Apple updates its iMac line | Hacker News Reader

Apple updates its iMac line

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Bought my iMac 7 years ago with 8GB as the default memory option and a 1TB fusion drive.

And here we are, nearly a decade later. Still 8 GB in the newest models. Still 1 TB fusion drives. GPUs haven't even seemed to take a jump over last year's models.

Plenty of folks use an iMac as the primary family machine - email, homework, some Netflix, kids' basic games. 8 GB is entirely sufficient for that. Hell, four probably is.

If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.

Given the improvement in technology, you would expect a decreased price in that case.

Not if the cost savings went into other stuff, like the 4k/5k displays.

Or the CPU. But we're talking an $1800 machine with a 5400rpm disc and 8gb of Ram. That's one hell of a screen and CPU.

It's probably no longer true, but when the 5K iMac came out it was the cheapest way to get a 5K screen. You got the computer for free, essentially.

I think the high quality 5k screen is still the bulk of the cost. There's nothing else like it on the market except for LG's, and that's ~$1300USD.

The high DPI monitor market is practically dead (for now) so there's no pressure forcing prices down.

It's still pretty much true. 5K screens unfortuantely barely exist at this point.

For the 5k model, an additional 8GB in DDR4 RAM for a total of 16GB model costs +$200 [1]. This is beyond unreasonable compared to market [2].

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MRR12LL/A&st...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Sure, but with a user-accessible RAM bay built into the back of the machine, I can't work up the energy to be too mad about that one.

I most definitely give you that point.

In 2019 how many apple products have user (or technician for that matter) upgrade-able anything? honest question. I'm not a Mac person and all I see is anecdotal reports of "soldered in RAM here" "fully bonded case there" etc.

Both new Mac mini and 27" iMac have upgradeable RAM.

The 27" iMac used to have upgradable RAM, but the text for the new version says "configurable to 64 GB", not "upgradable" like it used to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, I'm considering getting an iMac.

Unless something changed with today's update, it should be upgradeable via a hatch on the back of the machine. I upgraded my 2018 model to 40GB less than a year ago.

Interestingly this article says it's upgradable, but the quote they pulled from the spec sheet isn't mentioned on Apple's website (any longer): https://www.imore.com/can-you-upgrade-ram-27-inch-imac

Only a matter of time before they solder the RAM in the imac like they did in the macbook.

Has there ever been an investigation in how the average consumer app - email, browsers, word processing, etc - has changed over the years in terms of memory usage? I mean browsers are memory hungry (but that's because they use as much as is available, doesn't mean they reserve it from other applications), but a lot of modern-day apps are Electron ones, which easily cost a few hundred MB. Office has also moved from a set of native apps to heavier webapps.

OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.

You'd think so, right? See my comment elsewhere on this thread - I had to re-sell an iMac b/c 8GB (combined with the latest OS) was a disaster for simple tasks.

Chrome + Slack alone took up ~3 GB of RAM on my 4 GB machine and forced me to upgrade.

So what did you replace Chrome and Slack with…? </snark>

I use Slack in the browser instead. No more Electron crap.

I turned slack into a chrome “shortcut” (which seems to be a PWA minus the service worker), which lets it run in chrome instead of a separate electron instance, but also have a separate app window.

Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice

On an older iMac running 10.11, going from 4gb to 6gb was a big improvement.

Or if you allow all family members to stay logged on with their apps running like we do, you can upgrade to 16GB or 32GB. :)

I bought an iMac a couple years ago because at the time it was the only consumer level Mac being sold new where you could upgrade the RAM yourself.

It’s very likely that the high DRAM prices from 2017 to now have been due to market collusion, similar to what happened in 2010.

Like your example shows, they’ve basically set the entire industry back years for a modest profit. It’s heinous.

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

Yes. However we forget that 8GB was an ungodly amount of memory in the late 90's; it required industrial gear like an SGI Origin to get that much. That a browser would fill it is another abomination.

Late 90's is almost 20 years ago. OP mentions 10 years ago

Yes, and browsers worked fine back then. Their improvement has been quite inefficient memory-wise compared to native apps.

Is $11/GB a high DRAM price? That's the cost of a standalone stick. Apple DRAM costs 2x, and any other PC vendor's DRAM costs 1.5x-2x but that's vendor lock-in, not collusion.

I used to get more life out of my MBP by spending about $400 on max memory and a faster hard drive. Even with inflation $350 for memory seems a bit high (assuming there comes a day when you can put 32G in one of these things :/ )

> assuming there comes a day when you can put 32G in one of these things

That day came last October, assuming you are ok with a 15” MBP (not available for 13”) and slightly less battery life.

