very snappy still to this day, extremely durable, and it wasn't terribly expensive compared to other laptops with similar hardware/form factor.
Hasn't Apple always been more of a 'pretty good hardware, nicely integrated and packaged, for a premium price' proposition? I personally can't remember a time when this wasn't so.
Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?
You are right, but for a while this was not true. When Apple switched to x86 the MacBook was competitively priced. I remember buying one because it was cheaper than comparable PCs.
It depends. Their SSDs are state of the art and among the fastest you can get. Their 5K display still hasn't any serious alternatives. Their own mobile (for now) CPUs are pretty much unmatched.
Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.
The iMac has other configs and if you are a power user, you can get the specs you want. Maybe Apple does have some customers for the low end config that’s not obvious. Why should your opinions limit their choices?
Because hard drives have become "this is so slow that it harms your products reputation to use them". The bottom of the SSD pile is still many, many times faster than the fastest hard drive.
I have an ancient Dell Precision M6600 with a Core i7... and an ancient 5400 RPM hard drive. The machine is unusable. It's worse than nearly any other machine with an SSD--even one with a much weaker processor.
I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.
I boot off a Nvme SSD in an usb-c (https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_42600/merkmale.html) enclosure on my 2017 27" iMac. I do manage 1000 MB/s. Popping off the screen and using the right adapter and SSD you may be able to reach 2500 MB/s.
I recently replaced the drive on mine. The most annoying part of the process is the fact that you have to purchase adhesive strips to be able to re-seat the display.
Yeah, I bought my wife an iMac 4-5 years ago with the standard HD config and it feels almost useless being so slow. My even older MBA with half the RAM and an SSD is much more usable.
Replacement is still possible (I used to work in a shop that did the same) but definitely way out of the reach of users. If I recall correctly, you have to order replacement adhesive from Apple, and when I was working there third-parties hasn't come out with their own replacement adhesive yet (Apple will not sell any sort of parts to users).
My wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on.
I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).
At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.
But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.
Meh, not defending Apple in any way but RPM isn't a very useful metric without other specs on the drive.
Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.
This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.
Have you used a MacBook Pro (2012 or older) or iMac with a regular hard drive? You can't even surf the web with them and they take 2 minutes to boot up.
Have you used the 5,400 RPM iMac? It's incredibly laggy out of the box. Even booting takes 1-3 full minutes. It crunches just opening apps. With all that other hardware, it's just a waste: you're drinking an i7 through a straw.
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 over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.
The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.
They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.
A $3k desktop for which you need to buy an external drive. At some point slavishness to the Apple brand must have a breaking point.
Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.
Seeing that hardly any reputable company sells 5K displays anymore besides LG, the monitor itself is worth $1300. The cheapest 5K iMac is $1800. You’re not going to find computers “much cheaper” than $500 that match the iMacs specs.
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?
First generation 1TB fusion drives had 128GB of SSD storage. 2017 and 2019 1TB fusion drives have 32GB of SSD storage [1], which is basically just enough for the OS and a couple of apps if you are lucky. People are not exaggerating when they say Apple hardware are regressing, not progressing.
The size need only be proportional to the amount of hot data. And realistically, it need only be proportional to the amount of hot data that's randomly accessed in small chunks, because that's where the bulk of the improvements will come from.
I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.
Putting/letting Jony Ive on designing the new campus is one of the dumbest things Apple has done. Effectively dereliction of duty.
Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.
I mean... they will notice that their computer sucks, but they might not know why. 5400 rpm is a joke considering you can buy a 7200 rpm drive with belly button lint and a serviceable SSD for $100 or less. There are budget laptops at Best Buy you can get with 7200 rpm drives standard, and even that is borderline unacceptable with how cheap SSDs are now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are many colleges buying computers at all? My university CS and engineering schools both just required that students supply their own computer that was sufficient for the coursework.
Yes. There are departments outside of the CS and engineering schools and also colleges that cater to lower income students that don't require you to purchase a computer.
