So far the screens I've tested are more tiring to my eyes (I work both on a M1 13" with external screens, and on a legacy 27" iMac). What are the best 27" screens for coding comfort that work well with Macs these days?
I haven’t tried it myself but if you really want that 5K 27 inch form factor samsung’s viewfinity s9 is exactly that. Or apple’s studio display ofcourse.
Apart from the Samsung Viewfinity that another commenter mentioned, there's also the LG Ultrafine 5K and the Huawei Mateview. The MateView is nicer than other 4K monitors because it has a taller aspect ratio of 3840 x 2560 so the extra 400 pixels of vertical space is nice for productivity work, although of course this is still fewer total pixels than a 5K display.
I bought mine like 2 years ago and it's been rock solid. IIRC they had some revisions over the years. And being rock solid: that's a bit of a lie because the monitor is wobbly as hell. So I've propped it with two supports on each side. Apart from that, the picture is the nicest I ever had from a monitor, and I had a lot of good ones. Text is super sharp and has acres of pixels. Compared to 4K monitor I can have both a terminal client and a browser side by side all looking nice. Can't fit that on 4K unfortunately.
If only it had higher pixel density. If there was a 43" 6K or even 8K screen I'd buy it in a heartbeat. But with only 4K I have to use all sorts of weird tricks with raster fonts to make the text in my terminals sharp.
Also, too bad all the TV makers stopped making 8K screens in 55" and below.
It really is, 4K 27" monitors that can do >=120Hz are perfect for me personally.
I just wish that the base macbook pro models supported 3 external screens without resorting to a software-based video-over-usb DisplaySync (not DisplayPort) connection.
I tend to agree but more because the market has settled on it. One thing about screen size is that it's easier to achieve an effective screen size with a smaller screen (by moving it slightly forward) than it is to do the reverse. So a 24" screen will work in more environments, e.g., smaller desks, than a 27" will. A dual screen setup with two 24's will require less neck movement.
Of course, the market has also decided that decent aspect ratios aren't worth doing either. If there were 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4 options—more versatile for productivity—we'd probably settle on something between 21" and 24".
Now that my 27" iMac from 2020 is starting to get old and Apple will likely deprecate support for all Intel Macs soon, I really wish there was an easy way to use it as an external monitor for a MacBook. Every implementation of streaming to an iMac is hacky at best.
Not in terms of colors but the 5K panel (I assume from LG) was more uniform in the blacks and suffered from almost no IPS glow. Not a big deal. The Asus is great for the price paid.
Obviously big difference in DPI too, but 4K still looks great at 32''.
For reference, I'm using the PA329CV. I don't know if all ProArt monitors use the same quality of panel.
There's not a super easy way to do it but if you're willing to take it apart there's driver boards available on Aliexpress that convert 5k imacs into HDMI/DP monitors.
I looked into this briefly when they announced that the iMac Pro is the oldest device that still gets the newest software.
It's logically two displays crammed together, which apparently makes Linux support difficult. Someone posted on HN a link to a Chinese company whose sole purpose seems to be making boards that let you drive an iMac Pro display with a traditional display cable. It's left as an exercise to the reader how mad your company would be if you tried that on your corp device.
I've got one of the LG Ultrafine 5K monitors paired with a modern M1 Max macbook and it's a nice combination.
Expensive, but I adore the pixel density considering I spend all day staring at text :)
I'd be seriously tempted by an iMac if it had M4 Pro + a 27" 5K display. I just don't feel it's likely as they'll probably see it as cannibalising Mac Studio + Studio Display sales.
For what its worth, I am extremely satisfied with my Studio Display. The 5K resolution makes 2x pixel perfect scaling look great, built in webcam which fantatic for meetings, good speakers, and charges the MacBook Pro with the same cable, and acts as an USB-C hub.
I have both; I got the LG when they first came out and the Studio display last year during a good sale on Amazon.
The panels seem the same but everything on the Apple one is better, as you would expect.
But lately my LG is starting to have issues with ghosting and color shifts around the edges. It's still ok to use (I'm typing this on it) but I guess it's nearing the end of it's useful life.
It has a few upsides that don't get written about often, compared to other monitors:
- Apple is extremely picky about panel QC, making things like dead pixels and patchy backlights much less common
- Its design practically eliminates the backlight bleed that's common with other monitors due to variances in bezel/panel fastener tightness
- No coil whine (surprisingly common even in other high end monitors)
- Some of the best glossy antiglare treatment I've seen, without the "gritty" coating that can cause a "sparkle" effect that's common on Dell monitors
- It wakes up and displays a picture almost instantly
It's not perfect and I'd prefer better specs for the money, but it's not a bad monitor. I've tested models that are more expensive than the Studio Display that fail to check some of these boxes.
The biggest problem with it, frankly, is the occasional requirement for a full hard reboot, but no controls relating to that. When I was using a Studio Display, the UPS outlets were in a place that required as much as 45 seconds of effort to get to, and I while that was a real annoyance to me, it was only while typing this out that I realized that no one will see this as any kind of inconvenience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thankfully, I’ve not run into that issue, at least not with any frequency. Might’ve happened once in a year and change, and I can’t remember clearly if even that actually happened.
Everything you list is basically part of any display that is not bottom of the barrel.
Yes, it's a very good monitor but it would be crazy otherwise considering the price. And it has one fatal flaw: you can only connect to it with USBC/Thunderbolt making it an almost Apple only monitor which is extremely annoying in the long run...
What delineates it as an idiot product? There aren't exactly a ton of alternative 5k displays on the market. Dell and LG have some 5120x1440 options, but only Apple has a 5120x2880 option as far as I can find.
There’s a Samsung one, though it doesn’t seem to generally be much cheaper than the Apple one, and the LG Ultrafine 5K seems to be… maybe still available?
The Samsung is usually between $800-950 at Amazon, shooting up to $1600 about 10% of the time.
I've often it seen it in the $900 neighborhood at Best Buy and B & H. It's $1600 right now at both of them but I don't know if that is just one of those full price spikes like Amazon has or if they too are like Amazon.
Could you please be a little more kind and a little less vitriolic? Not talking about right or wrong here, but if this comment chain keeps going in this direction, we're left with lots of anger and little in the way of interesting reading.
Your reaction is mine too, but it feels like you're fighting for the sake of fighting.
Yes, it's infuriating that they effectively made an iMac, don't let you run your own software on it, but do charge iMac prices for it.
Also, if you're a consumer who wants a retina-class desktop display, do you have any better option? So far as I can tell, the 27" 4Ks we bought for my office ~9 years ago are still state-of-the-art if you're unwilling to consider Apple's option.
People are taking exception to your "idiot product" remark, because you're standing so high on your principles that you're calling people who are willing to make a financial sacrifice to get the best available option "idiots." If you spend hours a day in front of a screen, you can justify amortizing out stupid-expensive over the amount of time you spend using it.
We'd all like to see either just-the-screen for half the price, or a revived iMac Pro at the current price; but neither of those are options anyone can buy right now.
I don't think I'm fighting anything. You just choose another product. In particular for design professionals, you're better off buying monitors with panels from Samsung or LG, who are also Apple's suppliers.
Edit: The real point is you've been conditioned into thinking you need a 5k or even a 6k display. As someone who has done professional media work, no you do not.
Apple's monitors are products sold to people who don't know seemingly don't know anything about monitors, color accuracy, who don't calibrate, or have to test against multiple devices to ensure readability or clarity of picture.
They're really nice toys for people with a lot of money, not unlike Teenage Engineering products, except Apple markets them in earnest to "pros" not "professionals." People who know better use different products.
Good to know that other companies are supplying 5K displays, but neither is significantly cheaper than the Apple. In fact, Samsung's MSRP is identical to Apple's.
Personally I wish they sold a version without the camera and speakers. I already have those. A ultra wide would be nice too. I can’t imagine using two of them side by side, especially because it seems incredibly wasteful to have a duplicate speaker / camera set up.
On one hand, companies willing to spend more than $250 on monitors will rather give you a 32" ultra-wide, because that's more useful to the typical office monkey worker.
On the other, the PC enthusiast customer base is almost synonymous to gamers, who'd rather want high refresh rates than a silly 5K resolution they cannot use.
The thing is, only Apple computers really need it, because of their technical choice on resolution scaling, where only x2 do not give you a blurry mess on macOS.
5K is nice but not necessary for other platforms, you can get a 4K display scaled to 150% and it's still a good pixel density with same workspace size as a 2560x1440 display.
If a 27" iMac did exist, it makes the comparison to the Studio Display now a bit odd - because they'd both cost roughly the same price but one has a computer and one doesn't.
> They also did move the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse to USB-C.
Only for the bundled peripherals, it seems. The Apple Store now only lists the full-size Lightning keyboard without Touch ID in white, which is even worse than before when you could get various permutations of tenkeyless, Touch ID, and black.
It does - it two different ways! The scroll wheel ratchet can be disabled (which is how I use it) or MX Options can override Smooth Scrolling. Or both.
Out of the box, with no custom software installed, non-Apple mice (and even older Apple mice) will have extremely janky scrolling on modern versions of macOS.
Apparently, something internal to how the OS handles mouse scrolling was changed, and only the Magic Mouse gets a proper scrolling experience using built-in drivers. It is possible to fix this, but only with custom software (either drivers for specific mice or general tools for all mice).
is it janky, or is it tied very closely to the scroll input, so it's exactly as janky as your finger moves the scroll wheel on the mouse? because that's what it seems like to me.
for it to be any smoother, there would need to be some artificial smoothing of the scroll wheel input. and i'd rather not have that.
It's not so much "raw input" as "extremely erratic".
For example, when using the wired Mighty Mouse, the same motion of my finger will sometimes scroll a couple lines and sometimes scroll the entire page or not scroll at all. The same mouse plugged into Windows does not exhibit this problem.
> For example, when using the wired Mighty Mouse, the same motion of my finger will sometimes scroll a couple lines and sometimes scroll the entire page or not scroll at all. The same mouse plugged into Windows does not exhibit this problem.
This is not normal and you're possibly facing a bug. I have a Master 3S and mine scrolls exactly the same distance with every click of the wheel.
Ok, I just tested three different mice (Keychron M1, Mighty Mouse, Razer DeathAdder V2) on two different Macs (M1 Mac Mini and M1 MacBook Pro) and all 6 combinations exhibit the same janky scrolling (mostly, it either scrolls too slow/not at all or too fast). For the Razer and Keychron mice, the experience is more "consistently bad" while only the Mighty Mouse experience is inconsistent enough to be "extremely erratic". It might just be going bad, though (it's probably a decade old at this point).
I don't have any Logitech mice anymore, but maybe they've learned how to speak to Macs or worked with Apple to make them better. I had Logitech mice in the past, ca. 2-3 years ago, and they had the same problems then. I did notice that plugging in a non-Apple mouse results in a "Setup Your Keyboard" prompt, which I just quit out of (it's not a keyboard...), but maybe that would install a driver if I followed through? Though, the Mighty Mouse is an Apple mouse, and it still sucks on macOS but not on Windows.
I have never experienced this. I have a Logitech G203 mouse I use with my M1 Mac and of course I use the touch pad when I'm not at my desktop. I've never noticed a difference. Both seem butter smooth. I have no special software install. Am I missing something?
Apple is not nefariously gimping mice, they just don't see a world where people use non-Apple mice which have a touch surface for smooth scrolling. AFAIK this isn't an issue that can be solved with drivers. Logi's software has a persistent daemon that can convert your scrolling to smooth scrolling, but that requires leaving it open in the background. You can also use one of the dozens of open source apps that do the same thing.
I don't think it's nefarious, I think it's negligent. As I understand it, they changed something internal to how mouse motion is handled. The Magic Mouse speaks to the OS in a way that matches this change, and that was all they ever cared to ensure worked. They also don't support more than 3 buttons on a mouse well, because Apple doesn't make mice with more than 3 buttons. They did the same sort of thing with standard-DPI monitors; they didn't make them look bad on purpose, they just optimized for high-DPI monitors and didn't care about the others.
I can't recall ever seeing this option with the old System Preferences, so it might be new to System Settings; but either way, it's not universal. I have a 5-button Razer mouse attached to test with right now, and the "Mouse buttons" option doesn't appear in System Settings. It does, however, show up in the System Settings search results, which is nice and confusing ("here's a setting we found, that doesn't actually exist for you").
In order for Apple to be negligent by not tending to a matter they'd first have to have the responsibility of tending to it to begin with.
It is not my understanding that Apple has any responsibility for ensuring equal access and capabilities for third-party accessories on their own weird, proprietary, invented-in-house computing systems.
Therefore, it is also not my understanding that they can be negligent on these matters.
They broke things that used to work. They had other reasons for doing it, but they also didn't really care to fix the problems it created. Their ecosystem is somewhat isolated from regular PCs and caters to a different clientele so I'm sure it made business sense to prioritize that way. Hence, there's at least some intent involved, just not outright malice.
There are so many legitimate reasons to hate the magic mouse.
Ergonimics, the polling rate, the way the glass gets greasy, the scratchy hard plastic on the bottom.
Truly, inferior to the Logitech MX Master in all ways except looks. (which is subjective).
But it takes literally a few seconds to get a days worth of charge out of the mouse, Apple clearly don't want you to leave it plugged in to use as a wired mouse: why? idk, because they hate choice, or perhaps its because they know it would overcharge the battery and bulge, or perhaps even still, people would get weird expectations about "wired being better for latency" despite the mouse not using the data connections on the wire.
We'll never know. But the charging on the bottom is such a non-issue in reality that it makes me wonder if anyone actually owned that mouse, or they just think it looks funny. Personally, I'd rather they fix the other issues with the mouse, the charging was legitimately never an issue.
The only reason they don't let you charge it is because it's a recycled design of the MM1 which used disposable batteries. The Magic Keyboard and Trackpad which came out the exact same day both let you use it plugged in and charging, even wired! The Magic Mouse shell was just not designed with a cord in mind at all.
I have personally been in meeting where my boss forgot to charge her magic mouse and we had to wait two minutes for her to open the stuff we needed to discuss. It happens.
Those are both moving parts that must be treated as movng the same as a mouse, because they are not bolted to anything. Any mechanical designer will absolutely treat everything about the ports on those the same as for a phone.
ive had a magic mouse and only had to plug it in and charge it and walk away for 10 minutes... maybe... 5 times in the past three years? like it's annoying when it happens, but you also only have to charge it once every couple months, and i mostly have this annoyance because i have notifications 100% turned off and i don't see the low battery notification.
however i will say three years in, either a software update or hardware issue is now killing the battery and i have to charge it every week or two and that sucks
salty that i now have airpod pros, an iphone 13, and the magic keyboard and mouse all with their dumb lightning bolt or whatever it's called. going to have to rebuy all this to forever rid myself of non-usb-c cables but at least in 2024 it's finally happened as an option
Each of those times you walked away, did you ever try plugging it in, counting to ten and then continuing to use it afterwards? That's what I used to do.
ill give that a shot, thanks! im pretty sure it's just a dead battery though - after i charge it for 5-10 min it shows the percentage at like 3-5% which is enough for several more hours and then i just plug it in overnight
The ergonomics were absolutely terrible. I now find using any mouse painful, to the point where I've replaced all of my computer pointing devices with trackpads. I blame the pain on a long history of Magic Mouse usage.
it annoys everyone, it's a dumb design, you get a message from your Mac telling you that the mouse has no charge and suddenly you can't work anymore for a few minutes, it's idiotic, plain and simple
Yeah, I've been using these on multiple Macs for a decade now and it's just not an issue.
If I get the warning the mouse is getting low on charge I just plug it in, go grab a drink or use the bathroom, and by the time I get back it's good for the rest of the day.
Then all I have to do is remember to plug it in overnight and it'll be good for months. YMMV.
It’s all about tension on the lightning connector imo - the connector isn’t designed for that level of flexibility, so it would break and it’s not like they’re going to use a different connector just for the mouse
This is the best steelmanning I've seen of the Magic Mouse charging port design; I'm surprised I never encountered it before. It actually makes a lot of sense considering how stiff the cables typically are, and it also then makes sense that the (immobile) Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad do have a charging port you can use while the device is in use.
It's nonsense -- plenty of people use phones and iPads while tethered to a charging cord. The port is well secured to the logic board of the device because it has to survive a lot of yanking, accidental falls, etc. It doesn't explain the Magic Mouse design.
There are so many lulu ideas in this comment that don't hold up to the simplest examination.
Plugging in for a few seconds to get a days worth of charge is a stupid thing to actually require or consider normal.
I also want to use my mouse tomorrow, and even the next day, and do so without having to plan ahead "today I will leave my mouse plugged in overnight because I can tell by clairvoyance that it is about to run out" or "I have been tracking the calender like a menstrual cycle and it's time, tonight is the night!" or "I have set up a sheduled alarm on my wonderful Apple Watch to remind me to go look at the settings somewhere to check the mouse battery level and see if it's time to charge tonight"...
And if you don't plan, then you have a few choices, charge for a minute and have to do it again without warning in 2 days, a constant stream of unplanned forced trips to the coffee maker, or just charge for 30 seconds every single day as a part of your routine, or stop and wait for a full charge on the spot for however long that is, or the worst of both worlds, get on with your day by charging for a minute now, and then don't fail to remember to plug it back in before leaving several hours of busy-ness later, which you absolutely will of course.