It's the lowest option, you can upgrade to 32GB or 64GB on the 27-inch version. You can upgrade the drive to an 2TB SSD, or a 3TB fusion drive.

If you only buy an iMac for the basic things like browsing, emailing and watching youtube, 8GB is more than enough, especially on macOS. I don't get the hate for having a lower-budget option.

i don't think the ram is as much of an issue as the drive speed these days. it's not "lower budget", it's just a "low budget" option, but it damages the brand experience to have such a poor performing option available (speaking of drive speed specifically).

I find interesting that you say "especially on macOS", personally I feel that macOS has the highest memory requirements of the major OSs, but I haven't used macOS in a while, so that may have changed...

The day they take out the entry-level option people on here will be complaining about how they just want a decent desktop for their parents to browse on, or for them to upgrade themselves. I have 8gb and keep big music projects in Ableton open, a ton of Chrome tabs and several Electron apps open all the time, and I haven't had any issues yet.

What seems worse to me is that the default drive for the 21.5" is a 1TB 5400 spinning rust drive, not even a fusion drive.

This is just shameful.

People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance. This is exactly what happened to an older friend of my wife. And since it is an iMac, it is next to impossible to replace the drive later (on some models, you need to unseal the LCD screen to open it).

That's just a weird decision on Apple's part - don't they want the best perceived performance? I mean they could just put some soldered storage in there for the OS at the very least.

Not even soldered, they could came up with some fancy marketing name for slowest SSD drive in their line up (lets call it eSSD) and just drop-in 2.5" SATA SSD for $20 (retail cost of 120GB SSD on Amazon) instead of spinning rust. No need of redesigning chassis, no need of changing any factory procedures, machines, robots etc. Just give a box of SSDs instead of HDDs to the person that is responsible for putting them in. Here, job done, and Apple could "brag" about having SSDs in entry level options. Standard SATA SSD would increase massively performance on those machines.

The comment below you is dead and downvoted to hell, but it's correct even though I agree with you. I can't convince the IT person at my job that SSDs are faster than HDDs. He had never heard of them until we were looking at new PCs and he refused to approve any orders with SSDs since he thinks they're a scam. I even brought in my laptop with a PCIe SSD and he said he didn't notice a difference in boot time, and if there was one it was probably just a coincidence. He genuinely thinks that a terabyte of slow rust is better than a smaller amount of insanely fast storage. And that's even before he started ranting about how SSDs will all fail in a year anyway. I wish Apple would do what you said but there really are some lost souls out there.

To me as a tech person, this would feel as talking to a flat-earther. I switched to SSDs in all my machines literally a decade ago and never looked back, the performance was just that much better. Early models for sure had reliability issues but if an IT professional would claim today that SSDs are scams, he'd lose all my respect in a second.

I would question the competency of the IT person, who had never heard about the SSDs

It's a marketing decision. They don't want you to buy the cheapest model. They want to drive people towards the middle model by making the cheap model look less attractive.

I've felt this pain too. 2 years ago I bought a Mac mini (2014 model) off eBay for $340 mainly as a build machine for iOS binaries. It was the lowest end model which had a 5400rpm HDD in it and 4GB of RAM.

It took ~3 minutes to get to a usable desktop. Opening XCode took long enough for me to go grab a coffee or scroll through Facebook. It was swapping like crazy. I honestly couldn't believe they were selling this configuration new for $500 in 2018.

I bought some iFixit tools and used their guide to fully disassemble my Mac and slot in a new SSD. Time to usable desktop dropped to like 20 seconds, things were snappier. Doing more than one thing at a time still uses swap but it's much less noticable now.

This isn't the config for Mac Mini in 2018 though? Unless you're talking about the earlier half of 2018 when the new Mac Mini hasn't been released yet.

Yeah, just that the base 2014 Mac Mini was being sold $500 new up until the point in 2018 when the new model came out. Even by 2016 and 2017 standards, 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 and 500GB 5400rpm spinning disk is abysmal.

I would expect the base model of any product (really the cheapest way to experience macOS without fiddling with VMs or hackintosh) would provide a usable experience and not one where you have to wait several minutes to open Chrome.

I could live with it mainly because I had another machine to go to while my 30m Unity build was running (and because I knew I was going to have to swap the HDD), but for a normal person who wants to browse the web and manage pictures, the $500 Mac Mini would have been an incredibly frustrating experience.

I've recycled a 2011 mac book pro with snow leopard, put in a SSD instead of the dead spinning disc and WOW it was flying!

I/O is definitely the biggest pain point.