The only time we use it for labs is running Adobe stuff, and given what students want to learn, you do need decent performing machines and something with a 5400 rpm drive is not it.
This can't be good for Apple's reputation amongst kids in school though! Apple is basically pulling what Chrysler and GM used to do with rental cars where they sold an even cheaper version for rental use. It gives a terrible first impression of your product.
The weird thing is that slow spinning-rust is still highly usable in linux, at least in my experience. It helps that linux tends to leave a lot more RAM available as a disk cache.
When I still gamed, I was one of the first people in my group to get an SSD. A few days later the game glitched the graphics card and I had to reboot. Restarted the machine, the game, voice chat, logged back in and playing again in just under 30 seconds.
That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.
My 2017 MacBook pro is definitely my last Apple laptop because it's just too expensive and unreliable (for reasons well discussed on HN). I have definitely considered getting a Mac Mini, but the new iMacs are definitely interesting. One thing I'd be concerned about is cooling. I know the iMac Pros are not ideal from a cooling perspective - I can't imagine an 8 core processor @ 5GHz plus a Radeon Pro GPU runs cool. I'll wait for the user-upgradable Mac Pro before I make a decision.
I've been saying for 10 years, that I am going to switch from a Mac to a ThinkPad running Linux. Yet I keep buying Macs. My latest was a MacBook Air. It really wasn't that much more than the ThinkPad I was looking at.
Their steps backward in MacBook functionality (keyboard, ports, touchbar which is at best a wash) and the price hikes over the last ~4yrs have me thinking about going back to Linux. But I need a laptop, and don't want to feel like I have to have a mouse to use it and not be miserable. And good battery life, and power management so reliable I never have to think about it (close the lid, pick it up, walk off). They're so far ahead of everyone else it's hard to justify switching even when they keep screwing up and raising prices for years. It's more a testament to how bad every other hardware+software combo is, at this point, than how good they are.
It won't be cool. It'll throttle. 9900K requires very good cooling, preferably water cooling to keep that 5 GHz and there's no way to put that cooling, especially along GPU into tiny iMac. Also I'm afraid that constant heating would damage some electronical components after few years.
I was in a similar situation in late 2017 and ended up getting a 5K iMac since I didn't need portability anymore. Best Mac I've ever had.
The 5K iMac couldn't cool the i7 7700K properly, and since fan noise is extremely annoying for me I got the i5 6500K model. In over a year I've heard the fan a couple of times, but it is silent most of the time. Performance wise, I've never found myself wishing I had gotten the i7. I do mostly dev, but also video editing, photography, and music production as hobbies. Of course I got the SSD and 16GB.
I haven't needed to touch my memory in forever; why is this still apparently weighed so heavily? Or is that one of those things where you try to go around the Apple tax of more memory by installing your own?
Yes, and not just initially. Right now you can save something like $600 over the 64GB price but in a year those numbers will probably have improved and Apple won't have lowered the stock price at all.
iPads yesterday, iMacs today, maybe AirPods/AirPower tomorrow. Spreading out announcements is unusual for Apple, perhaps they're trying something new here.
they want to push iOS. They are begrudgingly updating their Mac line, with horrible specs such as 5400 RPM drives, and are avoiding holding an event for the announcements.
This way they get to ward off accusations that they have forgotten about the Mac, and they get the profits from the sales, while still trying to drive consumers to iPads.
spec bumps don't get anything more than a news release. I figure they are leaning towards only new product debut or when devices get more health related features which is where Apple seems to trying to position themselves.
pcs, tablets, and phones, pretty much are well developed markets.
now if the air pods get some new health monitoring ability I expect them to get a presentation but right now the only remaining product is air power; their charging mat.
Some media is reporting Apple will be launching their own streaming video service next week [1]. Maybe they want to keep that launch event focused to guarantee maximum exposure.
This is not the first time that they have significant updates days before a major announcement.