There is no version of any of that that is remotely convenient or sensible, and certainly not an upgrade from every other mouse in the world. There is no version of this that isn't patently ridiculous. You can work around it and tolerate it because it's not as bad as having to dig ditches for a living. If there was something about mice that the tech just didn't exist for it to work any other way, then sure it's possible to live with, because humans are adaptable. But it's not good, and it's not better than the already norm for $2 mice sice 20 years ago.
The mouse gives you like 3 days heads up that you might want to think about charging it though.
If you disable all notifications and it really runs out, waiting 10 seconds for it to charge is... fine...
I doubt you're using a wired mouse, and most wired mice are actually worse at charging than the magic mouse- the only difference is that you can use them while plugged in, so it's not as annoying that they charge so slow and use more power.
Ultimately it comes down to effective utility, people harping on about the placement of the charging cable without respect to the actual usability of the device holistically have quite literally missed the forest for the trees.
Like I said, theres plenty of reasons to dislike the mouse, but this ranks among the lowest and honestly the weird hate-boner for that decision just makes people look like they don't know what they're talking about to me.
Wired mice don't need to charge. Most modern wireless mice charge just as fast, you just don't NEED it because you can keep the cable plugged in. One minute of charge gets 3 hours for the Logitech MX 3S for example.
Sure, but it was still an inconvenience to interrupt a presentation once, and another time a prod debugging session where everybody was anxiously breathing on my neck and staring at my screen.
To me the plug placement was an inconvenience, regardless of how invisible it is to you.
On top of that, it never charged in few seconds after years of use, mine would take longer just to connect to the iMac again.
I was glad to buy magic trackpad I could leave connected 24/7 and never think about it (also I liked it much more than the MM in general).
The point I'm making is that people are making a point out of ignorance.
People think it will be a problem, so make ignorant commentary about it being idiotic, yet in practice it's fine, and not the worst aspect of a terrible mouse.
In my experience, it's slow to charge. I've been using the Magic Mouse for many years, because I otherwise like it. But charging it to last the rest of the day takes long enough that I lose track of whatever I was doing. And the low battery warning always comes so late that I must stop working immediately and plug in the cable.
It's probably just Apple's usual arrogance. They could have easily designed the mouse so that you can keep using it while it's charging, but the designer chose otherwise. And because this is a minor enough issue, Apple doesn't have to fix it and admit that they were wrong.
They are just lazy and cheap and can't admit they were wrong. That's it.
Because the current Magic Mouse is basically a battery version of the previous Magic Mouse that used swappable batteries.
As far as I'm concerned, they basically just used the same exact hardware and swapped the battery cradle for a LIPO + BMS and Lightning port. Which is actually a problem in itself because the sensor is really not great and could have used an upgrade at least.
I have had and used both and the first version was MUCH less annoying. Swapping is an instant activity and back to business; remember to put it to charge later when you get a message is an unnecessary mental load and unrealistic expectation from the user, the technology is supposed to work for the user not the other way around.
The fast-charging bullshit everyone talks about is just displacement of the problem, the next day you will get another interruption and mental load to remember to charge.
On top of that, the battery life is actually terrible, it's crazy how little useful life you get from it considering how heavy it is and how terrible the sensor is.
Personally, I really like the ability to "free scroll" in all direction on the surface and the 2-3 finger swipes but it's really not worth the hassle.
People boast about Apple trackpads being good but as far as I'm concerned, they don't have much choice considering that's the only thing they seem to be able to work out ok.
Nobody on PCs wants to use trackpads, it makes no sense compared to the performance of a mouse and gestures are unreliable compared to mouse buttons/keyboard shortcuts/macro keys.
I get what they were going for: force the user to use it as intended because the battery really lasted long enough for most people. Otherwise people would just have left it plugged always, and the cable+port would have needed different mechanical strength. But that really annoys anyone who would have left it charging if not most of the time. I think it would have been a better experience by leveraging software instead: detect that it is close to the end of the day and battery is low, and notify the user thwt they need to charge it when they stop using it, if leaving the underside port, or use notifications to annoy people into disconnecting the mouse when fully charged, if the port was moved to the obvious place. You're still annoying people, but you're less likely to end up with an unusable belly up mouse midway through your day.
Just pay logitech $5/piece to license the patent and then sell them for $200, there is plenty of meat on the bone for everyone involved.
Or bypass the idea of the patent altogether by making their mouse charge wirelessly and then releasing a giant wireless charger that happens to work pretty well as a mouse pad later.
Don't be foolish. We may one day cross the Atlantic in an aeroplane or conceive of a motorised carriage capable of traveling 50 miles per hour but some dreams are simply impossible!
Putting the plug on the bottom is an intentional choice by Apple. It's because they don't want you to plug it in to charge, then never remember to unplug it. Mandatory wirelessness.
I believe (unfounded) originally it was made for asthetic reasons, as to not interrupt the sushi shape, and that not being able to use it while charging was not considered to be that much of a downside. And then since then Apple just hasn't bothered spending engineering effort on 'fixing' that design decision ever since.
Makes sense, especially because it's more impressive/magic (especially when it was introduced) when your friend/family/coworker sees you using it. If the cable was plugged in, it might just look to them like a mundane, not Magic, mouse.
I'd buy any other brand if they produced something comparable in all metrics to a Macbook. That means the chassis, the display, sound quality and loudness, excellent trackpad and a very adequate keyboard, no fans or any moving parts at all, low temperature, very long battery life, size, thickness and weight.. I don't care about RAM, I was able to live with 8GB just fine. All the other metrics are much more important to me, more RAM just makes it a little nicer but otherwise doesn't make the experience.
Consider that the "fanboys" simply care about something other than you do. There was a time in my life when I had probably very similar preferences as you, but life changes.
What "shit" did I "make up" about Apple? I haven't made up anything. Apple would be happy if you bought 2 of their mice to work around their design problems. More profit = Apple is happy.
The mouse port thing is like a canary in the coal mine, betraying the people who just like taking shots at Apple, but generally are very ill informed. I think Apple should keep the port on the bottom purely so we can get the shortcut to discarding people's opinions when they hoist it up to concern troll.
For actual Apple Mouse users, charging is just the least concerning thing imaginable. The battery lasts an absolute eternity. I'm using one right now that I've had for at least five or so years and I charge it once in forever, it charges super quickly, and it's just not a factor in my life at all.
You cannot reasonably make this assertion and expect that it's true. I mean, you outed yourself right there as someone not capable of a reasonable discussion. Sort of a "canary in a coal mine" of your own.
I have never once had my Logitech mice run out of batter, not once, not ever. It charges as I use it. I'll take that all day long over the "magic mouse" with a charging port underneath so you can't even use the thing if it runs out of battery an an inopportune moment. But sure, go through the mental gymnastics of excusing a really bad design by Apple because you're an obvious fanboy.
Yes, I can make that assertion. No one is buying a second magic mouse because of how it charges, and the claim is ludicrous nonsense.
>I have never once had my Logitech mice run out of batter, not once, not ever.
Okay?
I have never, ever had my magic mouse run out of battery, or even come close. Again, you have zero idea what you're talking about. You cannot comprehend how long the battery lasts, or how ridiculously quickly it charges. The time to make a cup of coffee is days of usage.
It is never actual Magic Mouse users complaining about this. Ever. It's always the peanut gallery leaving dumb comments.
Like, why in the world did you click into a story about new Apple products to yap about how you would never buy Apple products. Bizarre. I'm not a "fan boy" for the reality that the magic mouse is actually perfectly fine, and it doesn't make me a fan boy to point out the peanut gallery that appears in every single Apple store with uninformed, often absurd takes.
Lol, no, someone just replied to you saying that they do this.
Okay?
>I have never, ever had my magic mouse run out of battery, or even come close.
The person that replied to you that they do this, has in fact had their magic mouse run out of battery, and they used the second one while the first one charges.
You're just wrong.
This conversation is boring and you're making assertions that aren't valid.
>Lol, no, someone just replied to you saying that they do this.
Ignoring that I was clearly being rhetorical, they specifically note that they bought two mice because they have two Macs. The "I let one die when at home and use the other" is a consequence of that choice, not the other way around. This is super clear.
You literally, directly claimed that Apple is making a monetary choice to try to force people to buy second mice for when one dies. This is...hilarious conjecture, to put it politely.
>This conversation is boring and you're making assertions that aren't valid.
It is. The tiring noise of the Apple haters who define their personality by being Apple haters and run into every Apple conversation to make it known remains extremely boring.
I'm one that does. I've got two MMs because I have a desktop iMac (27" 2019) and a laptop for travel and I have a MM for the laptop so that I can scroll using it in my hand while in a hotel room or when doing presentations.
So when I get the "low battery warning" on the desktop MM, I put it on charge and use the other one for an hour while it recharges.
> I'd sooner believe it's because they want you to buy 2 of them, so you can charge one while using the other.
We're discussing in this context. I still stand by the claim that there are probably around zero people on the planet that bought a second MM specifically to use it while the other one is charging.
I'm not doubting that there exists a group of people that happen to have acquired two MMs, however that came to be.
I switched to using the trackpad full time, because the mouse randomly bricked itself unless I let it distract me about its state of charge and whether my only cable was at home or my office desk.
Logitech makes mice that worked plugged in and not, and they are durable too because they use a custom plastic piece around the USB connector to ensure a snug fit:
Logitech mice don't use the top surface of the mouse as a multi-touch trackpad, so it doesn't matter to Logitech if the top surface of the mouse is uninterrupted by a charging port or not.
I converted a Logitech mx2 mouse from micro-usb to usb-c. When doing so I confirmed and am 100% certain that the data lines of usb are not connected on this mouse (only ground and 5V are connected for charging). The traces to the micro-usb connector do not exist. The mouse only works by bluetooth or a Logitech 2.4Ghz dongle.
Yet, when I read forums as I was troubleshooting something, I found multiple posts where someone claims the mouse doesn't work in "wired mode", and multiple people replied saying they only ever use the mouse with a usb cable and never wirelessly so surely something is wrong, leading to lots of confusion and returned mouses. In reality, the mouse can only work when plugged in if it is also paired as a wireless device.
If you think about it, the design choice to support charging only and not data makes some sense. Having a wired and wireless mode may confuse users if they don't have a Logitech driver installed that ensures settings are persistent across both modes. Apple's design is good from this point of view, it only works wirelessly and there is no design language that suggests it has a wired mode.
Logitech gaming mouses do have wired and wireless modes, but I think they generally do not have bluetooth, so presumably the mouse and/or its driver can more easily take care of persistent settings between modes by not supporting bluetooth which is constrained to support certain features.
All that being said, I believe the main reason for the port being on the bottom of Magic Mouse was simply to avoid cost of retooling for manufacturing when they switched from AA batteries to a non-removable chargeable battery.
Whoa, neat. That makes sense from a product engineering/support angle - less work. The cable is just for charging and nothing else. I think that Windows doesn't really support the auto-pairing via USB cable that Apple does anyhow with its mice and keyboards.
Given that the lightning version picks up a nine hour charge in the time it takes to take a bathroom break or go get a cup of coffee, this is more of an excuse to make fun of the design than it is a real world show stopper.
> The Apple Mouse 2 also comes with a Quick Charge feature that provides nine hours of use with a two-minute charge.
The moment it runs out of power isn't when you're you're taking a break, but while you're using it. You may change what you're doing and go take a break. But you also may be in the middle of a presentation.
In the same way people miss meeting reminders ahead of the meeting and Google meet/calendar combo still fails to do a reminder at 0 minutes by default. It's a bad design that doesn't account for real behaviour.
And all of that doesn't change the fact that I ended up without a charge a few times and threw the MM in the bin. With the replacement, I just plug the cable in and continue using it. I don't even know how fast it charges / how long it lasts, because charging doesn't disrupt the usage.
If you're unable to acknowledge basic information like "battery is low" and respond accordingly within several days nor able to wait a few seconds to get enough charge to last through your super critical meeting/whatever, I guess Apples mouse just isn't for you.
That's fine. It's why we have choices.
Now if you'll excuse me I must get back to complaining ad nauseam to strangers about how much I hate a mouse I don't use. Oh wait no I don't.
Yup, that mouse isn't for me. It's also not for a number of people who end up buying it. That's how reviews work: people who had negative experience talk about it so others like that (you know who you are) will not buy that mouse. We also talk about software/hardware design here. Acknowledging that wider accessibility means designing for people behaving in different ways and it saves you from years of repeated complaints - that's also important.
Given that it has a lithium ion battery and you’re very much not supposed to put it in a bin, i’m not surprised you ignored a low battery warning for weeks.
I'm personally not saying that excuses it, but I've once read that it was an absolutely conscious decision by Apple to put the port where it is.
A lot of people tend to simply leave the mouse plugged into a cable when using it, even once it's charged. Apple is famous for the image that they would like their products to convey. They don't want people leaving the mouse plugged in because it's convenient or they're unable to act on a month-long warning. They want to force you to use the mouse as it was designed -- wireless.
I'm not saying it's good, I don't have one myself and I plainly don't like the ergonomics of it. I like the look and I think I would be able to work around the port-location constraint, but it just doesn't feel nice to hold.
Yup. Me and many other people. Which Apple can either ignore, or fix their design to address a bigger market - without making the product worse for others.
> It's a bad design that doesn't account for real behaviour.
Not sure it's bad design as much as a design decision. I like the shape of the current MM. It works for my hands and usage. It's also slim enough to make it both a great desktop mouse and travel mouse (I used to have both!). Could Apple keep the exact same design and add a port to one of the sides? Sure, but it remain almost unusable when plugged in and not change much.
So when people complain about the port on the bottom, what they are really complaining about is the overall design of the MM. The want the MM to be thicker and have a port on the front or back, but that's no longer the MM we have. For people who want that mouse, there are plenty out there to chose from.
I’m a long time MM user and have one at every computer I use (work and multiple personal). My first one was one with the AA batteries. Never had a problem with this.
If you have a car, you have to fill it up with gas (or charge the battery) too and you can’t use it while doing that. Similar deal.
I haven’t done the research to know if that’s true or not, so I will assume it is.
But it is such a non-issue to me that I really don’t care that it exists. I also would not care if they made it possible. But as an actual user of multiple of them, it really, truly is a non-issue for me.
My issue is that mine are all lightning and I have fewer and fewer lightning devices, so I’ll have to keep around a lightning cable (regardless of whether I can charge while using it or not). But that was bound to happen.
If they are serious about their environmental goals, they should want all their products to be good enough to be used, not keep making something they know people aren't using.
Agreed. Unfortunately the ergonomics and the touch surface of the Magic Mouse make it unusable for most people. The charging port issue is a red herring because it doesn't really affect anything but gets lots of attention.
The people who like the magic mouse (not me) don't care, and the people who even otherwise would never use a magic mouse get to keep making fun of it. Why would they bother?
I like the magic mouse, and I care that I can't charge it while using it. I also care that I have to activate bluetooth in order to use it, even if it's plugged in. Same with the keyboard. WTFF.
You still have to switch it "on" which means it is emitting a BT signal. It leaves users vulnerable to keylogging via BT. It's well-attested and was reported to Apple in Q4 2022.
Ideally the on/off switch would not control both the power and BT.
Yes. It is possible intercept keystrokes for an Apple keyboard that has been previously connected to a computer or laptop. It was tested as part of this vulnerability for Apple shortcuts: https://jestlandia.github.io/apple-shortcuts-vulnerability-1....
I'd get a Magic Mouse if they'd move the port. It doesn't even need to be an actual port, it could be a magnetic charger, I'd be good with that too. Just something where I can plug it in while I'm thinking of it, keep working, and unplug it when I notice it's at 100% again. Having a magnet would actually be kind of cool. It could be left up near the top of the mouse pad and you could just swing your mouse up near it when it gets low for it to snap on and start charging.
I think the issue is that a lightning cable and socket aren't physically designed to take the stresses of being plugged in and being used like a mouse at the same time.
I've not measured it, but I could believe there is probably quite a bit of repeated vertical and sideways stress on a wired mouse's cable where it joins to the mouse body.
Apple charging cables aren't designed to be plugged into anything. Their cables are notoriously terrible. I had a lightning cable on my nightstand that I plugged my phone into at night a few times a week. After less than two years the connector had developed cracks. Inexcusable.
I got a Logitech MX Vertical that you can charge while using. But why would I ever do that? I charge it 3 times per year when I'm going for lunch and that's that.
I generally get a notification I need to charge my mouse when I’m in the middle of using it. It’s nice to be able to plug it in without interrupting my workflow. If instead I ignore the charge notification and keep working on what I was working on, I generally then forget to plug it in however many hours later when I’ve finished work. After enough cycles of this, it dies entirely. Sure it only happens a few times a year, but you would think Apple of all companies would get this right.
What if (and just hear me out here), the mouse was attached to a cord? This would have several benefits. No need to charge or have a battery. The mouse would stay near the computer and not get lost.
Because a lot of people find corded mice annoying?
To be fair though, I've seen multiple computer labs with new iMacs and old wired keyboards and mice (because they don't want them "going missing" or switching places).