Even worse, the upgrades are insultingly overpriced. $100 for 32GB of flash to get a Fusion drive, and $700 (again, extra) to get a 1TB when you can get a nice Samsung for $350 in that size. Ridiculous.

Wow, $700? 1TB NVMe goes for like $150 on sale sometimes.

Those are probably QLC drives at those prices, while I would think apple would be selling TLC or even MLC drives given their speeds. To properly compare against apple' storage, you have to look at the prices of things like the samsung pro series, which is about $350/TB

Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB is MLC and $150 on Amazon right now (2.5" formfactor).

That's not NVMe though.

The iMac takes 2.5 inch drives, including hard drives. Apple's website doesn't list what the SSD is, and we cannot infer much from the iMac Pro since it has different lineage.

My world has been totally SSD for the past decade. (Yes at a premium during times when I had an abundance of money and times when I had little. Priorities.)

I am A LOT rougher with computers. I don't think twice about picking up my NAS in mid operation.

A fusion drive wouldn't work for me.

I like your style. I also try to be rough with my computers, but on purpose because I want to live in a world where that's typical and designed for. I specifically pull USB drives out without ejecting, because we shouldn't have to do that.

I have to say that I agree with you - this makes no sense.

>People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance.

That's an unintended side-effect that is overshadowed by volume sales. All bulk orders for domains non related to performance (think libraries, hotels, basic desktops in enterprise), happen with a budget constraint without particular regard for price/performance ratio. So the lowest end model for all computers may have poor price/performance ratio but lower absolute price. That's also why thinkpads have poor screens, spinning rust drives, 4 GB memory, etc in the cheapest config. So that the procurement dept. can say in the spreadsheet that we replaced our inventory of n computers from 2012 to macs from 2019.

True. The only thing to replace 7yr old iMac is iMac Pro. I splurged, got myself one and expect to get another 7 yrs from it.

That's strange. If you can keep an iMac Pro for 7 years, then you don't need the power of the iMac Pro, or your needs are extremely high now yet won't grow over time.

Why not get a 27" iMac for half price, and another one in 4 years with whatever new thing is invented then?

Honestly I think you are overthinking this. At the time of purchase iMac had dinky video card and I wanted extra powerful processor and memory. This thing was perfect just pricy.

I bought an iMac Pro (base model) last year. I see it as investing up front in an already upgraded machine, that I can now use for the next 10 years.

But Apple does not support macOS for most Macs that long. E.g. last year's Mojave does not support iMacs from before 2012. You may be lucky and they might support the iMac Pro a bit longer, but it is unlikely that you'll get an up-to-date secure OS for ten years.

If they transition to ARM at some point, the lifetimes of Intel Macs may even be shorter.

Yeah, my "main" personal machine is a 2011 Air that no longer can run the latest OS. My 2006 Mac Pro got replaced on its 10th birthday with a new iMac as it was an OS or two behind. I'd say 8 years is sorta the outer limit.

I did a quick check on Macbook Pros:

* 10.8 (2012) dropped support for original Core 2 Duo (2006) — 6 years

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2009 MacBook Pro — 7 years

* 10.14 (2018) dropped support for 2011 MacBook Pro — 7 years

The releases in between didn't drop support for any (mbp) hardware.

The longest support I found with a spot-check was:

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2007 MacBook Pro — 9 years

Apple tends to release updates for about 3 years for each OS. 10.11 (2015) got its last patch in 2018. 10.12 (2016) got an update in January and is expected to receive updates through September.

I should have looked up desktops, since that's what most of the discussion is in this thread, but I don't have much firsthand experience with them. So assuming you buy the hardware the day its released, you can expect to have the newest software support for 6-9 years and have security updates for 9-12 years.

I'm happily using Mojave on two MBP's - 2009 (4Gb) and 2010 (8Gb) with SSD's. Freedom to upgrade internals and the smarts and generosity of dosdude1 (google that) turned them into the best tech purchases Ive made (after previous years of throwing money at premium end PC's that didn't last)

To be fair, they support their computers for a long time and seemingly provide update as long as possible. My Late 2009 iMac still received 2017's High Sierra update.

and the reason it won't run Mohave is not caprice but rather a desire to simplify system graphics by moving it to the Metal API along with Metal's using hardware features not yet introduced in late 2009.

8 GB of RAM are fine for basic tasks. However offering a spinning drive (and I include the Fusion drives in that category) is not. For any use case.

The 5400 RPM HDD in the abse 21.5" iMac will be unbearably slow, pretty much unusable from the first day and people not interested in technology won't have any idea why their new, shiny iMac performs that slow.