I suspect that Apply keeps a lot of options for things to talk about until the last days. They wait for every key aspect of the announcement to be confirmed (which can be days earlier). That allows them to focus on the expected change if they are ready, or, if there is a last-minute issue, they can talk about spec upgrades to fill the hour, or rather to ramp up the announcement (e.g. “With all that memory, HD videos are going to look _gorgeous_. And you know where you can find HD videos? Boom! New VOD service!”). It’s consistent with descriptions of how Steve Jobs would scrape large segments of his keynotes at the last minute.
They've been doing this for about a decade. New Mac products (iMac Pro) and form factors (new MBA) get a mention at events, but spec bumps almost never do.
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 upgrade the RAM.
I quickly re-sold it to another person who I bet also hadn't imagined these things.
I would have thought it would be ok too, but I'm guessing your machine has an SSD, so when it occasionally needs to use swap space you barely even notice. On a machine with a bare spinning platter drive and no fusion drive, going to swap can be awful for performance. You’ll really notice it. So most of the time everything will be fine, but now and then it will suddenly start crawling.
Also Chrome with a dozen tabs open is a bit of a memory hog. Safari is a lot better, but eh.
It's probably not even swapping. It's that operating systems use additional memory for I/O caching. Less memory means fewer blocks in the cache which means more slow reads from spinning rust every time you open a program or document. But replacing HDD with SSD fixes that too.
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.
I bought one of those from best buy and quickly hit the wall with the 5400 rpm drive. I bought the iMac repair kit from ifixit and put a 1tb ssd in its place. It screams now. I have literally never had a drive swap make such a HUGE performance improvement.
Can confirm. 2012 Imac with 1TB rust disk was truly feeling its age. Swapped to small SSD I had laying around just to see what would happen and just SuperDuper-ed the old OS. Could not believe the difference. You just have to see it happen to get it. Best upgrade ever.
Agreed. I had a 2009 iMac with 640GB (7200 rpm) disk and 4 GB ram. I swapped to a smaller (250 GB) SSD and upgraded to 8 GB ram and it's like a new machine for me--a great upgrade.
Is using an external SSD drive with USB 3 a reasonable alternative? I'm considering an iMac, but I'd rather not do that iFixit kit on a brand new machine if I can avoid it.
My $999 Asus from Costco 18 months ago came with a 480GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a discrete GPU.
The screen is 1080p, I would've had to pay a couple hundred extra for a 4k screen instead, not worth it when I'm mostly connected to external, and battery life is better with 1080p when I'm mobile.
My desktop is 7 years old now. I've spent ~$1400 in parts over the years. 32GB of RAM, CPU that does its job (Intel i7-whatever), and a GPU that consumes more power but is just as good as a GTX 1050 (A lot less VRAM though!).
I fully expect that machine to last me until the physical components start to give out.
Probably the capacitors. It is always the capacitors.
Still have an old first-gen i5 powered 27" iMac. I pulled it out of the closet a year ago and replaced the dead OEM hard drive with an SSD and set it up in a corner of the living room as a GP/web machine. The optical drive is dead and a couple of the USB ports don't work, but it's still useful (nice screen, still). It's the last mac in the house, though, and I'll never buy another one.
The general rule on HN is to use the same headline as the article you're linking to and not to editorialize in your title. So when you're linking to an Apple press release then of course it's Apple saying it.
I really wish I could buy a headless Mac with similar performance (including a real video card) and price. The mini doesn't quite meet my needs and the pro at $3k+ is way too expensive. These specs look good (although I would greatly prefer SSD) but I really don't want an extra monitor on my desk.
I have a 27" LG 4k monitor that I connect to my work MacBook pro during the day. Then I'd like to flip a switch (or swap one plug) to use my personal computer with the same monitor. Currently that personal computer is a 2013 iMac sitting right next to my LG monitor but I'd love to get rid of it and free up the desk space.
Ok, thanks. That's a similar setup to mine, but I'm very tired of plugging, re-plugging, and using the stupid OSD menus in monitors. Plus, I really think that for 27" a 5K resolution is required.