The 'magic' mouse is garbage is magically useless. I could not care less about the charging port location. The size and shape are completely wrong for adult human use.
I think it's roughly the right size for my child, aged six. I used it for about ten minutes so I could order a Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac.
Of all the annoying things Apple does, this pushes me the hardest.
There's a "bumper case" for the Magic Mouse you can get that converts it to be wirelessly charged. I want one that puts a USB-C wire I can run along the desk though. Because f*ck Apple, that's why.
These days 8 GB is absurdly low for a ~$1300 PC. Hopefully they might have finally realized that selling crippled products (just to force its users to pay the predatory price for memory upgrades) is hurting UX and their reputation.
I mean they claim:
> Compared to the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor, the new iMac is up to 4.5x faster.1
But is that really true if your "ultrafast" Mac grinds to a halt when you have a couple of Electron apps and a browser open at the same time? Naturally users who bought the base model because they didn't really understood the implications would just conclude that macOS is slow and unstable compared to Windows?
No, it's not. It's a $1300 high end tablet, which (among other things) will not run arbitrary programs of the user's choosing, and which has aggressive memory management and background process restrictions. All of these factors contribute to 8 GiB being a reasonable amount of memory for such a device.
As far as I know even the newest iPad Pro is limited to 5GB per app, so if you use it for things like drawing in Procreate the 16GB upgrade does literally nothing.
Thanks, last time I checked that supposedly wasn't the case. Though an increase of layers between ~10-25% seems a bit underwhelming for the RAM upgrade.
But they could barely do it without swapping in my experience.
The OS alone takes 2GB or more (200MB just for spotlight iirc), a bit is used for graphics, and once you add a bunch of browser tabs and windows you're easily in a situation where RAM usage is permanently above 80%. You don't feel it as quickly on the M1 but by the time you notice lags it's already swapping 15GB, sometimes for no apparent reason.
I still don't quite get it, on the 16GB Macbook I feel like I can do much more without exceeding 8GB usage.
Swapping is fine as long as performance remains acceptable. Obviously at some point it won't – the 8GB models do have limits. But these limits are often wildly exaggerated in this sort of discussion.
I get your point, and Apple doesn't price RAM cheap, but it's worth noting that any RAM doesn't equal any other RAM.
There's a ton of ram types with varying performance levels, and in apple's case it's RAM with direct and performant access from the graphics card (unified memory).
I’d much rather have had serviceable ram modules than sightly faster ram to the gpu I will never fully flex with macos software anyhow. Speaking as someone saddled with one of these computers.
Every M-series Mac has shipped with completely standard LPDDR4 or LPDDR5(X) memory chips. While these can be a bit more expensive than socketed non-LP DDR DIMMS, we're talking maybe 10% more expensive, not 1000% more expensive (which is what Apple charges for upgrades vs standard retail price for DIMMs).
Apple's marketing department would be happy for you to think otherwise, but the "secret sauce" of their high memory bandwidth is completely due to having more memory channels built into the SoC than a standard x86 CPU.
RAM cost is predominantly the cost to produce the silicon, which is a standard and interchangeable. Apple uses multiple sourcing as well to lower their cost.
Isn't the memory in the Surface Laptop 7 (and presumably other comparable Qualcomm/x86 laptops) quite a bit faster?
Of course MS overcharges on upgrades as well... because they can. Can it really have anything to do with cost, though? I wouldn't be surprised that the slotted RAM in laptops that support it and which Lenovo/Dell/etc. sell pretty cheap ir as or more expensive than the "Apple Magic Unified Max Marketing RAM" wholesale?
I'd love that, seems like a fantastic deal. I assume it's DDR4, though? Which makes it an even more apples to oranges comparison.
However if we're being fair Dell seems to be charging about 50% less (and Lenovo 75% at least for some models) for soldered LPDDR5X upgrades than Apple and Lunar Lake seems to have comparable bandwidth
Isn’t Apple’s RAM inside CPU package? I think it might not be possible to put together a system (at least with consumer parts) that matches their memory bandwidth.
On the other hand, they are limited in capacity. It is a trade off, it is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
No, but their marketing department would like you to think so.
> It is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
They are limiting memory capacity and charging you 8x-10x reasonable retail price for upgrades, so that their profit margins stay high. Whether or not that's vile is something I leave to you to decide.
> No, but their marketing department would like you to think so.
Can you link to a teardown that finds RAM somewhere other than the CPU package?
Or were you in too much of a hurry to notice that the comment you replied to didn't make the common mistake of claiming the RAM is on-die not just on-package?
Thanks for clarifying, and especially for not being snarky!
I think I was thrown off by your use of the term "inside," vs other terms like "on" or "part of," which led me to believe you were asking about the memory being part of the SoC proper. If that's not what you meant, I apologize.
The memory consists of standard DDR4/5 memory chips, soldered on a PCB, directly next to the M-series SoC. So my point was that while it is likely faster than any memory you could get on a standard consumer PC, it's not in any way special (read: more expensive) for Apple to source or assemble.
Side point: I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare most Macs to consumer PC hardware, given the price differentials involved.
> capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
No, it's obviously because they can upcharge on upgrades? That's just market segmentation. I doubt it can have much to do with technical limitations or actual costs (the the difference the wholesale price between 8GB and 16GB is relatively marginal).
> I think it might not be possible to put together a system
No, but you can get a Lunar Lake laptop with comparable bandwidth. Dell is also "only" half as "greedy" as Apple or MS, e.g. 16 GB -> 32 GB is only $200 instead of $400.
Why does the Magic Mouse still exist, though? If you have an iMac with the Magic Mouse, you own the only Apple device without the complete suite of multitouch gestures. It's weird that they still make the Magic Touchpad a paid option when it seems like a core part of the offering.
First off, "up to" is the most bullshit metric. I am also up to 10x more productive when I get coffee, but that's when comparing to days where I just play Satisfactory all day long.
Secondly, "compared to a random HP AIO PC with a 5 year old CPU" (since there are approximately zero chances that the most popular PC in a market that is heavily Apple dominated would be a 2023 Raptor Lake) is just, once again, Apple's piss poor comparisons.
Yes that's because they don't price match.
If they would, the Apple computer would still some better things about it but it wouldn't win a lot of benchmarks, if any...
_No-one_ buying this is upgrading from an M3. Honestly, most people buying this would be upgrading from some sort of elderly Intel thing; these tend to have long operating lifetimes.
Yup, for years. It feels exactly the same as a MacBook track pad and lets you use all the same gestures. I like it better than a mouse for my work machine.
Been using it for 10 years. It's my favorite mouse to use. Scrolling and tap gesture is the main reason I prefer it. I also like touching glass/aluminum over plastic.
I use one for 8+ hours a day. I keep reading about the design being uncomfortable, but definitely hasn't been the case for me.
I guess if I actually kept my hand directly in line with the mouse it'd be pretty painful. I just about always keep my hand in a slant, more similar to how you'd use a trackpad, or as if you were holding a sort of slanted mouse.
I've stuck with it because of the well implemented 2d scrolling. Using a physical scrolling wheel feels off at this point.
My work bought one for me so I gave a try. Maybe they updated the sensor but the one I got a few years ago was a bad optical mouse compared to what I’m used to (Logitech MX and Razer).
I have one and I don't much care for it. But one thing it does better than other mice is scrolling left and right. It scrolls left and right as easily as it scrolls up and down. I edit audio files and work in DAWs a lot and it's really great for that. If I'm not performing those tasks, I generally don't use it.
I guess it's what you're used to and how large your hands are. For me, I've use it since it came out and prefer it to any other mouse, once you get used to the touch top surface using mechanical button/wheel seems archaic. It's also a lot easier to keep clean without a scroll wheel.
That said, the change to the rechargeable version was a huge unforced error apart from the deserved mocking for the charge port location because the mouse also reports low batt condition about 10 minutes before it actually dies, I don't know what the thinking there was.
Looks like they don't have the color-matched options for individual purchase, but the b/w trackpad, keyboard, and at least 1 keyboard variant are available.
I see lots of people in this thread mentioning this, but am confused. I've never seen a lighting port on an Apple computer- only on iphones and ipads, and the cables that come with those are USB-C on the other end. Haven't all Apple computer accessories been USB-C for almost a decade now?
> Recharge the built-in battery in your Apple keyboard, mouse, or trackpad [...] To charge your device's battery, connect a Lightning to USB cable to its Lightning port,
> Every iMac comes with a color-matched Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse or optional Magic Trackpad, all of which now feature a USB-C port, so users can charge their favorite devices with a single cable.
Thanks! That seems like a minor issue because in both cases you still use usb-c on the computer end. However it will certainly be nice to not need to have 3 different kinds of cables, and have everything just take usb-c at some point. Although I'll bet they'll have a new usb connector right about the time the usb-a and lightning devices finally start to disappear.
If 32GB is the max, why not just make that the one and only model and get rid of this weird segmentation. That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate. 8GB was practically criminal.
Or -- and I know this is crazy -- slottable RAM on a device that is designed for things other than portability. Wild, I know.
Would the people who were buying the baseline 8GB model (presumably just for general computing/office work) care about the GPU being slightly slower, though?
I bet that the extreme lag when you run out of memory because you have an Electron app or two, several browser tabs and something like Excel is way more noticeable.
Hardly anyone is using Macs for gaming these days and almost anybody who does something GPU intense would need more than 16GB anyway.
> The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
Source for what? Parallel RAM interfaces have strict timing and electrical requirements. Classic DDR sockets are modular at the cost of peak bandwidth and bus width. The wider your bus, the more traces you have to run in parallel from the socket to the compute complex, which becomes harder and harder. You don't see sockets for HBM or GDDR for a good reason. The proof is there.
LPCAMM solutions mentioned upthread resolve some of this by making the problem more "three dimensional" from what I can tell. They reduce the length of the traces by making the pinout more "square" (as opposed to thin and rectangular) and stacking them closer to the actual dies they connect to. This allows you to cram swappable memory into the same form factor, while retaining the same clock speeds/size/bus width, and without as many design complexities that come from complex socket traces.
In Apple's case they connect their GPU to the same pool of memory that their CPU uses. This is a key piece of the puzzle for their design, because even if the CPU doesn't need 200GB/s of bandwidth, GPUs are a very different story. If you want them to do work, you have to feed them with something, so you need lots of memory bandwidth to do that. Note that Samsung's LPCAMM solutions are only 128-bits wide and reported around 120GB/s. Apple's gone as high as 1024-bit busses with hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth; the M1 Max was released years ago and does 400GB/s. LPCAMM is still useful and a good improvement over the status quo, of course, but I don't think you're even going to see 256-bit or 512-bit versions just so soon.
And if your problem can be parallelized, then the higher your bus width, the lower your clock speeds can go, so you can get lower power while retaining the same level of performance. This same dynamic is how an A100 (1024-bit bus) can smoke a 3090 (384-bit) despite a far lower clock speed and power usage.
There is no magical secret or magical trick. You will always get better performance, less noise, at lower power by directly integrating these components together. It's a matter of if it makes sense given the rest of your design decisions -- like whether your GPU shares the memory pool or not.
There are alternative memory solutions like IBM using serial interfaces for disaggregating RAM and driving the clock speeds higher in the Power10 series, allowing you to kind of "socket-ify" GDDR. But these are mostly unobtainium and nobody is doing them in consumer stuff.
Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM with the new CAMM2/LPCAMM2 standards. The M4 has LPDDR5X-7500 120GB/sec memory and there are already LPCAMM2-7500 120GB/sec modules, with even faster ones on the way: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra...
Two of those modules working in parallel would hit "M Pro" speeds as well. I doubt Apple will be adopting them though, for the same reason they don't offer standard M.2 SSD slots even on systems that could obviously support them with minimal design compromises.
Very unlikely. Apple can argue that less than 1% of computers users ever upgrade their memory (which is true), and after all, did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
> did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
The difference there is that slotted GPU memory is demonstrably impactical, but the memory on the M4 isn't demonstrably better than the LPCAMM2 module above. It's literally the exact same spec. Not that I expect the EU to do anything either when they didn't act on Apples soldered-in SSDs, which definitely aren't any better than standardized M.2 drives.
Actually, incorrect. On some scenarios, you’d need up to 4 CAMM2 slots to do what Apple does. This is due to CAMM2 maxing out at 128 bit busses; but M3 Max chips are currently at 512. Needless to say, battery life most affected.
Yes, the higher end Max and Ultra chips would still need soldered memory for sure. Two CAMM modules flanking opposite sides of the SOC is probably doable though, so I think the M Pros could practically have socketed memory.
These are still well below what Apple offers at the high end and you can not buy systems like that right now. If you want high memory bandwidth on the CPU today, you will be charged a big markup on Epyc/Xeon/ThreadripperPro CPUs and motherboards, rather than the DRAM.
For SSD speeds, that was already dismistified with iBoff new adapter which makes an M1 Macbook Air upgradable and faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for RAM using the CAMM standard positioned near the CPU. Or maybe even better, slotted memory chips like in the old days, with a memory controller ready to accept multiple chip sizes.
Yeah I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware and even I can't handle this. The different in price between 8GB and 16GB for the M3 Air was like $500 at Costco. My air from 2016 came with 8GB.
> That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate.
What are you doing? I'm still doing web development with Chrome, JetBrains, and Docker on a 16GB M1 Pro and it isn't a problem. For the average Chrome-using citizen, 16GB should be fine.
32 GB seems plenty for me for the target audience. The iMac is aimed at a rather casual computer user, especially now that they nixed the larger screen size one.
I agree, I run 32gb on a dev Macbook pro and it's enough, even our largest app is around 20k files and the language server uses 5gb of ram. I often sit around 22-24gb of usage with Docker running.
For most people 32gb is not going to hold them back.
Arbitrary markup based on whatever they can maximally extract from their consumers is the name of the game. Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
> Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%.
If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
I’ve never felt memory limited on my 16gb macbook pro, on which I code, run rust-analyzer (major memory hog), video edit, etc. Most people definitely don’t need 32GB
If you use your PC to only run a single application at any time then yes, 8GB might be usable. If you need to have an Electron app opened, a few browser tabs and XCode (let alone some less efficient IDE)? Your compute will grind to a halt...
I’ve definitely been memory limited on a 32GB MacBook Pro. Though it’s probably due to Docker, Slack, multiple IDEs, and dozens and dozens of browser tabs all open at the same time. Consider me part of the exception.
The problem is the insane markups, but my anecdata is the opposite of yours.
I'm also doing Rust dev, but I can't work with less than ~24GB.
On my headless rackmount dev box that I use for my remote development environment, the box sits around 17GB of memory in use + 8GB of cache. I've got an M3 with 36GB running a few Visual Studios Code (plus browser/Docker/Dropbox) with about 30GB used (8GB of that is cache).
16GB would not have been enough for me for my work at Deno. My current job involves both Rust and Python work and I'd quickly hit the limits of 16GB if I'm running my code while developing it, let alone running a browser or keeping my email client open.
Says the first owner of the machine. Macbooks, and Apple devices in general, have a strong reputation for high resale value. That high resale value is based on having them last quite a while. This falls apart in a few years as hardware requirements continue to balloon.
That was fine when Intel was sitting on their ass, raking in the cash, and nearly everything else (storage, especially external drives, RAM, and even batteries weren't too bad) is upgradeable. This is less great when you can no longer upgrade the component most likely to be the first bottleneck.
Apple pays people to be smarter than me about this, but I still think it's a stupid long-term play to damage one of your biggest selling points
Have you considered that your way of using the machine is based around the limitations, hence you don't recognize them?
Whenever switching company I went from a 64 gb ram computer to a 16 gb ram. Yes, it worked, but only because I had to adapt to it. But one might not see it if one's never tried.
I might get away with 48GB (don't know, I have 64 now on my work machine) but I had a lot of swap usage when I was running on 32GB. Some of us do need a lot of ram.
Well, iMacs used to be fairly common in music/video production. Given the move towards more casual use-cases by Apple, I would say there aren't many anymore, but if they were to put pro chips in there, I'm sure there would be more.
I have the feeling most music/video producers these days like the laptop format anyway (a music producer would typically want to have access to his projet in his home studio, live stages and pro studios) and the imac format is getting limited to traditional pro desk use.
With usb-c/thunderbolt, it is hard to be a pro user AND be interested in the iMac form factor when you can have a mobile device that you can easily dock to a large screen and have the conveniency and comfort of both a laptop and a desktop.
Outside of companies that wants fixed, kensington locked desktops for their employees, I don't see who would choose an imac over anything else.
The OS will use more RAM if you give it more RAM. The fact that you are currently using 46GB on an (I assume) 64GB model doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would run badly on a 32GB or 16GB model.
It's more likely to mean exactly that, because the less RAM, the more disk swapping.
At some point it becomes impossible for the OS to keep everything it wants in RAM at the same time, and then you get an orgy of disk thrashing and a potential lock-up.
This is not theoretical. I've had it happen on both Macs and Windows machines, sometimes with just a single main app running.
At best you'll get obvious delays if you switch apps, as pages get dumped to disk while other pages are loaded.
Definitely constrained by my 16gb, it's only 2 years old. Rubymine takes 4gb on it's own, Chrome eats a lot... I'm usually hovering around 10gb of swap.