It's baffling to me that Apple seems to be fine with offering such abysmal performance. Reaching that price point certainly isn't worth compromising the user experience in such a significant way.

It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me.

I've been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I'm comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and integrate well with my development machines. Furthermore, the family does well with MacOS, and they don't need IT help with their email, iPhone, music, homework, printing, etc. like they used to under Windows.

I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors, but that doesn't look like that will ever happen. By locking down the hardware to just certain configurations, the very successful stores can handle problems (hardware, software, and user related) at locations all over the world.

Even if Apple can't make the machines more upgradeable because of customer support issues, the new machines don't seem to be well designed for me. They have become too thin and too sleek and overpriced because of features I don't want (over sharp display, touchbar) and issues caused by the pursuit of sleekness and style (crap keyboards, thermal limits).

Lenovo (Thinkpads) offers thin, light, somewhat upgradeable, good looking laptops that are light to carry and easier to grip with great keyboards. I wish Apple could start with something like one of those and equip it with an Apple touchpad and MacOS.

I've been waiting and waiting for Apple to improve its line up (I'm writing this on a Mac Pro from 2013 with a nice 34 inch ultra-wide monitor). It looks like I'll never replace it. I know there are alternatives, my home/office are littered with computers, Thinkpads running Linux, Microsoft laptops, Dell Servers running FreeBSD, and homemade PCs running Windows (for gaming); but I'm going to miss using MacOS as my daily-driver.

> I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors, but that doesn't look like that will ever happen.

You may want to keep your eyes out for the new Mac Pro that's meant to release this year.

Even if the Mac Pro is the computer of all our dreams, I doubt it will meet the poster’s needs. Seems like they want a fairly bare-bones, minimalist and simple computer. I doubt a Mac Pro is going to come in at under $3.5k at the entry level.

His current machine is a Mac Pro from 2013 and those started at $3k.

$3.5k entry would be very disappointing since the Mac Mini doesn’t have a graphics card so it struggles with even 3-5 year old video games or hobbyist video editing. I really hope they make a high end mini or low end pro in the $1.5-2k range that can meet the needs of a lot of monitor owning folks who used to be Apple Computer’s core demographic.

If your budget is $1.5k+ you could put an external GPU on a Mac Mini and call it a day.

That would suck because you're paying the consequences (money and thermal) of that mac form factor but you're still gonna have a big ugly mess on your desk.

That's my concern too. I'm surprised Apple hasn't made hard drives and/or eGPU enclosures that are meant to stack with the mini.

It's not that I think the Mac's are too expensive, I paid more that $3.5k for my current gen Mac Book Pro laptop. I wish it had a good keyboard and I wish it was as easy to handle as one of my ThinkPads.

My current development machine is a Mac Pro, the little cylinder from 2013, and I had a couple of the aluminum box ones and my first was in a plastic case. I just couldn't see upgrading to a current Mac Pro ($5k to $13k). It's thin and looks cool, but I thought that I would want to use a different (wider) monitor and didn't think the cooling offered by the case was a good idea. Maybe the new Mac Pro that is supposed to be offered later this year will be just right.

> I paid more that $3.5k for my current gen Mac Book Pro laptop. I wish it had a good keyboard

As time goes on I find Mac loyalists more and more absurd

> As times goes on I find Mac loyalists more and more absurd

What purposes does your comment serve? It's not that hard to understand that he found the rest of the laptop valuable enough to spend 3.5k on it (despite the keyboard, which isn't that bad anyways).

His viewpoint isn't that uncommon either, plenty of businesses buy fully loaded MacBook Pros in bulk because it increases productivity. If you're using the laptop for work, you'll be connected to an external monitor and keyboard 90% of the time.

The only case I ever saw of a company buying Apple hardware in bulk, the decision had zero to do with specs or productivity, and all to do with wanting to project an image of success.

Yeah, it's a status symbol for consumers and tech companies alike.

The iMac Pro starts at $4,999 and was (probably) intended to be Apple's only "pro" desktop but the desire for an upgradable system was too much so Apple caved and a new Mac Pro is on the horizon. Apple is going to charge a premium for that upgradability that the iMac Pro doesn't have, I'll bet the base price for the Mac Pro is going to be at least $5,999.

> was (probably) intended to be Apple's only "pro" desktop

Apple specifically said in 2017 (before the release of the iMac Pro) that they messed up the 2013 Mac Pro, that they would make a new modular Mac Pro but it would take a long time to finish, and that the iMac Pro would be a stopgap.