I suppose so. I don't know much about eGPUs. I see the cheapest one available on the Apple store is $700 which includes a Radeon Pro 580 (appears to be the same card offered on the top of line iMac from today?). With SSDs on the Mini being as expensive as they are ($800 to upgrade to 1TB), I'd probably want an external HD as well, so minimum 3 boxes on my desk and more chords to deal with.
It would meet my needs and I might reluctantly get one.
If you're buying a machine that needs 256 GB of RAM, presumably you or your company is using it for the type of graphics/video work that pays well enough to recoup $5200 in costs. The comparison is to professional equipment like cameras and audio interfaces, not to consumer products.
It seems to me this product is on life support and Apple is simply doing performance bumps to avoid big capex expenses on designing/tooling for something new? It ships with a 5,400 RPM disk, an outdated display technology, omits T2 chipset, doesn't include Face ID, nor any of their other innovations over the last year. It's actually egregious to stuff old hardware in a workable form factor and hock it, while ignoring that they're not backporting _any_ of their other innovations back to these devices.
And that's not to mention: buying a $3500 screen glued to a computer is massively risky.
Well the Mac Mini got a recent refresh with decent processors, the new Mac Pro is reputedly just around the corner and there is a rumour they are going to release a new display soon. My guess is you are right, it's on life support.
I started fiddling with hackintoshes in 2010 and since then I've built maybe a dozen ones for me or my friends.
I now own a 5K iMac. My time is worth more than the difference in price between a hackintosh and a real mac.
Of course if you are in it for hardware freedom instead of cost then a hackintosh is your only option, but it's very difficult to get a perfect build and updating the OS is always a Russian roulette game.
The more time passes, the more it looks like they released an SE by mistake, still be best phone ever made IMHO but doesn't fit the strategy of upselling as much as possible.
Reading your comment on my iPhone SE. It really is the best ultra-portable smartphone ever released :)
I'm a bit puzzled as to why they don't just keep selling it, maybe with an upgraded SOC but no other new components. I don't think it would cannibalize sales of their mainline phones, and it would give lower income people a path to buy into their ecosystem. They're taking that approach with the iPad line. Maybe it didn't sell as well as I thought it did.
Well, it depends. Which particular 2018 XPS are you referring to?
Some Passmark CPU comparisons:
2012 iMac with the i7 3770 - 9282
XPS 13 i7-8550U - 8305
XPS 15 i7-8750H -12477 (Note that XPS 15s tend to be thermally throttled also)
Desktop i7 9700K - 17257
Desktop i9 9900X - 22883
Desktop Ryzen 2920X - 21920
A high spec laptop doesn't compare with a high spec desktop CPU, especially if it's a U class CPU like the ones used by the XPS 13 (which seems to be way more popular than the XPS 15).
If you have an i7 2012 iMac, it still holds its own to any top end ultrabook (U) class CPU.
479 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadGuess I'll wait for the laptops this year to see HOW Apple gets my money lol.
No space grey, no T2 chip, no Touchbar.
Somehow they still sell the 1080 21" model for $1099.
I can understand how it can be more ergonomic and usable for some people, though.
Sure, this is my problem, its just only my problem on MacBook Pros.
¿Why not both?
I have (on Linux, not on Mac, but it shouldn't matter):
* "caps lock" + key = Ctrl+key
* "caps lock" (release) = Esc
It works like charm and I can definitely recommend it.
I have mine mapped to:
* caps (no other key) => esc * caps + home row => corresponding symbol key
Extremely nice for programming when '(' and ')' are on 'L' and ';' keys - directly under my fingers.
1. to put Ctrl on CapsLock:
2. to have "dual" CL as described above:I've tried mapping esc to the backtick (`) key and tried 60% keyboards - I can't get used to it.
Depending on what you do you could look into the MacBook Air?
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.
I also dreaded the soft-escape, but that turned out to be the least of my problems. Remapping caps lock to escape wasn't hard to get used to at all (even after 30+ years of vi use). Within a couple days that felt fine. Seemed like an OK trade for getting touch-ID unlocking.