Presumably, their career economists found that this "weird" pricing scheme is actually optimal—that selling tiny RAM upgrades for $200 or $400 is empirically, measurably an effective way to sort their consumers by purchasing power, and optimally drain their wallets.
It goes by many names, the "microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of",
I mean, that's basically it. The difference between part costs of 8GB/16GB/32GB RAM chips is nearly a rounding error, and they're probably eating a bunch more costs stocking and adding assembly for different RAM SKUs.
That explains it then. The extra cost of supporting extra RAM SKUs has to be recouped somehow. What better way than by stocking extra RAM SKUs and charging a premium? :)
On the one hand, sure, Apple loves to get that extra margin for more RAM and SSD, no doubt.
On the other hand, the MacBook Air ships with 8GiB RAM standard, and it's robustly popular. One could suppose that all those customers are suffering from the lack of RAM, or one could suppose that for many use cases, it's an adequate amount.
The latter is more likely. macOS manages memory well, and a fast SSD means that swapping is fast enough that it often results in no visible delays to the user.
I'm not sure how can we tell. The Mac revenue has peaked back in 2022 and has been declining since. But assure, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad (i.e. at most a single app and/or browser and 8GB might be enough for that).
That they sell a lot of stock MacBook Airs? They do. I don't find the topic interesting enough to find a link, but I'm pretty confident on this one.
> a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad
A lot of people have pretty undemanding requirements in a laptop, yes. 8GiB is more than enough for some web browsing and light document editing, a bit of photo retouching, that kind of thing. There are many Chromebooks on the market right now with 4 GiB and they sell in numbers.
The HN tilt trends toward systematically overestimating system requirements because development is fairly demanding of them.
I just doubt there is actual meaningful data available (at least that's publicly accessible). We'd need to measure the proportion of base config MBA users who regularly get OOM warnings?
> many Chromebooks
Yes. People just have different use cases. I mean almost nobody who does anything that might require > 16-32 GB of memory would likely buy this iMac (even if Apple sold such configs).
It's an entirely different product than the 27 inch "Pro" iMacs with Xeons from back in the day.
Hardly anybody "needs" a desktop PC these days (outside of gaming and some niche applications). So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Ah, yes that was why I asked what I did. I'm quite confident they sell a lot of stock MBAs, is what I said, as a guess at what we were trying to 'tell'.
As for "low on application memory" warnings, macOS doesn't really do that unless the user is also out of swap. Offer may not be valid for XCode. My wild-ass guess is that users who need lots of RAM tend to know that when they buy computers, and that percentage wise, there are more over-provisioned Mac users than under-provisioned. But who knows.
> So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Right. Apple market-segments their products pretty carefully, and the post-Pro iMac line is for receptionists, desktop publishing, light-duty visual/creative, the occasional desk-oriented email job, and so on. 16 GiB is a generous baseline for those tasks, and 8 GiB was probably adequate for most customers.
Are you expected to replace your screen often? I don't think I upgrade and replace either one much faster than the other. Usually get a new monitor and a new PC every 4 or so years.
> Usually get a new monitor and a new PC every 4 or so years.
Maybe you're not quite the average consumer that OP has in mind? Maybe you are, I don't know. Either way it's unsustainable and ridiculous that the _average consumer_ would need to replace something after 4 years when it COULD be built to last.
My first LCD monitor is still actively used in our house, about 18 years old now. My mother has gone through several computers, kept the same screen for 15 years. Apple Consumers are not "Average Consumers". Starting at $1300, it's a luxury desktop.
That’s a mid-range desktop at most in a world where people pay more than that for individual components at the high-end, especially when you look at pricing for equivalent quality displays.
The correct criticism of iMacs is that it links two parts with different lifespans. There should be a legal requirement that all-in-one computers have an external connector so that if some other component fails or simply becomes obsolete you can use the perfectly functional display with another system.
I agree that the iMac needs to be usable as a monitor. Both Dell and HP all-in-ones that I looked at do this (I did not do an exhaustive search, so it may not be as common as my 'look at two' makes it sound, but it's not UN-common)
However, let's be real clear, iMac is not a mid-range desktop, price-wise. Amazon's all-in-one category's HIGHEST non-apple price in the top-10 is $599. There are three non-apple all-in-ones over $1k in the top-50. [1]
Obviously, once we separate the pieces out, things become even more clear cut. You can buy the beefiest "mini-pc" from amazon and pair it with a 28" or 32", flat or curved 4k monitor for $200-400 and still have money left over.
The iMac is NOT high-end, but it is luxury, and that's an important distinction.
My point was just that while it’s not low-end it’s also not luxury in a world unless you’re defining that term to mean something like “has clean lines without stickers” or “has a better display than a TV from a decade ago”.
Most of the cost of an iMac is the display and as your example shows, you don’t see significant savings unless you accept massive compromises on quality. 1080p FHDs is like saying you have a luxury car because your baseline is a golf cart and most of those have terrible color quality according to their spec sheets even if you ignore the low resolution. By the time you’re getting to models which are only one generation behind on CPU you’re looking at a $900 system with a display which is worse than what Apple shipped almost 20 years ago.
That wasn't their point. The point is that the average consumer doesn't really upgrade their desktop separately from their screen, if the two are separate. You do not need to replace an iMac after 4 years, they are in fact built to last.
Most people I know who don't use laptop exclusively don't replace their monitors that often. My work docking station is still rocking 2017 4k monitors and my wife home setup is similar.
I'd love to see a regulator mandate that computers like the iMac that have built in screens must have HDMI ports that allow them to be used as monitors.
This would be great for the consumer and prevent a lot of ewaste as people can use obsolete computers as monitors well past their useful lifespan as a monitor.
HDMI might be a bit more complex, but displayport should be doable since most devices use embedded displayport (eDP) anyway for their built in displays. I'm guessing the main cost would be adding a switching chip for switching between external and internal source.
While it is a shame it was never brought back, at the time it was removed it was unavoidable since the bandwidth required for 5k was beyond what could be carried across a single display port cable.
Displayport 1.3 which supports 5k 60fps became widely available with the NVIDIA 900 series just 5 months after the 5K iMac released. AMD followed suit 1 year after.
They could have very soon added support for it, maybe even launched with DP 1.3 support if they worked something out with AMD.
yeah I have an older model that had the well documented faulty / fragile screen connector for the LED back lights. Very expensive replacement screen was the recommended fix! all for the sake of a tiny six pin connector.
One of these days I'll split it down and see if my hands are still steady enough to solder on a new connector.
Anyway it was enough to swear me off any all-in-one devices ever again. I thought by now we'd be fully modular with desktop computer hardware.
I commented elsewhere, but my uncle is on his third iMac in 30 years. He keeps them a decade at a time. My father is still using an Intel iMac. Normal people do not upgrade their computers after purchase. Displays are generally not something that fail. These machines are capable of providing a decade or more of service to normal people.
I rounded too aggressively. His first iMac was the G4 on a stalk (2002). The second was one of the aluminum pre-Retina Intel models, perhaps 2012. He just purchased his third earlier this year. So, three iMacs in 22 years, but I expect him to keep this one for at least a decade too, at least 5 years, so that will get him to three iMacs in 27 years at minimum.
My last iMac lasted 10-years. I replaced it with the M3 iMac for my daughter. I will be happy if it takes her through High School graduation in 2030. If the M3 iMac is still running, I expect to use it for some intro to computer stuff for one of the younger kids.
Yes I cannot mine the iMac for parts at EOL, but realistically, I haven't really done that on any tower-based PC either.
That feature was available and only possible with specific Intel chips. It went away because Intel stopped supporting it. Sad the feature didn't come back to life in the AppleSilicon iMac.
Their display stack on Apple Silicon is still maturing. It took way too long for them to support more than a single external display. I bet you it's due for a comeback in the next decade.
For something that's literally designed to sit on a desk, yes... it's ridiculous to make it thinner in a dimension you never see vs one that you see all the time.
From the ifixit teardown of the previous M1 model [1], it seems that all the compute is going in the chin.
They can't put the compute in the back of the display itself, while maintaining the same thickness like an iPad (which has the same CPU), because the room behind the displays is dominated by the speaker system, allowing the iMac to have surprisingly good audio quality despite being so thin.
> The iMac is basically the same as the M4 iPad Pro, and the iPad Pro doesn't have a chin.
Cooling seems like it might be a factor here. The iMac's display is probably going to be run at a brighter (and thus hotter) setting AND it's more likely to be used to do things that require high load for extended periods of time, so putting it in its own space probably helps.
Yes that's mostly the reason. But considering there are report of display issues like we used to on poorly cooled Intel iMac (those things would get to 90 degree at the PSU, being over 50 degrees on the aluminum case outside) I would say this design is largely a failure.
They should just have separated everything in the foot, that would have made sense.
Some sort of modern Sunflower iMac if you will.
But Apple is more obsessed with thinness than practical design, so we get an impossibly thin iMac will all the flaws that brings...
iMac has active cooling, more ports and more power available to it to drive those ports (though the PSU is external, it’s still gotta have the internal circuitry to deliver that).
Someone got into their mind that it was important that everything is as thin as possible - hence the chin.
I miss the times when they used the form factor to actually make new shapes - both the sunflower and the cube looks more futuristic than the 2024 iMac.
The chin gives you a good touch-point for adjusting the angle of the display and the rotation angle of the entire base, without having to worry about touching the screen/screen bezel and getting finger prints on it.
Curious who uses iMac over a MBP with an external monitor? Is it mainly for front desk, businesses, and perhaps people with large homes and need stationary mac?
It might also be a good choice for those who always work at one desk, have established a work/life balance such that they don't need a portable computer, and would prefer not to pay extra to have portability that they just don't require.
An M4 iMac with 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $1700.
A 14" MBP with 8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $2000. Before you add a 27" monitor and desktop keyboard/pointing device.
Why pay that premium if you don't actually need to carry your desktop PC around?
I'm a typical software engineer nerd who uses a MacBook Pro for work.
My last two home computers have been 27" iMacs. Each one has lasted me about 8 years and I've been happy with both of them. Nice big display, good specs, not a lot of clutter. Really good bang for the buck.
At home, I use them for making music (Ableton Live), video production (DaVinci Resolve), photo processing (Photoshop and Lightroom), and programming (various IDEs and editors). I much prefer one good display over a pair of them.
Long-term, maybe it would be more cost effective to get a Mac Mini so that I don't end up paying to replace the display when I replace the machine. But display technology seems to advance about as fast as other hardware specs do, so I suspect I'd want a new monitor at about that rate anyway.
Going forward, though, I probably won't buy another iMac. That's largely because now that I make music with Ableton Live, I want a laptop that I can (aspirationally!) take to shows to play live on.
But for well over a decade, I've been a happy iMac user. I don't care about upgradeability. I buy a machine that has the specs I want when I buy it.
Do they sell matching monitors to go with these all in one style iMac's?
I'm not really an Apple person, but I can't imagine having a single monitor in this day and age and any other color would look silly next to a weird pastel pink device.
I agree... on the proviso that I can never afford 3 monitors, and I've never quite found 2-monitor setups comfortable because even with the very small bezels today I'm constantly shifting and turning away from the centre.
> A lot of people in this thread commenting without making an attempt to understand who this is for.
Why do you seem defensive? I asked a reasonable question of a group of people I thought might have product knowledge I lacked. I am not a Very Pink Apple Product SME, and stated as much in my question.
This isn't directed at you. I just happened to read a bunch of comments before yours. Stu2b50's response seemed like a good enough place to point out the dynamic.
I could never justify getting an iMac. All the downsides of a laptop & desktop in one; not upgradeable and not portable. Leaves me wondering how many of these Apple actually sell. A Mac Mini with a separate screen feels like it makes far more sense.
The iMacs very much aren't their main seller. A couple of key demographics use it though:
* Families with a shared computer in a common room. Super simple to setup, no fiddling, low price. In the video Apple showcased this use case. My parents have an M3 imac and it works great. They had their last iMac for ten years.
* Businesses buy these for reception areas and customers see the Apple logo on the back. Easy solution for a business with no IT department, great marketing for Apple.
Apple will probably always sell an iMac option as long as businesses buy and display them.
+1 for the business front desk. This is by far where I see them the most. They're very easy to deploy, and most of the software you're going to need it to be running works in a browser. A windows all-in-one PC is another option... but the chance of something going wrong/being annoying in the interim between "plunk it on the desk" and "open salesforce in chrome" is definitely higher.
My parents have had an iMac in their living room sitting quietly doing stuff (web apps, mainly) for 9 years now. Still works fine for all their use cases and the 5k screen remains a delight to behold.
i know a few people who have an iMac in their living room like that, with the same logic as the people who still have landlines - the laptops and cell phones get put away when you get home (or stay in the home office), so you can be present with your family. but sometimes you still need a computer for stuff, like controlling the music or quickly looking something up on google. but if it's not your computer, and it's not signed in to all your stuff, you're going to quickly do the thing you need doing and then get off it again.
iMac is perfect for that. it looks pretty, it's small enough that it can be put in a corner, and it's powerful enough that you can buy it, leave it there, and not think about having to upgrade it for a decade.
It's surreal for me how something so expensive can be thought as "perfect" for this usecase.
I'd say in cases like this having a cheap laptop or even a cheap all in one desktop computer is good enough. Why spend $2000 to browse the internet?
Being honest, I would bet the archetypical family that can prioritize "putting the phone away and being present" definitely skews more affluent than you may expect.
Eh, they start at $1300 (I suspect pretty much all non-commercial purchases are the base-line one) and last roughly forever (like, a decade is not an exaggeration; you see old ones around a fair bit). There’s a market, there.
Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.
The long support length lowers the effective cost. We only upgraded my parents' computer after ten years due to software support. It was so old it was soon going to lose even Google Chrome updates. But it ran like new.
The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.
Sorry for the 2000 price mark, seems like the base version costs 1300$.
In my personal experience, my parents (not super tech savvy) always had a windows laptop and never had a specific windows issue due to updates and whatever. If they did, it's more app specific, not necessarily os specific.
In general, I (personally) disagree with the statement that macs require less maintenance than windows or Linux, I use a mac for work, and I have a fair share of app related issues just like I would on a Windows or Linux machine. It's just my opinion.
I love the iMac as the main driver for my family of 5
* We want a dedicated space in the house for a family computer, so portability is no concern
* It has a very small footprint
* It looks the most like "furniture" out of all the options I've seen; pretty color & form factor, and no mess of cables. If you're male, think "wife approval factor".
* It does everything the family needs from it; runs Steam, documents, spreadsheet, browser, school, photos/videos, etc
* High interoperability with our family iPhones/iPads
Yeah a family friend PC that can end up on a desk or in the kitchen, or on a milk crate as a media player in an apartment, as a family computer they get years of use over time by different people in a family. From work to life to play.
Low number of cables has also been one of the points of appeal for the iMac, to the point that it was a focal point of marketing for the original model. For the average person's setup the current model only needs a power cable.
Of course, but those cables (or more likely, just one cable) can be stashed away in a drawer 99% of the time. The bundled keyboard and mouse/trackpad can go months between recharges, especially with lighter less frequent use that something like a living room or kitchen machine might see.
That's fine, but personal anecdotes are also a hugely misleading source of information too. In the time since the iMac redesign was released, I've seen 10x more of the old models than I have seen of the new ones. My local barber even uses an Intel iMac in Target Display mode to run their Windows small-form-factor PC.
HN is disillusioned, but so are a lot of the west coast product designers that expect businesses to buy these on day 1. The majority of businesses are going to buy whatever is cheap and effective - their realistic choice is between a Chromebox and a Mac Mini.
The sell but Apple makes around twice as much from services as they do from Mac. Wearables are even bigger than Mac. And within Mac, 90% of sales are laptops. I don't think Apple focuses that much about desktop Macs.
If you just want a family computer in the living room or somewhere, it's perfect. A place where you can just sit down and do some stuff. We have an iMac there without a login requirement.
Upgraded my father to one when the M1 came out. Perfect size and screen for him, more performance than he'll ever need (browsing and occasional word processing/spreadsheets).
I don't see the point in them anymore, too. 24" screen size is not interesting and I can't get more displays that do look like the first one. Will always look strangely mixed in environments.
edit: ok, others pointed out possible use cases. was thinking about the reception one, too.
Most Mac users seldom upgrade. I read here and myself often use a MacBook for 7+ years. Given screen tech changes alone, I think it makes a lot of sense.
I’ve owned an iMac before very happily. I just don’t own one now because they stopped making 27” versions.
27" iMac has been my daily driver for over 10 years, and I only replaced my last one because the screen cracked when I tried to repair it. I've got 64GB of RAM and a 27" thunderbolt display on both sides, making excellent for both software development and video editing. I don't know what I'd replace it with if it died.
What is preventing them from launching a 27" version?
I've been waiting to upgrade our 2017 model in the living room, was hoping the 27" was finally going to come now. Guess Mac Mini is the only route to go...
> What is preventing them from launching a 27" version?
most likely they (apple) think that would eat into some other market segment. for a 27" station they probably want you to get a mac mini with a studio display. apple is known for "gently (but firmly) nudging" you towards the more expensive options.
Note that those are revenue figures, not unit sales. That is why the Mac Pro comes out so high. the unit cost is so much higher that even with low volumes, the revenue is noticeable.
Note the data isn't actually public - Apple does not break Mac revenue or sales figures down to per device. These are all just 'market intelligence' estimates.
I'd be interested in numbers on some of this. From my view, the upgradability is a bit of a red herring for most users. Computers are fast enough for most uses that it just doesn't matter.
And frankly, the “upgradeability” of most desktops is a myth in my experience.
By the time I’ve ever wanted to upgrade a Windows or Linux PC, a new CPU probably isn’t going to fit into the same socket as the one I had so now I need a new motherboard too. I probably want a new GPU if it was a gaming PC and if it wasn’t I would be using an integrated GPU anyway.
I think the only thing I’ve ever kept from an “upgrade” was my case and some memory sticks. But I probably would have been better off—both in time and money—just selling the damn thing as a whole and buying an entirely new set of components.
TL;DR, year-over-year bumps just aren’t worth the price of upgrades, but by the time it is worth doing you probably want to upgrade so many parts there’s little left to keep. YMMV.
I agree with you entirely except for if we skip the year over year part.5-
Time of purchase upgrade ability, if we’re talking about getting to 128 or 256 GB of RAM. Time of purchase to upgrade to multiple high res screens that match. Dedicated GPUs… I bet there is a top of the line home hobbiest LLM oriented GPU from Nvidia or AMD in the next 3 years that will cleanly connect to recent chip architectures. I doubt it will run optimally tied to a Mac. It’ll be something that you could also rack in a server.
If you want a new CPU after a decade it's absolutely as you describe: you need a new mainboard and probably new memory (DDR5 just came out), and end up keeping only the case, drive, case fans and PSU, if that.
For other components it mostly works. You can smoothly upgrade from 8GB RAM all the way to 128GB, get a new GPU, whatever the current WiFi standard is, more silent cooling, more, bigger or faster drives, etc. If you replace something every 2-3 years you can ship-of-theseus the same computer for a surprisingly long time at pretty low cost
I have been building and upgrading PCs for like thirty years, from 10 to 40 and through varying degrees of expendable income. I genuinely cannot ever remember there being a time where it made sense to upgrade a single component.
I’m not going to say it doesn’t make sense to do so for anyone, but it certainly wasn’t in my experience.
You can hit a RAM limit on some lower-end motherboards quite quickly depending on the memory controller and you might only get so far with GPUs as well depending on the type of PCIe slots.
I'm not sure what decade you have in mind, but for all the recent ones, the memory controller has both been on the CPU, and not been part of the differentiation between low-end and high-end CPUs for a given socket. So the only significant RAM limitation coming from the motherboard is if it's a small form factor board with only two slots instead of four.
A person in college on a tight budget might choose a budget-conscious PC, with an average amount of RAM and a modest hard drive. A few years later, component prices will have fallen and the PC will be showing its age thanks to its modest components. Adding a larger hard drive and more RAM will get a few more years out of it.
On the other hand, a mid-career professional programmer has plenty of disposable income, so if they're buying a PC today they can chuck in 128GB of RAM and not need to upgrade for the next 10 years.
If they bought a “budget conscious” PC, what are the odds that they’ll have hit the limits of their RAM but not any other component? If they bought a cheap laptop, for example, what are the odds that the hardware isn’t starting to fail? If it’s a desktop, what are the odds that by the time they need a new CPU a worthwhile upgrade will still be socket-compatible? Usually the budget options are already well into the service lifecycle for things like that and at least anecdotally the budget buyers I know buy a new one 1-2 times per decade rather than upgrading anything.
> If they bought a “budget conscious” PC, what are the odds that they’ll have hit the limits of their RAM but not any other component?
20 years ago, a budget-conscious 1.3GHz CPU for $130 was just a binned version of a high-end 1.6GHz $339 CPU. So the budget-conscious CPU would have pretty much the same longevity as a higher-end CPU.
10 years ago, a budget-conscious user could pick up a 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPU for ~$192 (like the i5-4590). Today you'd be due for an upgrade, but it wouldn't be unusably slow. Indeed, Intel are still selling 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPUs to this day, like the i3-14100.
And of course components like sound cards and gigabit ethernet ports don't really 'hit their limits'. You'll probably want to upgrade your wifi, admittedly - but a USB dongle is what, $20?
Yes, but the question was how often you only need one of those. You can toss a slightly better CPU into that socket but how likely is it that you’re limited by only that much? Your memory bus, storage subsystem, etc. won’t get noticeably faster and those are what most people notice - especially when their starting point was low end on the day it was released.
That Wi-Fi dongle is a good example: your $20 dongle is probably a waste of money because it won’t reach the maximum for whatever wifi spec it claims to support and it tends to be the case that cheap hardware does not reach the maximum USB speeds promised so the performance impact is likely to be unnoticeable.
Allow me to rephrase, then. I have personally upgraded PCs many times.
The most common upgrade for me has been adding more disk space. Back in 1995, a 1 Gigabyte hard drive for $250 was just the thing for your new installation of Windows 95.
The second-most-common upgrade is getting an employer-issued machine with a baseline spec and needing it to be a bit beefier. If you're running virtual machines or dealing with large datasets or analysing large heap dumps you might need some extra RAM; if you're doing machine learning you might need more disk space.
The third-most-common upgrade is a better GPU. PCI Express means modern cards will plug into 10-year-old motherboards. Maybe your PC was just short of what you needed for that 4K display, or you'd like to play some newer games.
Of course, if you're informed enough to do this, you're undoubtedly informed enough to know not to expect to upgrade these modern Macs.
Me too, but it’s increasingly uncommon. Going from a 500MB to 1GB drive back in the day was huge but since the late 2000s most normal people I know seem to have plateaued, both because they’re not generating data as fast as storage densities increased and because cloud storage has soaked up a lot of use-cases. Even the gamers I know don’t upgrade as often as they used to.
In your experience for sure, myself and everyone I know with a desktop upgrades bit by bit where they can. My recent one was 16->32gb ram, even cheaper now since it's only ddr4.
Tho the next will likely be a full upgrade as my last main build was 2018 with the mini-itx I still have. But if I want to do more ai stuff I'll probably need to hop up to m-atx or even just atx. 1080ti I'm currently on was the last before the era of sanely sized gpus came to an abrupt end
This is what had me thinking this is a red herring.
I remember buying computers in the past piece wise with an eye for what component I would want next. I... can't remember the last time I did this. And for my kids, it is not something they are interested in. At all.
I bought an iMac a while back. I left it connected to a bunch of music studio equipment. It does its job as the center of a home recording studio—gigabit ethernet and plenty of USB ports. I am not considering replacing it yet, even though it stopped receiving updates from Apple. It can’t run Logic 11 (it’s stuck on 10).
Most computers are part of a 3D space where you can occupy more than just the frontal view. You will notice the screen thinness from other angles. it's not the most important aspect but it a nice enhancement. This are often used in environments where they are seen from other angles like homes, front desks, schools.
My uncle is on his third iMac. He owns them for a decade at a time. When he sends emails, the subject is always "From <his name>" because he shared an email account with my aunt years ago and even though he no longer does, he still puts his name in the subject.
I've provided my father (82 years, living 500km away from me) with hand-me-downs Mac laptops since 2009: from the initial Macbook Core Duo up to a the most recent M2 Air. He does web browsing and frequent FaceTime calls with me just for checking out how they are. Those little laptops last him until the battery dies.
He could very well be using Windows with a cheaper laptop, but I consider the amount of support hours that I've saved to more than compensate for that.
Meet my relatives who recently retired an x86 iMac, upgraded to an Arm-based one, and will probably upgrade to something like this, but only after another 7-10 years, when the current iMac is far out of support and getting so slow that it becomes unbearable. They use it as a shared family computer, almost exclusively for downloading photos from a (also very old) digital camera and watching Youtube videos.
Judging by the sibling comments I'm not the only one with relatives like this!
At the very least, they use them at the front desk of every Apple building for the admin who signs people in. :)
I had one during the pandemic. I got it at a steep discount but it was really nice when I didn't need to go anywhere. I'm giving it to my son to put in his room.
Seems like they're useful for families and kids, and corp environments that use Macs for the folks who work in office and don't move around (admins, lab workers, etc)
The “separate screens” you can buy all suck. They aren’t 5k resolution, and they always have some weird edge case issue you find out about 2 weeks after you buy it.
I think iMacs end up where someone wants a computer to look nice (either personally or professionally). You could have these in a none tech environment and they will look good.
You’re completely right and yet the sight of one fills me with desire.
Possibly because it has a direct line right back to the original Macintosh. Such that when I showed my 11yo cousin my Macintosh SE, he called it an ‘iMac’.
For a long time the best Apple display you could get was in the iMacs. An iMac with nothing used with it besides a wireless keyboard and mouse, where you can even hide the ethernet port in the power brick, makes for a nice clean desk.
Since none of the options there are tangibly more upgradeable than the other, you can reduce your point to "The iMac is not portable."
I bet that iMac M4 sales meet their target, which is probably on par with the iMac M1 sales. And those were apparently good enough that they finally released an updated model.
They are perfect for suuuuuper casual people. Perfect for your grandparents for example. Most people I know who own these are elderly. Yes, an iPad would also work or a MacBook too but elderly people aren't travelling nor are they gonna buy a MacMini and get a monitor. They just need their simple to set up, all-in-one desktop computer.
schools are a big one. If they are going to buy macs, being all in one the school IT doesn't have to worry about a separate monitor to troubleshoot problems with.
> Leaves me wondering how many of these Apple actually sell.
The target audience for this machine is my local yoga studio (which has two), my local comic book shop (which has two), and my local spa (which has one).
They run a web browser, some kind of inventory or booking app in the browser, and Spotify. That's it.
Last year I went to Bali and the Gili Islands on vacation and both of the places I stayed checked me in on an M1 iMac. In that instance they were both also running the WhatsApp app.
That’s overstating what happened there and what was sent. OCSP validation happened only for signed executables and the only bit of information is the hash of the developer certificate being verified, which was not logged in conjunction with your IP.
Apple knows that a Mac user checked the revocation status of the TOR Project’s signing key. They don’t log your IP, your Mac caches the result so it’s not even every time you launch the browser, and if knowing when your browser was launched is a successful timing attack it means the TOR protocol is too broken to be used – which I rather doubt is true regardless of what random commenters may confidently assert.
If the App is delivered outside of the Mac App Store, then you could just verify the signature, then resign / replace it with a local one (using the "codesign" tool). Dealing with OTA updates after you've done this might take a bit more effort.
Resigning will appease Gatekeeper. As a result there will be no X.509 compliant OCSP checks made for the developer certificate - because it won't be there any more.
The Tor browser folks could do this as a privacy and security feature for you.
No. It's mostly on device, and the not on-device stuff uses incredibly clever computer science to run code in an auditable, non trackable way on cloud hardware. It's called "Private Cloud Compute" https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
An arbitrary limit of 32G of memory? Laughable. Glad I exited the Apple ecosystem long ago. Only have 2-3 year old machines now. Current phone is “free” from carrier due to trade ins.
I think Apple should shift away from personal computing (iMac, MBP/A, iPhone) and focus on selling their SoC. Get these into data centers.
Powering a data center with their chips would likely result in significant decrease in power consumption. I am running an “old” M1 as a small remote k8s cluster for personal dev work and home automation. Works wonderfully.
Power consumption during peak load (20 W?) is very low compared to my Intel based computer (120-150W?) I use for occasional gaming.
> I think Apple should shift away from personal computing (iMac, MBP/A, iPhone)
This is going to be the most insane thing I read all day.
> Get [their SoC] into data centers.
This is a great idea. Apple discontinued servers a long time ago, and it's too bad, now that they've got the new silicon they could be crushing it in the sector.
Apple has very little understanding of Enterprise and Datacenter markets. They proved that with the Xserve, despite having some success - they should have "owned" the market by driving down the costs of running, managing and maintaining hardware over the long term - but didn't, or got bored about it, and missed the opportunity.
Form factor isn't updated afaik, but man, I am just so so impressed with the form factor. It looks like a giant tablet. Makes me want to hold it and draw on it.
> You can build PCs there are more powerful than that Mac, cheaper. And you can easily repair them.
Nobody’s buying a Mac to game. The gaming is a bonus for a segment of their market, is why they mention it at all. Zero Mac sales are motivated primarily by gaming. “Does this do enough gaming, well enough, that I can avoid buying a Steamdeck, or that I can get rid of this bulky PC that I use only for gaming?” are things their prospective buyers might wonder, not “should I buy this if I want a gaming computer?” (No, obviously)
Yes except so few games run. Even games I suspect don't need the power.
Examples: Cocoon, ufo50, Outer wilds, Harold Halibut, Noita
> “Does this do enough gaming, well enough, that I can avoid buying a Steamdeck, or that I can get rid of this bulky PC that I use only for gaming?”
I think the answer is "No". I'm writing this from a Mac. In the last year, so many games I've wanted to play while traveling, someone tells me about it, I go check it out, no mac version. I just have to wait until I get home.
Sometimes I get lucky, "A Short Hike", but more often than not there's no Mac version.
If you want to play almost any possible game, yeah, you need a PC. (I have one. And a Steam Deck. I kinda half-regret taking up gaming as a hobby any time I touch either of those, but not quite enough to ditch them)
If you’re flexible on what you play, it might be fine for gaming. Like someone with a Switch might be like “eh, sure I’d like to play the new Assassins Creed, but not enough to get a PlayStation—my kids want the Switch, and I don’t want two consoles, so I’ll just find stuff to play on here instead.” I think that’s the market-segment they’re talking to when they write ad or marketing copy about Mac gaming capabilities.
> You can build PCs there are more powerful than that Mac, cheaper. And you can easily repair them
Why would anyone buy a Porsche? You can buy an F-150 with a >1 ton payload capacity, fit 6 people in it and if you get the EV version it might be even faster than the base config Porsche.
The PC will take up a lot of space, use a lot more power, be loud and be look ugly. Some people might care about these things even if you don't.
To be honest it's the Mac that feels clunky, at least compared to Linux. Why does every app have its own updater? Why are the animations so painfully slow?
That's fair. People have different preferences. I personally don't even really care much for macOS these days..
> every app have its own updater
Well certainly not all due. But mainly because they are not part of the OS/distribution. And it's not like there arent any proprietary apps on Linux that have to be installed/updated independently.
Also you can use the App Store if you are so inclined. IMHO an awful experience but still better than the extremely laggy GUI app stores on Gnome/KDE.
Maybe more recent versions of macOS have made it better (last I used it was in 2020), but I remember the app store being really slow at everything. KDE Discover is a bit slow but feels like it functions better overall.
Sounds like you haven't really used macOS a lot. What is this thing about every app having its own updater? Animations slow? It's like the polar opposite, and I've been using macOS since it was called Mac OS X in 2003. IMHO the biggest asset of the macOS ecosystem is the OS itself - not the HW (which of course helps). But the OS is incredibly good as a desktop Unix.
I used macOS full time for many years, actually. I dealt with this every day. When rebooting I saw a ton of popups, because all of my apps wanted to update themselves and each of them shipped a separate updater.
I use Linux now and I'm much happier. It has weird bugs at times, but is overall both faster and much more polished.
I wonder what apps those were. I rebooted yesterday and nothing popped up. I suppose MS Office would have tried that though, but I've switched off auto-updates for it permanently, as I don't really use it.
* Outlook/Office (not available on Linux so I'll exclude this one)
* an app for being able to use different scroll directions across mouse and trackpad (I prefer natural scrolling on trackpad and the opposite on mouse, something that macOS strangely doesn't let you do)
* an app to set a flat acceleration profile on mouse (I strongly prefer no acceleration on mouse after years playing FPS games)
* an app to let me use my ultrawide monitor at full resolution and refresh rate -- this was a weird problem and I don't remember all the details, but the app did work in the end
* an app to cmd-tab by window rather than by app -- again, personal preference here but I strongly believe that there's no moral difference in switching between two Firefox windows versus between a Firefox and a Safari window
On Linux, the first is handled by my package manager, and the last four are built into KDE as settings.
On top of all of this I was using yabai, but updates to that were handled via Homebrew so that wasn't as bad. (I generally have lots of complaints about Homebrew though -- for example, if I ask it to install a binary, I want exactly that binary to be on my PATH. I don't want to use Homebrew's version of pkgconfig, LLVM etc as well. More recently, on Linux, I've switched to Nix for this which does the right thing.)
I recommend these to friends who want a simple computer setup. Many people have dramatically different needs and wants than I do as a software professional.
Apple knows this, and so it markets it to them rather than to us.
With an M4 and 16gb+ ram it is more computer than anything I’ve ever owned. I write text files for a living. Might be able to limp along on a souped up 486, definitely a Pentium 90.
I could do my work on one, but yeah, the screen size would be annoying long term. The sad part is that it's the exact form factor my dad wants. It's absolutely perfect for his needs, except it's wildly overpowered and overpriced.
The 4K monitor is going to push up the price, and I'm all for giving everyone a high quality monitor, but I'd argue that the iMac is 30-40% over budget for those who'd like that type of computer. I think you could get away with having it be a $1000 computer, but not $1600, for the lowest spec'ed model.