What is absolutely not ok is this keyboard. It's the third generation "membrane" version that supposedly is better, but it's near unusable for any real work. So many keystrokes double register that my overall typing speed is probably but in half. I'm just having to backspace over the keyboard's mistakes so much! (Twice in that last sentence, for example)
And even if I put up with the keyboard somehow, I can look forward to the screen probably dying in a year or two anyway: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/22/apples-latest-macbook-pro...
I've become so used to Apple being the premium laptop brand -- yes I had to pay a bit more for a given machine spec but the overall build quality was top notch. Now they're still premium priced but are delivering the worst laptop hardware in the industry. After being sucked into the Apple ecosystem for so long I'm being forced to switch back to linux simply because they no longer sell a minimally functional laptop at any price.
So please treat that rMBP well -- you'll definitely miss it when its gone. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple never makes a laptop as good as that one again.
I love the touchbar, mainly because you can customise it any way you want. I have a lot of macros and shortcuts put on there for while I'm programming. Of course, I did that with the F1-F12 keys before, but now it's just more intuitive for me and aesthetically pleasing.
For my money the innovation we're missing is more tactile feedback. A device that allows you to modify the click of a key, the amount of force required, the position and shape of those keys.
RAM:
8 GB -> 16 GB is 2200 SEK (239 USD)
8 GB -> 32 GB is 6600 SEK (717 USD)
You can get 32GB as low as 1689 SEK (183 USD) on Newegg.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Pro+Teardown/101807 and https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac-pro/imac-pro-faq/ima...
@vbezhenar posted a link to Apple Support in his comment: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191
right at the top, if you scroll past “27-inch” you’ll see this gem: “*Memory is not removable by users on iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2014), iMac (21.5-inch, 2017), and iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017). If the memory in one of these computers needs repair service, contact an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.”
i call this the “iMac pitfall”.
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.
PC manufacturers only have themselves to blame for being low margin commodities.
Apple also makes macOS. Dell, Acer, and co are free to make their own OS. MS and Google already did. Heck, even some student in Helsinki did IIRC.
Can't blame Apple if people don't want their PC+generic OS bundle and prefer Mac+macOS.
Overall, I'm kinda disappointed that the 21' and 27' macs get different CPU gens. Why? Why not just have the latest gen in both of them? Is it price, or is it more about artificial performance impediment?
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2548
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/1779
To me it is obvious it's about HW. These are new iMac release notes, not new macOS announcement.
How do you know that though?
Second, OS optimizations of the kind that yield such a big speedup would have applied to the whole Mac range, it makes no sense how they'd be only applicable to iMacs which run more or less the same hardware.
Third, the very first words of the PR is: "Cupertino, California — Apple today updated its iMac line with up to 8-core Intel 9th-generation processors for the first time and powerful Vega graphics options, delivering dramatic increases in both compute and graphics performance. "
(as in there is an i5-9400 to replace i5-8400, but no refresh of the i5-8500, i5-8600, or i7-8700, which are all faster than the i5-9400.)
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.
If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.
The high DPI monitor market is practically dead (for now) so there's no pressure forcing prices down.
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MRR12LL/A&st...
[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.
Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice
I bought an iMac a couple years ago because at the time it was the only consumer level Mac being sold new where you could upgrade the RAM yourself.
Like your example shows, they’ve basically set the entire industry back years for a modest profit. It’s heinous.
That day came last October, assuming you are ok with a 15” MBP (not available for 13”) and slightly less battery life.
If you only buy an iMac for the basic things like browsing, emailing and watching youtube, 8GB is more than enough, especially on macOS. I don't get the hate for having a lower-budget option.
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 screen to open it).
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.
I would expect the base model of any product (really the cheapest way to experience macOS without fiddling with VMs or hackintosh) would provide a usable experience and not one where you have to wait several minutes to open Chrome.
I could live with it mainly because I had another machine to go to while my 30m Unity build was running (and because I knew I was going to have to swap the HDD), but for a normal person who wants to browse the web and manage pictures, the $500 Mac Mini would have been an incredibly frustrating experience.
I/O is definitely the biggest pain point.
I am A LOT rougher with computers. I don't think twice about picking up my NAS in mid operation.
A fusion drive wouldn't work for me.
That's an unintended side-effect that is overshadowed by volume sales. All bulk orders for domains non related to performance (think libraries, hotels, basic desktops in enterprise), happen with a budget constraint without particular regard for price/performance ratio. So the lowest end model for all computers may have poor price/performance ratio but lower absolute price. That's also why thinkpads have poor screens, spinning rust drives, 4 GB memory, etc in the cheapest config. So that the procurement dept. can say in the spreadsheet that we replaced our inventory of n computers from 2012 to macs from 2019.
Why not get a 27" iMac for half price, and another one in 4 years with whatever new thing is invented then?
If they transition to ARM at some point, the lifetimes of Intel Macs may even be shorter.
* 10.8 (2012) dropped support for original Core 2 Duo (2006) — 6 years
* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2009 MacBook Pro — 7 years
* 10.14 (2018) dropped support for 2011 MacBook Pro — 7 years
The releases in between didn't drop support for any (mbp) hardware.
The longest support I found with a spot-check was:
* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2007 MacBook Pro — 9 years
Apple tends to release updates for about 3 years for each OS. 10.11 (2015) got its last patch in 2018. 10.12 (2016) got an update in January and is expected to receive updates through September.
I should have looked up desktops, since that's what most of the discussion is in this thread, but I don't have much firsthand experience with them. So assuming you buy the hardware the day its released, you can expect to have the newest software support for 6-9 years and have security updates for 9-12 years.
The 5400 RPM HDD in the abse 21.5" iMac will be unbearably slow, pretty much unusable from the first day and people not interested in technology won't have any idea why their new, shiny iMac performs that slow.
It's baffling to me that Apple seems to be fine with offering such abysmal performance. Reaching that price point certainly isn't worth compromising the user experience in such a significant way.
and so i wonder: at what point does that communication speed limit the performance of such a set up? why do people normally plug high end graphics cards into a x16 slot? how good a GPU should be used in an eGPU housing before it's a waste of money? etc
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.
https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat...
https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...
A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.
Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.
https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp...
Edit: Apparently 3TB HDDs cost as low as 60€ nowadays...
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 cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.
Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.
I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.
But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.
Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.
You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.
Apple explicitly claims the iMac is for "pros" in the article this page is discussing:
"iMac is ideal for pros"
"iMac is loved by consumers and pros alike."
"the most demanding pro workloads."
"even a pro studio."
and more.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-perfor...
> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?
Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.
But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."
They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.
Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.
Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?
This is the part they gave up on, while keeping the other two.
Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.
A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.
I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.
The process was surprisingly fun, too.
I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).
At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.
But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.
Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.
This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.
Fusion Drive is a hack.
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 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 over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.
The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.
Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.
A quarter of the storage at a premium price isn't exactly appealing to a lot of people, regardless of how much faster it may be.
If you are willing to accept separate components, you can buy much cheaper hardware.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive
I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.
Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...
Because 90% don't need computing power; they just browse Facebook and Spotify.
The Fusion Drive is available for $100 more, if you actually need to access local storage.
In fact, the laptop is still usable.
That 5400 rpm hard drive was a bad mistake.
So why buy Apple?
This doesn’t even make sense given how cheap SSDs are now. Especially with Apple’s buying power.
I’m sure some people still want high-capacity HDDs for various workloads, but that’s what Thunderbolt 3 is for, surely?
That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.
The 5K iMac couldn't cool the i7 7700K properly, and since fan noise is extremely annoying for me I got the i5 6500K model. In over a year I've heard the fan a couple of times, but it is silent most of the time. Performance wise, I've never found myself wishing I had gotten the i7. I do mostly dev, but also video editing, photography, and music production as hobbies. Of course I got the SSD and 16GB.
> 8GB (two 4GB) of 2666MHz DDR4 memory; four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible
Being able to upgrade it down the line (or immediately because only small sizes are offered) is ideal.