4, 4.5K makes little difference, and no $1300 is the US price, not including taxes. It's 12,000DKK including taxes. People has to pay the tax, so it makes no sense to not factor that in when setting the price.
Taxes apply to everything you would buy. It's not unreasonable to compare two items on their base price with the understanding that you'll be paying proportionally more when the deed is done.
They aren't really available here as refurbished. I think they've sold very few, and even the M1 is pretty overpowered for most people, so there has been little replacement done I think.
Heck I still use my M1 Air for everything, it's fine.
It only shows two USB-C ports while further down the marketing material talks about "all four USB-C ports". EDIT: the low-end 8-core model for $1300 only has two ports.
It also has what looks like a rear-facing camera in the stand cutout. What is that for? EDIT: It's the magnetic power connector. I did not expect that to be round.
Supposedly there's a gigabit Ethernet port somewhere too. Not shown in any of the pictures on the site that I can find.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 366 ms ] threadhttps://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-43-4k-usb-c-...
Also, too bad all the TV makers stopped making 8K screens in 55" and below.
I just wish that the base macbook pro models supported 3 external screens without resorting to a software-based video-over-usb DisplaySync (not DisplayPort) connection.
Of course, the market has also decided that decent aspect ratios aren't worth doing either. If there were 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4 options—more versatile for productivity—we'd probably settle on something between 21" and 24".
When I switched to a MBP M2 I got an Asus ProArt 32'' 4K and really like it. Comes precalibrated out of the box.
Obviously big difference in DPI too, but 4K still looks great at 32''.
For reference, I'm using the PA329CV. I don't know if all ProArt monitors use the same quality of panel.
It's logically two displays crammed together, which apparently makes Linux support difficult. Someone posted on HN a link to a Chinese company whose sole purpose seems to be making boards that let you drive an iMac Pro display with a traditional display cable. It's left as an exercise to the reader how mad your company would be if you tried that on your corp device.
Expensive, but I adore the pixel density considering I spend all day staring at text :)
I'd be seriously tempted by an iMac if it had M4 Pro + a 27" 5K display. I just don't feel it's likely as they'll probably see it as cannibalising Mac Studio + Studio Display sales.
It's insane that we've had retina displays for over a decade, and Apple still seems to be more-or-less the only game in town for a 5k 27" display.
If I didn't already have the LG Ultrafine, I would have bought one of the studio displays.
The panels seem the same but everything on the Apple one is better, as you would expect.
But lately my LG is starting to have issues with ghosting and color shifts around the edges. It's still ok to use (I'm typing this on it) but I guess it's nearing the end of it's useful life.
It has a few upsides that don't get written about often, compared to other monitors:
- Apple is extremely picky about panel QC, making things like dead pixels and patchy backlights much less common
- Its design practically eliminates the backlight bleed that's common with other monitors due to variances in bezel/panel fastener tightness
- No coil whine (surprisingly common even in other high end monitors)
- Some of the best glossy antiglare treatment I've seen, without the "gritty" coating that can cause a "sparkle" effect that's common on Dell monitors
- It wakes up and displays a picture almost instantly
It's not perfect and I'd prefer better specs for the money, but it's not a bad monitor. I've tested models that are more expensive than the Studio Display that fail to check some of these boxes.
I've often it seen it in the $900 neighborhood at Best Buy and B & H. It's $1600 right now at both of them but I don't know if that is just one of those full price spikes like Amazon has or if they too are like Amazon.
It’s much better looking than the LG ultrafine 5K, slightly more functional, and costs more.
What’s the idiot part? Price?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22968960/apple-studio-disp...
Similarly my car has a computer in it that I "can't use", except it does car stuff.
Yes, it's infuriating that they effectively made an iMac, don't let you run your own software on it, but do charge iMac prices for it.
Also, if you're a consumer who wants a retina-class desktop display, do you have any better option? So far as I can tell, the 27" 4Ks we bought for my office ~9 years ago are still state-of-the-art if you're unwilling to consider Apple's option.
People are taking exception to your "idiot product" remark, because you're standing so high on your principles that you're calling people who are willing to make a financial sacrifice to get the best available option "idiots." If you spend hours a day in front of a screen, you can justify amortizing out stupid-expensive over the amount of time you spend using it.
We'd all like to see either just-the-screen for half the price, or a revived iMac Pro at the current price; but neither of those are options anyone can buy right now.
Edit: The real point is you've been conditioned into thinking you need a 5k or even a 6k display. As someone who has done professional media work, no you do not.
Apple's monitors are products sold to people who don't know seemingly don't know anything about monitors, color accuracy, who don't calibrate, or have to test against multiple devices to ensure readability or clarity of picture.
They're really nice toys for people with a lot of money, not unlike Teenage Engineering products, except Apple markets them in earnest to "pros" not "professionals." People who know better use different products.
So much for being an "idiot" product…
On one hand, companies willing to spend more than $250 on monitors will rather give you a 32" ultra-wide, because that's more useful to the typical office monkey worker.
On the other, the PC enthusiast customer base is almost synonymous to gamers, who'd rather want high refresh rates than a silly 5K resolution they cannot use.
If a 27" iMac did exist, it makes the comparison to the Studio Display now a bit odd - because they'd both cost roughly the same price but one has a computer and one doesn't.
They also did move the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse to USB-C.
Only for the bundled peripherals, it seems. The Apple Store now only lists the full-size Lightning keyboard without Touch ID in white, which is even worse than before when you could get various permutations of tenkeyless, Touch ID, and black.
Apparently, something internal to how the OS handles mouse scrolling was changed, and only the Magic Mouse gets a proper scrolling experience using built-in drivers. It is possible to fix this, but only with custom software (either drivers for specific mice or general tools for all mice).
for it to be any smoother, there would need to be some artificial smoothing of the scroll wheel input. and i'd rather not have that.
For example, when using the wired Mighty Mouse, the same motion of my finger will sometimes scroll a couple lines and sometimes scroll the entire page or not scroll at all. The same mouse plugged into Windows does not exhibit this problem.
This is not normal and you're possibly facing a bug. I have a Master 3S and mine scrolls exactly the same distance with every click of the wheel.
I don't have any Logitech mice anymore, but maybe they've learned how to speak to Macs or worked with Apple to make them better. I had Logitech mice in the past, ca. 2-3 years ago, and they had the same problems then. I did notice that plugging in a non-Apple mouse results in a "Setup Your Keyboard" prompt, which I just quit out of (it's not a keyboard...), but maybe that would install a driver if I followed through? Though, the Mighty Mouse is an Apple mouse, and it still sucks on macOS but not on Windows.
And yes, fixing this requires custom software.
This is not true. Again, I have a Master 3S and I have natively, through macOS settings, bound Mouse 4 and 5 to mission control.
It is not my understanding that Apple has any responsibility for ensuring equal access and capabilities for third-party accessories on their own weird, proprietary, invented-in-house computing systems.
Therefore, it is also not my understanding that they can be negligent on these matters.
Ergonimics, the polling rate, the way the glass gets greasy, the scratchy hard plastic on the bottom.
Truly, inferior to the Logitech MX Master in all ways except looks. (which is subjective).
But it takes literally a few seconds to get a days worth of charge out of the mouse, Apple clearly don't want you to leave it plugged in to use as a wired mouse: why? idk, because they hate choice, or perhaps its because they know it would overcharge the battery and bulge, or perhaps even still, people would get weird expectations about "wired being better for latency" despite the mouse not using the data connections on the wire.
We'll never know. But the charging on the bottom is such a non-issue in reality that it makes me wonder if anyone actually owned that mouse, or they just think it looks funny. Personally, I'd rather they fix the other issues with the mouse, the charging was legitimately never an issue.
I have personally been in meeting where my boss forgot to charge her magic mouse and we had to wait two minutes for her to open the stuff we needed to discuss. It happens.
But they've done incremental updates to the design since, they could have easily fixed that by now.
however i will say three years in, either a software update or hardware issue is now killing the battery and i have to charge it every week or two and that sucks
salty that i now have airpod pros, an iphone 13, and the magic keyboard and mouse all with their dumb lightning bolt or whatever it's called. going to have to rebuy all this to forever rid myself of non-usb-c cables but at least in 2024 it's finally happened as an option
Each of those times you walked away, did you ever try plugging it in, counting to ten and then continuing to use it afterwards? That's what I used to do.
I use a trackpad now though.
it annoys everyone, it's a dumb design, you get a message from your Mac telling you that the mouse has no charge and suddenly you can't work anymore for a few minutes, it's idiotic, plain and simple
You don't like the mouse, that's fine, I also don't like the mouse.
But unless you've actually used the mouse for an extended period: I don't think you understood the point that you:
A) don't need it plugged in constantly
and
B) if you charge it for a handful of seconds it lasts the rest of the day, meaning you don't actually have to stop working.
If I get the warning the mouse is getting low on charge I just plug it in, go grab a drink or use the bathroom, and by the time I get back it's good for the rest of the day.
Then all I have to do is remember to plug it in overnight and it'll be good for months. YMMV.
Plugging in for a few seconds to get a days worth of charge is a stupid thing to actually require or consider normal.
I also want to use my mouse tomorrow, and even the next day, and do so without having to plan ahead "today I will leave my mouse plugged in overnight because I can tell by clairvoyance that it is about to run out" or "I have been tracking the calender like a menstrual cycle and it's time, tonight is the night!" or "I have set up a sheduled alarm on my wonderful Apple Watch to remind me to go look at the settings somewhere to check the mouse battery level and see if it's time to charge tonight"...
And if you don't plan, then you have a few choices, charge for a minute and have to do it again without warning in 2 days, a constant stream of unplanned forced trips to the coffee maker, or just charge for 30 seconds every single day as a part of your routine, or stop and wait for a full charge on the spot for however long that is, or the worst of both worlds, get on with your day by charging for a minute now, and then don't fail to remember to plug it back in before leaving several hours of busy-ness later, which you absolutely will of course.
There is no version of any of that that is remotely convenient or sensible, and certainly not an upgrade from every other mouse in the world. There is no version of this that isn't patently ridiculous. You can work around it and tolerate it because it's not as bad as having to dig ditches for a living. If there was something about mice that the tech just didn't exist for it to work any other way, then sure it's possible to live with, because humans are adaptable. But it's not good, and it's not better than the already norm for $2 mice sice 20 years ago.
It's baffling weird to even try.
If you disable all notifications and it really runs out, waiting 10 seconds for it to charge is... fine...
I doubt you're using a wired mouse, and most wired mice are actually worse at charging than the magic mouse- the only difference is that you can use them while plugged in, so it's not as annoying that they charge so slow and use more power.
Ultimately it comes down to effective utility, people harping on about the placement of the charging cable without respect to the actual usability of the device holistically have quite literally missed the forest for the trees.
Like I said, theres plenty of reasons to dislike the mouse, but this ranks among the lowest and honestly the weird hate-boner for that decision just makes people look like they don't know what they're talking about to me.
As I said, you rarely needed to remember to charge it. Till you would in the midst of something.
Anyway, I never liked the MM so when I had my iMac I bought a magic trackpad (which you could charge while using, small bonus).
To me the plug placement was an inconvenience, regardless of how invisible it is to you.
On top of that, it never charged in few seconds after years of use, mine would take longer just to connect to the iMac again.
I was glad to buy magic trackpad I could leave connected 24/7 and never think about it (also I liked it much more than the MM in general).
People think it will be a problem, so make ignorant commentary about it being idiotic, yet in practice it's fine, and not the worst aspect of a terrible mouse.
It lasted so long, even after the warning, that I never got any urgency.
It's probably just Apple's usual arrogance. They could have easily designed the mouse so that you can keep using it while it's charging, but the designer chose otherwise. And because this is a minor enough issue, Apple doesn't have to fix it and admit that they were wrong.
That's quite contrary to my experience, granted I've only used two magic mice, one for 2 years in 2014-16, and another from 2020-2023.
It's possible that your experience is much more common though!
That thing charges annoyingly slowly and uses battery way faster than reasonable.
I have had and used both and the first version was MUCH less annoying. Swapping is an instant activity and back to business; remember to put it to charge later when you get a message is an unnecessary mental load and unrealistic expectation from the user, the technology is supposed to work for the user not the other way around. The fast-charging bullshit everyone talks about is just displacement of the problem, the next day you will get another interruption and mental load to remember to charge.
On top of that, the battery life is actually terrible, it's crazy how little useful life you get from it considering how heavy it is and how terrible the sensor is.
Personally, I really like the ability to "free scroll" in all direction on the surface and the 2-3 finger swipes but it's really not worth the hassle.
People boast about Apple trackpads being good but as far as I'm concerned, they don't have much choice considering that's the only thing they seem to be able to work out ok. Nobody on PCs wants to use trackpads, it makes no sense compared to the performance of a mouse and gestures are unreliable compared to mouse buttons/keyboard shortcuts/macro keys.
https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/powerplay.html
The product is already several years old after all (release date 2017)
Or bypass the idea of the patent altogether by making their mouse charge wirelessly and then releasing a giant wireless charger that happens to work pretty well as a mouse pad later.
Option 2 is a great way to land in court. It's one thing to steal IP from a tiny company or individual but Logitech can afford lawyers.
I believe (unfounded) originally it was made for asthetic reasons, as to not interrupt the sushi shape, and that not being able to use it while charging was not considered to be that much of a downside. And then since then Apple just hasn't bothered spending engineering effort on 'fixing' that design decision ever since.
Consider that the "fanboys" simply care about something other than you do. There was a time in my life when I had probably very similar preferences as you, but life changes.
The mouse port thing is like a canary in the coal mine, betraying the people who just like taking shots at Apple, but generally are very ill informed. I think Apple should keep the port on the bottom purely so we can get the shortcut to discarding people's opinions when they hoist it up to concern troll.
For actual Apple Mouse users, charging is just the least concerning thing imaginable. The battery lasts an absolute eternity. I'm using one right now that I've had for at least five or so years and I charge it once in forever, it charges super quickly, and it's just not a factor in my life at all.
You cannot reasonably make this assertion and expect that it's true. I mean, you outed yourself right there as someone not capable of a reasonable discussion. Sort of a "canary in a coal mine" of your own.
I have never once had my Logitech mice run out of batter, not once, not ever. It charges as I use it. I'll take that all day long over the "magic mouse" with a charging port underneath so you can't even use the thing if it runs out of battery an an inopportune moment. But sure, go through the mental gymnastics of excusing a really bad design by Apple because you're an obvious fanboy.
>I have never once had my Logitech mice run out of batter, not once, not ever.
Okay?
I have never, ever had my magic mouse run out of battery, or even come close. Again, you have zero idea what you're talking about. You cannot comprehend how long the battery lasts, or how ridiculously quickly it charges. The time to make a cup of coffee is days of usage.
It is never actual Magic Mouse users complaining about this. Ever. It's always the peanut gallery leaving dumb comments.
Like, why in the world did you click into a story about new Apple products to yap about how you would never buy Apple products. Bizarre. I'm not a "fan boy" for the reality that the magic mouse is actually perfectly fine, and it doesn't make me a fan boy to point out the peanut gallery that appears in every single Apple store with uninformed, often absurd takes.
Cheers! Hope you have a great day.
Lol, no, someone just replied to you saying that they do this.
Okay?
>I have never, ever had my magic mouse run out of battery, or even come close.
The person that replied to you that they do this, has in fact had their magic mouse run out of battery, and they used the second one while the first one charges.
You're just wrong.
This conversation is boring and you're making assertions that aren't valid.
Have the day you deserve.
Ignoring that I was clearly being rhetorical, they specifically note that they bought two mice because they have two Macs. The "I let one die when at home and use the other" is a consequence of that choice, not the other way around. This is super clear.
You literally, directly claimed that Apple is making a monetary choice to try to force people to buy second mice for when one dies. This is...hilarious conjecture, to put it politely.
>This conversation is boring and you're making assertions that aren't valid.
It is. The tiring noise of the Apple haters who define their personality by being Apple haters and run into every Apple conversation to make it known remains extremely boring.
So when I get the "low battery warning" on the desktop MM, I put it on charge and use the other one for an hour while it recharges.
Then I bought an iMac and the 2nd MM came with it.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not that unusual.
We're discussing in this context. I still stand by the claim that there are probably around zero people on the planet that bought a second MM specifically to use it while the other one is charging.
I'm not doubting that there exists a group of people that happen to have acquired two MMs, however that came to be.
https://www.logitechg.com/en-ca/products/gaming-mice/pro-x-s...
Yet, when I read forums as I was troubleshooting something, I found multiple posts where someone claims the mouse doesn't work in "wired mode", and multiple people replied saying they only ever use the mouse with a usb cable and never wirelessly so surely something is wrong, leading to lots of confusion and returned mouses. In reality, the mouse can only work when plugged in if it is also paired as a wireless device.
If you think about it, the design choice to support charging only and not data makes some sense. Having a wired and wireless mode may confuse users if they don't have a Logitech driver installed that ensures settings are persistent across both modes. Apple's design is good from this point of view, it only works wirelessly and there is no design language that suggests it has a wired mode.
Logitech gaming mouses do have wired and wireless modes, but I think they generally do not have bluetooth, so presumably the mouse and/or its driver can more easily take care of persistent settings between modes by not supporting bluetooth which is constrained to support certain features.
All that being said, I believe the main reason for the port being on the bottom of Magic Mouse was simply to avoid cost of retooling for manufacturing when they switched from AA batteries to a non-removable chargeable battery.
> The Apple Mouse 2 also comes with a Quick Charge feature that provides nine hours of use with a two-minute charge.
https://www.jackery.com/blogs/knowledge/how-to-charge-apple-...
In the same way people miss meeting reminders ahead of the meeting and Google meet/calendar combo still fails to do a reminder at 0 minutes by default. It's a bad design that doesn't account for real behaviour.
That's fine. It's why we have choices.
Now if you'll excuse me I must get back to complaining ad nauseam to strangers about how much I hate a mouse I don't use. Oh wait no I don't.
Every time it's mentioned people come out of the woodwork to complain about "how can I use it while it's charging".
Meanwhile the people that actually use one know that isn't an issue - and rebut the complaints.
...not.
A lot of people tend to simply leave the mouse plugged into a cable when using it, even once it's charged. Apple is famous for the image that they would like their products to convey. They don't want people leaving the mouse plugged in because it's convenient or they're unable to act on a month-long warning. They want to force you to use the mouse as it was designed -- wireless.
I'm not saying it's good, I don't have one myself and I plainly don't like the ergonomics of it. I like the look and I think I would be able to work around the port-location constraint, but it just doesn't feel nice to hold.
Pretty to look at, though.
Sure, and you might forget the mouse at home. Or the cord!
They can't solve every problem.
But this one. This one they certainly can.
Not sure it's bad design as much as a design decision. I like the shape of the current MM. It works for my hands and usage. It's also slim enough to make it both a great desktop mouse and travel mouse (I used to have both!). Could Apple keep the exact same design and add a port to one of the sides? Sure, but it remain almost unusable when plugged in and not change much.
So when people complain about the port on the bottom, what they are really complaining about is the overall design of the MM. The want the MM to be thicker and have a port on the front or back, but that's no longer the MM we have. For people who want that mouse, there are plenty out there to chose from.
I’m a long time MM user and have one at every computer I use (work and multiple personal). My first one was one with the AA batteries. Never had a problem with this.
If you have a car, you have to fill it up with gas (or charge the battery) too and you can’t use it while doing that. Similar deal.
But it is such a non-issue to me that I really don’t care that it exists. I also would not care if they made it possible. But as an actual user of multiple of them, it really, truly is a non-issue for me.
My issue is that mine are all lightning and I have fewer and fewer lightning devices, so I’ll have to keep around a lightning cable (regardless of whether I can charge while using it or not). But that was bound to happen.
It's still a shitty design born of hubris.
Ideally the on/off switch would not control both the power and BT.
I've not measured it, but I could believe there is probably quite a bit of repeated vertical and sideways stress on a wired mouse's cable where it joins to the mouse body.
To be fair though, I've seen multiple computer labs with new iMacs and old wired keyboards and mice (because they don't want them "going missing" or switching places).
I think it's roughly the right size for my child, aged six. I used it for about ten minutes so I could order a Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac.
Of all the annoying things Apple does, this pushes me the hardest.
I mean they claim:
> Compared to the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor, the new iMac is up to 4.5x faster.1
But is that really true if your "ultrafast" Mac grinds to a halt when you have a couple of Electron apps and a browser open at the same time? Naturally users who bought the base model because they didn't really understood the implications would just conclude that macOS is slow and unstable compared to Windows?
https://help.procreate.com/articles/YB7CjQ-maximum-layer-lim...
The 8GB models could easily handle this kind of load.
The OS alone takes 2GB or more (200MB just for spotlight iirc), a bit is used for graphics, and once you add a bunch of browser tabs and windows you're easily in a situation where RAM usage is permanently above 80%. You don't feel it as quickly on the M1 but by the time you notice lags it's already swapping 15GB, sometimes for no apparent reason.
I still don't quite get it, on the 16GB Macbook I feel like I can do much more without exceeding 8GB usage.
I've paid €200 for 128GB RAM in my PC. How much does Apple charge for 128GB of memory?
There's a ton of ram types with varying performance levels, and in apple's case it's RAM with direct and performant access from the graphics card (unified memory).
Apple's marketing department would be happy for you to think otherwise, but the "secret sauce" of their high memory bandwidth is completely due to having more memory channels built into the SoC than a standard x86 CPU.
Of course MS overcharges on upgrades as well... because they can. Can it really have anything to do with cost, though? I wouldn't be surprised that the slotted RAM in laptops that support it and which Lenovo/Dell/etc. sell pretty cheap ir as or more expensive than the "Apple Magic Unified Max Marketing RAM" wholesale?
The cost to Apple for going from 16GB to 32GB is less than $40. So of course it's priced at $400.
I'd love that, seems like a fantastic deal. I assume it's DDR4, though? Which makes it an even more apples to oranges comparison.
However if we're being fair Dell seems to be charging about 50% less (and Lenovo 75% at least for some models) for soldered LPDDR5X upgrades than Apple and Lunar Lake seems to have comparable bandwidth
On the other hand, they are limited in capacity. It is a trade off, it is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
No, but their marketing department would like you to think so.
> It is silly to pretend they are just limiting memory capacity out of the vileness of their hearts or something.
They are limiting memory capacity and charging you 8x-10x reasonable retail price for upgrades, so that their profit margins stay high. Whether or not that's vile is something I leave to you to decide.
Can you link to a teardown that finds RAM somewhere other than the CPU package?
Or were you in too much of a hurry to notice that the comment you replied to didn't make the common mistake of claiming the RAM is on-die not just on-package?
I think I was thrown off by your use of the term "inside," vs other terms like "on" or "part of," which led me to believe you were asking about the memory being part of the SoC proper. If that's not what you meant, I apologize.
The memory consists of standard DDR4/5 memory chips, soldered on a PCB, directly next to the M-series SoC. So my point was that while it is likely faster than any memory you could get on a standard consumer PC, it's not in any way special (read: more expensive) for Apple to source or assemble.
Side point: I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare most Macs to consumer PC hardware, given the price differentials involved.
No, it's obviously because they can upcharge on upgrades? That's just market segmentation. I doubt it can have much to do with technical limitations or actual costs (the the difference the wholesale price between 8GB and 16GB is relatively marginal).
> I think it might not be possible to put together a system
No, but you can get a Lunar Lake laptop with comparable bandwidth. Dell is also "only" half as "greedy" as Apple or MS, e.g. 16 GB -> 32 GB is only $200 instead of $400.
The DRAM makers must love AI, low end iPhones increase RAM 33% (6GB -> 8GB), low end iMacs go from 8GB to 16GB.
Now 4 generations in, they are still comparing performance to M1. I get that 15-20% improvements aren't too exciting but it feels old.
FTA: "Compared to the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor, the new iMac is up to 4.5x faster.1"
Secondly, "compared to a random HP AIO PC with a 5 year old CPU" (since there are approximately zero chances that the most popular PC in a market that is heavily Apple dominated would be a 2023 Raptor Lake) is just, once again, Apple's piss poor comparisons.
The trick is they used a GPU accelerated benchmark (Affinity) that highlights how trash the Intel GPU is.
EDIT: This is wrong: apparently there was a M3 refresh that went under the radar, including mine: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-supercharges-24...
Most people I know who bought an M1 (myself included) are still rocking the M1.
People who’ve purchased M2/M3 machines are less likely to be jumping on an M4.
Comparing to an M1 tells the most likely customer exactly what they need to know.
The nerds will find the relevant information anyway so no need to cater the high level marketing to them.
When I got an iMac I paid the $50 extra for the Magic Trackpad and it was worth it.
My biggest issue with it is that it's way too heavy. Once you go back to 50-60g mice you can't go back.
I guess if I actually kept my hand directly in line with the mouse it'd be pretty painful. I just about always keep my hand in a slant, more similar to how you'd use a trackpad, or as if you were holding a sort of slanted mouse.
I've stuck with it because of the well implemented 2d scrolling. Using a physical scrolling wheel feels off at this point.
That said, the change to the rechargeable version was a huge unforced error apart from the deserved mocking for the charge port location because the mouse also reports low batt condition about 10 minutes before it actually dies, I don't know what the thinking there was.
That was definitely unexpected.
I've been waiting 15 years for Apple to reintroduce a matte display to the MacBook Pro.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXK93AM/A
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXK53AM/A
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXK73LL/A
> Recharge the built-in battery in your Apple keyboard, mouse, or trackpad [...] To charge your device's battery, connect a Lightning to USB cable to its Lightning port,
The future: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-new-...
> Every iMac comes with a color-matched Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse or optional Magic Trackpad, all of which now feature a USB-C port, so users can charge their favorite devices with a single cable.
Or -- and I know this is crazy -- slottable RAM on a device that is designed for things other than portability. Wild, I know.
Source?
For transfer speeds, look at the data sheets for the M series. Much faster than DDR4 or DDR5 RAM. In the ballpark of GPU memory.
I bet that the extreme lag when you run out of memory because you have an Electron app or two, several browser tabs and something like Excel is way more noticeable.
Hardly anyone is using Macs for gaming these days and almost anybody who does something GPU intense would need more than 16GB anyway.
See: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid...
> The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
LPCAMM solutions mentioned upthread resolve some of this by making the problem more "three dimensional" from what I can tell. They reduce the length of the traces by making the pinout more "square" (as opposed to thin and rectangular) and stacking them closer to the actual dies they connect to. This allows you to cram swappable memory into the same form factor, while retaining the same clock speeds/size/bus width, and without as many design complexities that come from complex socket traces.
In Apple's case they connect their GPU to the same pool of memory that their CPU uses. This is a key piece of the puzzle for their design, because even if the CPU doesn't need 200GB/s of bandwidth, GPUs are a very different story. If you want them to do work, you have to feed them with something, so you need lots of memory bandwidth to do that. Note that Samsung's LPCAMM solutions are only 128-bits wide and reported around 120GB/s. Apple's gone as high as 1024-bit busses with hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth; the M1 Max was released years ago and does 400GB/s. LPCAMM is still useful and a good improvement over the status quo, of course, but I don't think you're even going to see 256-bit or 512-bit versions just so soon.
And if your problem can be parallelized, then the higher your bus width, the lower your clock speeds can go, so you can get lower power while retaining the same level of performance. This same dynamic is how an A100 (1024-bit bus) can smoke a 3090 (384-bit) despite a far lower clock speed and power usage.
There is no magical secret or magical trick. You will always get better performance, less noise, at lower power by directly integrating these components together. It's a matter of if it makes sense given the rest of your design decisions -- like whether your GPU shares the memory pool or not.
There are alternative memory solutions like IBM using serial interfaces for disaggregating RAM and driving the clock speeds higher in the Power10 series, allowing you to kind of "socket-ify" GDDR. But these are mostly unobtainium and nobody is doing them in consumer stuff.
Two of those modules working in parallel would hit "M Pro" speeds as well. I doubt Apple will be adopting them though, for the same reason they don't offer standard M.2 SSD slots even on systems that could obviously support them with minimal design compromises.
Just be patient, the EU will take a large stick and force Apple to allow users to replace their RAM soon too.
The difference there is that slotted GPU memory is demonstrably impactical, but the memory on the M4 isn't demonstrably better than the LPCAMM2 module above. It's literally the exact same spec. Not that I expect the EU to do anything either when they didn't act on Apples soldered-in SSDs, which definitely aren't any better than standardized M.2 drives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40287592
Easy heuristic: if your memory transfer rate is more than 1.5x the standard, you can solder RAM. If not, you must use the standard.
What are you doing? I'm still doing web development with Chrome, JetBrains, and Docker on a 16GB M1 Pro and it isn't a problem. For the average Chrome-using citizen, 16GB should be fine.
For most people 32gb is not going to hold them back.
I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%.
If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
It's nice to see more RAM and Apple was being very stingy about it, but the real-world is totally overblown.
I'm also doing Rust dev, but I can't work with less than ~24GB.
On my headless rackmount dev box that I use for my remote development environment, the box sits around 17GB of memory in use + 8GB of cache. I've got an M3 with 36GB running a few Visual Studios Code (plus browser/Docker/Dropbox) with about 30GB used (8GB of that is cache).
16GB would not have been enough for me for my work at Deno. My current job involves both Rust and Python work and I'd quickly hit the limits of 16GB if I'm running my code while developing it, let alone running a browser or keeping my email client open.
That was fine when Intel was sitting on their ass, raking in the cash, and nearly everything else (storage, especially external drives, RAM, and even batteries weren't too bad) is upgradeable. This is less great when you can no longer upgrade the component most likely to be the first bottleneck.
Apple pays people to be smarter than me about this, but I still think it's a stupid long-term play to damage one of your biggest selling points
Whenever switching company I went from a 64 gb ram computer to a 16 gb ram. Yes, it worked, but only because I had to adapt to it. But one might not see it if one's never tried.
With usb-c/thunderbolt, it is hard to be a pro user AND be interested in the iMac form factor when you can have a mobile device that you can easily dock to a large screen and have the conveniency and comfort of both a laptop and a desktop.
Outside of companies that wants fixed, kensington locked desktops for their employees, I don't see who would choose an imac over anything else.
(WebStorm, Rider, Android Studio, Chrome, Discord & Slack), not currently running an Android Emulator, LLM or Docker
At some point it becomes impossible for the OS to keep everything it wants in RAM at the same time, and then you get an orgy of disk thrashing and a potential lock-up.
This is not theoretical. I've had it happen on both Macs and Windows machines, sometimes with just a single main app running.
At best you'll get obvious delays if you switch apps, as pages get dumped to disk while other pages are loaded.
Some RAM is used for file caching and other optional stuff, so not all of the additional usage will translate into swap if RAM is reduced.
MacOS also makes use of RAM compression, which increases the amount of memory pressure that can be sustained before swapping is necessary.
All in all, it's pretty complicated, and the only way to know if a workload will perform acceptably on a machine with less RAM is to try it.
It goes by many names, the "microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
I mean, that's basically it. The difference between part costs of 8GB/16GB/32GB RAM chips is nearly a rounding error, and they're probably eating a bunch more costs stocking and adding assembly for different RAM SKUs.
On the other hand, the MacBook Air ships with 8GiB RAM standard, and it's robustly popular. One could suppose that all those customers are suffering from the lack of RAM, or one could suppose that for many use cases, it's an adequate amount.
The latter is more likely. macOS manages memory well, and a fast SSD means that swapping is fast enough that it often results in no visible delays to the user.
That they sell a lot of stock MacBook Airs? They do. I don't find the topic interesting enough to find a link, but I'm pretty confident on this one.
> a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad
A lot of people have pretty undemanding requirements in a laptop, yes. 8GiB is more than enough for some web browsing and light document editing, a bit of photo retouching, that kind of thing. There are many Chromebooks on the market right now with 4 GiB and they sell in numbers.
The HN tilt trends toward systematically overestimating system requirements because development is fairly demanding of them.
I just doubt there is actual meaningful data available (at least that's publicly accessible). We'd need to measure the proportion of base config MBA users who regularly get OOM warnings?
> many Chromebooks
Yes. People just have different use cases. I mean almost nobody who does anything that might require > 16-32 GB of memory would likely buy this iMac (even if Apple sold such configs).
It's an entirely different product than the 27 inch "Pro" iMacs with Xeons from back in the day.
Hardly anybody "needs" a desktop PC these days (outside of gaming and some niche applications). So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Ah, yes that was why I asked what I did. I'm quite confident they sell a lot of stock MBAs, is what I said, as a guess at what we were trying to 'tell'.
As for "low on application memory" warnings, macOS doesn't really do that unless the user is also out of swap. Offer may not be valid for XCode. My wild-ass guess is that users who need lots of RAM tend to know that when they buy computers, and that percentage wise, there are more over-provisioned Mac users than under-provisioned. But who knows.
> So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Right. Apple market-segments their products pretty carefully, and the post-Pro iMac line is for receptionists, desktop publishing, light-duty visual/creative, the occasional desk-oriented email job, and so on. 16 GiB is a generous baseline for those tasks, and 8 GiB was probably adequate for most customers.
edit: e.g. screen replacements cost nearly as much as the entire computer
Maybe you're not quite the average consumer that OP has in mind? Maybe you are, I don't know. Either way it's unsustainable and ridiculous that the _average consumer_ would need to replace something after 4 years when it COULD be built to last.
The correct criticism of iMacs is that it links two parts with different lifespans. There should be a legal requirement that all-in-one computers have an external connector so that if some other component fails or simply becomes obsolete you can use the perfectly functional display with another system.
However, let's be real clear, iMac is not a mid-range desktop, price-wise. Amazon's all-in-one category's HIGHEST non-apple price in the top-10 is $599. There are three non-apple all-in-ones over $1k in the top-50. [1]
Obviously, once we separate the pieces out, things become even more clear cut. You can buy the beefiest "mini-pc" from amazon and pair it with a 28" or 32", flat or curved 4k monitor for $200-400 and still have money left over.
The iMac is NOT high-end, but it is luxury, and that's an important distinction.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-All-in-One-C...