Isn't that slow? And expensive, as usual. I'm looking at 16GB (8x2) 3200MHz for $109 on newegg. The iMac upgrade from 8 to 16GB is $200!
Maybe they already have too many announcements to fit into the narrative of the handful of events per year.
I'm curious whether they take this PR option with AirPods 2 / AirPower as well or if those make it to an event.
This way they get to ward off accusations that they have forgotten about the Mac, and they get the profits from the sales, while still trying to drive consumers to iPads.
pcs, tablets, and phones, pretty much are well developed markets.
now if the air pods get some new health monitoring ability I expect them to get a presentation but right now the only remaining product is air power; their charging mat.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/business/media/apple-cont...
I suspect that Apply keeps a lot of options for things to talk about until the last days. They wait for every key aspect of the announcement to be confirmed (which can be days earlier). That allows them to focus on the expected change if they are ready, or, if there is a last-minute issue, they can talk about spec upgrades to fill the hour, or rather to ramp up the announcement (e.g. “With all that memory, HD videos are going to look _gorgeous_. And you know where you can find HD videos? Boom! New VOD service!”). It’s consistent with descriptions of how Steve Jobs would scrape large segments of his keynotes at the last minute.
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 upgrade the RAM.
I quickly re-sold it to another person who I bet also hadn't imagined these things.
My 2016 MacBook Pro has 8GB and it's perfectly fine.
I can't even imagine what web you're browsing.
Also Chrome with a dozen tabs open is a bit of a memory hog. Safari is a lot better, but eh.
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.
Not used time machine or is it not backing up all necessary?
The screen is 1080p, I would've had to pay a couple hundred extra for a 4k screen instead, not worth it when I'm mostly connected to external, and battery life is better with 1080p when I'm mobile.
My desktop is 7 years old now. I've spent ~$1400 in parts over the years. 32GB of RAM, CPU that does its job (Intel i7-whatever), and a GPU that consumes more power but is just as good as a GTX 1050 (A lot less VRAM though!).
I fully expect that machine to last me until the physical components start to give out.
Probably the capacitors. It is always the capacitors.
Looks like Apple is starting to put a premium on OSX rather than going quality-first for its hardware.
Did a bot write this? No one uses "pros" in writing like this to refer to professionals.
> From consumers to pros alike, users will notice their iMac is faster for everyday tasks all the way up to the most demanding pro workloads.
This is not a natural sentence.
[Citation needed]
If, as I'm guessing, you want to connect an external monitor, what would be your monitor choice (and how would you connect it) to get 5K?
From my research, the iMac (or iMac Pro) was pretty much the only way to get a working non-crappy 5K setup.
It would meet my needs and I might reluctantly get one.
"iMac Pro now available with 256 GB RAM option … for an extra $5200"
sort of pricey.
https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/19/256-gb-ram-imac-pro/
And that's not to mention: buying a $3500 screen glued to a computer is massively risky.
I now own a 5K iMac. My time is worth more than the difference in price between a hackintosh and a real mac.
Of course if you are in it for hardware freedom instead of cost then a hackintosh is your only option, but it's very difficult to get a perfect build and updating the OS is always a Russian roulette game.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why they don't just keep selling it, maybe with an upgraded SOC but no other new components. I don't think it would cannibalize sales of their mainline phones, and it would give lower income people a path to buy into their ecosystem. They're taking that approach with the iPad line. Maybe it didn't sell as well as I thought it did.
Some Passmark CPU comparisons:
2012 iMac with the i7 3770 - 9282
XPS 13 i7-8550U - 8305
XPS 15 i7-8750H -12477 (Note that XPS 15s tend to be thermally throttled also)
Desktop i7 9700K - 17257
Desktop i9 9900X - 22883
Desktop Ryzen 2920X - 21920
A high spec laptop doesn't compare with a high spec desktop CPU, especially if it's a U class CPU like the ones used by the XPS 13 (which seems to be way more popular than the XPS 15).
If you have an i7 2012 iMac, it still holds its own to any top end ultrabook (U) class CPU.