Most of the cost of an iMac is the display and as your example shows, you don’t see significant savings unless you accept massive compromises on quality. 1080p FHDs is like saying you have a luxury car because your baseline is a golf cart and most of those have terrible color quality according to their spec sheets even if you ignore the low resolution. By the time you’re getting to models which are only one generation behind on CPU you’re looking at a $900 system with a display which is worse than what Apple shipped almost 20 years ago.
This would be great for the consumer and prevent a lot of ewaste as people can use obsolete computers as monitors well past their useful lifespan as a monitor.
It should be kept out of regulations.
They could have very soon added support for it, maybe even launched with DP 1.3 support if they worked something out with AMD.
One of these days I'll split it down and see if my hands are still steady enough to solder on a new connector.
Anyway it was enough to swear me off any all-in-one devices ever again. I thought by now we'd be fully modular with desktop computer hardware.
Yes I cannot mine the iMac for parts at EOL, but realistically, I haven't really done that on any tower-based PC either.
But I’m sad that the 27” models are obsolete computers and still-wonderful screens, and Apple removed the use-as-screen mode.
The last display I had break down was a CRT piece of shit I got off my school's auction a quarter century ago.
Now you could argue if it needs to be that thin but for the current configuration, there's nothing you can cram behind the screen.
They can't put the compute in the back of the display itself, while maintaining the same thickness like an iPad (which has the same CPU), because the room behind the displays is dominated by the speaker system, allowing the iMac to have surprisingly good audio quality despite being so thin.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M1+24-Inch+Teardown/142...
The iMac is basically the same as the M4 iPad Pro, and the iPad Pro doesn't have a chin.
Cooling seems like it might be a factor here. The iMac's display is probably going to be run at a brighter (and thus hotter) setting AND it's more likely to be used to do things that require high load for extended periods of time, so putting it in its own space probably helps.
They should just have separated everything in the foot, that would have made sense. Some sort of modern Sunflower iMac if you will. But Apple is more obsessed with thinness than practical design, so we get an impossibly thin iMac will all the flaws that brings...
Those all do have to go somewhere.
I miss the times when they used the form factor to actually make new shapes - both the sunflower and the cube looks more futuristic than the 2024 iMac.
It's also a great place to tack post-it notes.
There's a reason ergotron puts handles on many of its monitor mounts.
It may be part of the iMac design identity at this point, but I don’t like it since its appearance on the iMac G5.
An M4 iMac with 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $1700.
A 14" MBP with 8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $2000. Before you add a 27" monitor and desktop keyboard/pointing device.
Why pay that premium if you don't actually need to carry your desktop PC around?
My last two home computers have been 27" iMacs. Each one has lasted me about 8 years and I've been happy with both of them. Nice big display, good specs, not a lot of clutter. Really good bang for the buck.
At home, I use them for making music (Ableton Live), video production (DaVinci Resolve), photo processing (Photoshop and Lightroom), and programming (various IDEs and editors). I much prefer one good display over a pair of them.
Long-term, maybe it would be more cost effective to get a Mac Mini so that I don't end up paying to replace the display when I replace the machine. But display technology seems to advance about as fast as other hardware specs do, so I suspect I'd want a new monitor at about that rate anyway.
Going forward, though, I probably won't buy another iMac. That's largely because now that I make music with Ableton Live, I want a laptop that I can (aspirationally!) take to shows to play live on.
But for well over a decade, I've been a happy iMac user. I don't care about upgradeability. I buy a machine that has the specs I want when I buy it.
(from the marketing page)
wait so this thing has the universally reviled Studio Display camera??
I'm not really an Apple person, but I can't imagine having a single monitor in this day and age and any other color would look silly next to a weird pastel pink device.
Why do you seem defensive? I asked a reasonable question of a group of people I thought might have product knowledge I lacked. I am not a Very Pink Apple Product SME, and stated as much in my question.
* Families with a shared computer in a common room. Super simple to setup, no fiddling, low price. In the video Apple showcased this use case. My parents have an M3 imac and it works great. They had their last iMac for ten years.
* Businesses buy these for reception areas and customers see the Apple logo on the back. Easy solution for a business with no IT department, great marketing for Apple.
Apple will probably always sell an iMac option as long as businesses buy and display them.
iMac is perfect for that. it looks pretty, it's small enough that it can be put in a corner, and it's powerful enough that you can buy it, leave it there, and not think about having to upgrade it for a decade.
Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.
The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.
Not having to manage windows and its bullshit, most likely.
Macs usually require way less maintenance than windows machines. Just install all the upgrades and you're 99% fine.
In my personal experience, my parents (not super tech savvy) always had a windows laptop and never had a specific windows issue due to updates and whatever. If they did, it's more app specific, not necessarily os specific.
In general, I (personally) disagree with the statement that macs require less maintenance than windows or Linux, I use a mac for work, and I have a fair share of app related issues just like I would on a Windows or Linux machine. It's just my opinion.
* We want a dedicated space in the house for a family computer, so portability is no concern
* It has a very small footprint
* It looks the most like "furniture" out of all the options I've seen; pretty color & form factor, and no mess of cables. If you're male, think "wife approval factor".
* It does everything the family needs from it; runs Steam, documents, spreadsheet, browser, school, photos/videos, etc
* High interoperability with our family iPhones/iPads
Even if you use wireless input devices you'll need to charge them occasionally
HN honestly is a terrible source of information for
1) What sells
2) What might sell
I wouldn't apply this observation to judge if the product makes sense
HN is disillusioned, but so are a lot of the west coast product designers that expect businesses to buy these on day 1. The majority of businesses are going to buy whatever is cheap and effective - their realistic choice is between a Chromebox and a Mac Mini.
Windows 11 (literally) will not work out-of-the-box if you don’t have internet access.
Linux isn’t cheap unless your time is free.
I say we should just bring back IRIX.
???
He's very happy with it.
edit: ok, others pointed out possible use cases. was thinking about the reception one, too.
I’ve owned an iMac before very happily. I just don’t own one now because they stopped making 27” versions.
I've been waiting to upgrade our 2017 model in the living room, was hoping the 27" was finally going to come now. Guess Mac Mini is the only route to go...
most likely they (apple) think that would eat into some other market segment. for a 27" station they probably want you to get a mac mini with a studio display. apple is known for "gently (but firmly) nudging" you towards the more expensive options.
I think we can check since they're public. Looks like 5-8 million per quarter [0]. Approx 10% of their computer sales [1].
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/macbooks-make-up-a-whopping-7...
So these are their most popular desktop, but by a slim margin and far behind the laptop sales
By the time I’ve ever wanted to upgrade a Windows or Linux PC, a new CPU probably isn’t going to fit into the same socket as the one I had so now I need a new motherboard too. I probably want a new GPU if it was a gaming PC and if it wasn’t I would be using an integrated GPU anyway.
I think the only thing I’ve ever kept from an “upgrade” was my case and some memory sticks. But I probably would have been better off—both in time and money—just selling the damn thing as a whole and buying an entirely new set of components.
TL;DR, year-over-year bumps just aren’t worth the price of upgrades, but by the time it is worth doing you probably want to upgrade so many parts there’s little left to keep. YMMV.
Time of purchase upgrade ability, if we’re talking about getting to 128 or 256 GB of RAM. Time of purchase to upgrade to multiple high res screens that match. Dedicated GPUs… I bet there is a top of the line home hobbiest LLM oriented GPU from Nvidia or AMD in the next 3 years that will cleanly connect to recent chip architectures. I doubt it will run optimally tied to a Mac. It’ll be something that you could also rack in a server.
For other components it mostly works. You can smoothly upgrade from 8GB RAM all the way to 128GB, get a new GPU, whatever the current WiFi standard is, more silent cooling, more, bigger or faster drives, etc. If you replace something every 2-3 years you can ship-of-theseus the same computer for a surprisingly long time at pretty low cost
I’m not going to say it doesn’t make sense to do so for anyone, but it certainly wasn’t in my experience.
A person in college on a tight budget might choose a budget-conscious PC, with an average amount of RAM and a modest hard drive. A few years later, component prices will have fallen and the PC will be showing its age thanks to its modest components. Adding a larger hard drive and more RAM will get a few more years out of it.
On the other hand, a mid-career professional programmer has plenty of disposable income, so if they're buying a PC today they can chuck in 128GB of RAM and not need to upgrade for the next 10 years.
20 years ago, a budget-conscious 1.3GHz CPU for $130 was just a binned version of a high-end 1.6GHz $339 CPU. So the budget-conscious CPU would have pretty much the same longevity as a higher-end CPU.
10 years ago, a budget-conscious user could pick up a 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPU for ~$192 (like the i5-4590). Today you'd be due for an upgrade, but it wouldn't be unusably slow. Indeed, Intel are still selling 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPUs to this day, like the i3-14100.
And of course components like sound cards and gigabit ethernet ports don't really 'hit their limits'. You'll probably want to upgrade your wifi, admittedly - but a USB dongle is what, $20?
That Wi-Fi dongle is a good example: your $20 dongle is probably a waste of money because it won’t reach the maximum for whatever wifi spec it claims to support and it tends to be the case that cheap hardware does not reach the maximum USB speeds promised so the performance impact is likely to be unnoticeable.
The most common upgrade for me has been adding more disk space. Back in 1995, a 1 Gigabyte hard drive for $250 was just the thing for your new installation of Windows 95.
The second-most-common upgrade is getting an employer-issued machine with a baseline spec and needing it to be a bit beefier. If you're running virtual machines or dealing with large datasets or analysing large heap dumps you might need some extra RAM; if you're doing machine learning you might need more disk space.
The third-most-common upgrade is a better GPU. PCI Express means modern cards will plug into 10-year-old motherboards. Maybe your PC was just short of what you needed for that 4K display, or you'd like to play some newer games.
Of course, if you're informed enough to do this, you're undoubtedly informed enough to know not to expect to upgrade these modern Macs.
Me too, but it’s increasingly uncommon. Going from a 500MB to 1GB drive back in the day was huge but since the late 2000s most normal people I know seem to have plateaued, both because they’re not generating data as fast as storage densities increased and because cloud storage has soaked up a lot of use-cases. Even the gamers I know don’t upgrade as often as they used to.
Tho the next will likely be a full upgrade as my last main build was 2018 with the mini-itx I still have. But if I want to do more ai stuff I'll probably need to hop up to m-atx or even just atx. 1080ti I'm currently on was the last before the era of sanely sized gpus came to an abrupt end
I remember buying computers in the past piece wise with an eye for what component I would want next. I... can't remember the last time I did this. And for my kids, it is not something they are interested in. At all.
your average user (aka not HN-er) doesn't upgrade their computer
an all-in-one solution is very attractive for families or situations where you don't need to tote around a laptop and you want a large screen
That's the target buyer.
He could very well be using Windows with a cheaper laptop, but I consider the amount of support hours that I've saved to more than compensate for that.
Some people don’t care about a $300 price difference (just an example) if they plan to keep it for 10 years. Good for them.
Judging by the sibling comments I'm not the only one with relatives like this!
I had one during the pandemic. I got it at a steep discount but it was really nice when I didn't need to go anywhere. I'm giving it to my son to put in his room.
Seems like they're useful for families and kids, and corp environments that use Macs for the folks who work in office and don't move around (admins, lab workers, etc)
Possibly because it has a direct line right back to the original Macintosh. Such that when I showed my 11yo cousin my Macintosh SE, he called it an ‘iMac’.
I bet that iMac M4 sales meet their target, which is probably on par with the iMac M1 sales. And those were apparently good enough that they finally released an updated model.
The target audience for this machine is my local yoga studio (which has two), my local comic book shop (which has two), and my local spa (which has one).
They run a web browser, some kind of inventory or booking app in the browser, and Spotify. That's it.
Last year I went to Bali and the Gili Islands on vacation and both of the places I stayed checked me in on an M1 iMac. In that instance they were both also running the WhatsApp app.
They're going to sell millions.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-certificate-chec...
Typically when there are concerns about phoning home it’s both more detailed information and something being traceable back to an individual.
Resigning will appease Gatekeeper. As a result there will be no X.509 compliant OCSP checks made for the developer certificate - because it won't be there any more.
The Tor browser folks could do this as a privacy and security feature for you.
I think Apple should shift away from personal computing (iMac, MBP/A, iPhone) and focus on selling their SoC. Get these into data centers.
Powering a data center with their chips would likely result in significant decrease in power consumption. I am running an “old” M1 as a small remote k8s cluster for personal dev work and home automation. Works wonderfully.
Power consumption during peak load (20 W?) is very low compared to my Intel based computer (120-150W?) I use for occasional gaming.
This is going to be the most insane thing I read all day.
> Get [their SoC] into data centers.
This is a great idea. Apple discontinued servers a long time ago, and it's too bad, now that they've got the new silicon they could be crushing it in the sector.
> Gamers can enjoy incredibly smooth gameplay, with up to 2x higher frame rates5 than on iMac with M1.
What games do run on the Mac? Certainly, most AAA titles do not.
>Compared to the most popular 24-inch all-in-one PC with the latest Intel Core 7 processor, the new iMac is up to 4.5x faster.
You can build PCs there are more powerful than that Mac, cheaper. And you can easily repair them.
Nobody’s buying a Mac to game. The gaming is a bonus for a segment of their market, is why they mention it at all. Zero Mac sales are motivated primarily by gaming. “Does this do enough gaming, well enough, that I can avoid buying a Steamdeck, or that I can get rid of this bulky PC that I use only for gaming?” are things their prospective buyers might wonder, not “should I buy this if I want a gaming computer?” (No, obviously)
Examples: Cocoon, ufo50, Outer wilds, Harold Halibut, Noita
> “Does this do enough gaming, well enough, that I can avoid buying a Steamdeck, or that I can get rid of this bulky PC that I use only for gaming?”
I think the answer is "No". I'm writing this from a Mac. In the last year, so many games I've wanted to play while traveling, someone tells me about it, I go check it out, no mac version. I just have to wait until I get home.
Sometimes I get lucky, "A Short Hike", but more often than not there's no Mac version.
If you’re flexible on what you play, it might be fine for gaming. Like someone with a Switch might be like “eh, sure I’d like to play the new Assassins Creed, but not enough to get a PlayStation—my kids want the Switch, and I don’t want two consoles, so I’ll just find stuff to play on here instead.” I think that’s the market-segment they’re talking to when they write ad or marketing copy about Mac gaming capabilities.
Why would anyone buy a Porsche? You can buy an F-150 with a >1 ton payload capacity, fit 6 people in it and if you get the EV version it might be even faster than the base config Porsche.
The PC will take up a lot of space, use a lot more power, be loud and be look ugly. Some people might care about these things even if you don't.
> every app have its own updater
Well certainly not all due. But mainly because they are not part of the OS/distribution. And it's not like there arent any proprietary apps on Linux that have to be installed/updated independently.
Also you can use the App Store if you are so inclined. IMHO an awful experience but still better than the extremely laggy GUI app stores on Gnome/KDE.
I use Linux now and I'm much happier. It has weird bugs at times, but is overall both faster and much more polished.
* iTerm
* Outlook/Office (not available on Linux so I'll exclude this one)
* an app for being able to use different scroll directions across mouse and trackpad (I prefer natural scrolling on trackpad and the opposite on mouse, something that macOS strangely doesn't let you do)
* an app to set a flat acceleration profile on mouse (I strongly prefer no acceleration on mouse after years playing FPS games)
* an app to let me use my ultrawide monitor at full resolution and refresh rate -- this was a weird problem and I don't remember all the details, but the app did work in the end
* an app to cmd-tab by window rather than by app -- again, personal preference here but I strongly believe that there's no moral difference in switching between two Firefox windows versus between a Firefox and a Safari window
On Linux, the first is handled by my package manager, and the last four are built into KDE as settings.
On top of all of this I was using yabai, but updates to that were handled via Homebrew so that wasn't as bad. (I generally have lots of complaints about Homebrew though -- for example, if I ask it to install a binary, I want exactly that binary to be on my PATH. I don't want to use Homebrew's version of pkgconfig, LLVM etc as well. More recently, on Linux, I've switched to Nix for this which does the right thing.)
- BG3
- CIV
- Stardew Valley
- Football Manager
- Subnautica
- XCOM
- ARMA 3
Apple knows this, and so it markets it to them rather than to us.
The 4K monitor is going to push up the price, and I'm all for giving everyone a high quality monitor, but I'd argue that the iMac is 30-40% over budget for those who'd like that type of computer. I think you could get away with having it be a $1000 computer, but not $1600, for the lowest spec'ed model.
Heck I still use my M1 Air for everything, it's fine.
It only shows two USB-C ports while further down the marketing material talks about "all four USB-C ports". EDIT: the low-end 8-core model for $1300 only has two ports.
It also has what looks like a rear-facing camera in the stand cutout. What is that for? EDIT: It's the magnetic power connector. I did not expect that to be round.
Supposedly there's a gigabit Ethernet port somewhere too. Not shown in any of the pictures on the site that I can find.
Indeed, per specs [1]
[1] https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/
The picture is of the base model.
The upper model is featured on their main website[1], which shows this image [2]
[1] https://www.apple.com/imac/ [2] https://www.apple.com/v/imac/q/images/overview/closer-look/c...