It was a private press event, so the best source on this is probably Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

I bought a 48-core rig (Dual socket ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS w/ 2x Xeon E7-8890V4's) w/ a 10TB RAID5 array of 10800 RPM disks, 128GB DDR4 ECC, and a 1TB SSD for $5k...

Granted it was from some dude's homelab after he got laid off at Cray but still.

When you get up to that dollar amount I feel like there's just much sweeter shit out there.

One gripe is the thing is fucking massive and kinda unwieldy stuffed into a Coolermaster Cosmos II case...

I'm curious why you think that. I mostly write code for a living and apart from the notebook line catastrophe (I'm stuck on a 2014 model of a MacBook Pro and waiting for something to come out with a reasonable keyboard and perhaps more than one port that I can use), the desktop line is improving quickly. I've been really tempted by the Mac Mini, I would buy the iMac Pro if I could afford it, and now I intend to get the iMac: as it turns out, it's pretty much the only way to get a 5K 27" monitor. I do need 5K to get three columns of code in a full-screen Emacs (4K is fine for two columns, but three is squeezing it).

So my conclusion is exactly the opposite: while I am frustrated that I have to depend on Apple, because seemingly nobody else can get their act together and produce integrated hardware+software ecosystems that work, I am quite happy with the recent direction they've taken.

To the parent's point... I'd recommend a hackintosh Intel NUC. I got blisters stuffing RAM SIMMs into daughter cards. I've agonized over IRQ choices for peripherals. I'm so over fiddling with my daily driver. I've got Audrinos and RPi projects for scratching that itch.

Uncertainty over the keyboards is precisely why I postponed replacing my laptop.

I'd probably use my iMac more if I could find a keyboard & trackpad combo in the same form factor as my laptop's. I want the trackpad flush and centered below the keyboard. I've used cardboard wedges to fake the arrangement, but it's not the same. And since Teleport has stopped working, I haven't figured out how to use my laptop's inputs across devices. (First world problems, I know.)

I've been using Synergy in place of teleport. Not as good but gets the job done. There's a top shelf paid version but an older free version does the job for me.

https://symless.com/synergy

If you build a newer version from source you can get the best of both worlds: Free, while also not blasting your passwords across the network in plaintext

I think Synergy does what you needed with Teleport. I used it at work a while back when I had Apple devices and it worked great as long as I had the MacBook set up as the host.

I use this piece of software for Windows/MacOS mouse and keyboard sharing: http://www.keyboard-and-mouse-sharing.com/

It works reasonably well.

> I'd recommend a hackintosh Intel NUC

What models work with minimal fuss? What about updates? How do I know that an update won't replace/delete some kext that I need and brick it or break some required functionality?

I really wanted to do this a year ago - except there wasn't any hardware that seemed to answer those questions satisfactorily. In the end, the stability of knowing I can turn on the computer and start work every day without worrying about having to drop into a recovery console because an update f'd is worth more to me than a few grand.

Maybe things have changed?

Have you seen https://bullettrain.com/products/express-keyboard-platform? I have an older version of this and I love it.

I had not. Thank you!

I'm curious why you need 5K@27 for 3 columns.

I have 2x27" 4K LG's and they comfortably fit.

The effective DPI may be higher on 5K at 27" than 4K at 27" but at a reasonable distance I fail to see any difference (approx 220ppi vs 170ppi at 3 feet).

I currently use a 24" at 4K and to fit 3 columns I need to use a smaller font size, which makes the code hard to read.

I used to have a 27" at 4K, and indeed you can fit 3 columns then, but the blurry/jagged fonts annoyed me. 4K really isn't enough for 27".

My conclusion was that I need exactly 5K at 27" (and not larger, because then you have to turn your head to see everything) for coding.

Interesting, you must have excellent eyesight 170ppi at arm's length and I can see a pixel or any jaggedness.

I agree with you about size though running two 27" (on VESA mount arms) is the max I'd want for comfort as it was I had to get a 80cm deep desk to sit slight further back.

https://i.redd.it/tctxa7hs16l21.png

That desk is 120x80 and the monitors still over shadow it.

5K at 27" enables you to use 2x scaling which is much lighter on your hardware. Scaling 4K at 2x leads to a sizing which looks like 1080p (just much sharper), which may be too large depending on your distance from the screen. Using anything but 2x scaling will tax your hardware, slow down the computer and blur the image.

Read more about it here: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

Ah Mac.

I'm on Linux and I just use fractional font scaling (1.5 usually) and everything works fine and it has no performance impact I can discern across AMD RX at work, intel hd or rtx2080.

While it's true that fractional scaling works differently on Linux and Windows, it's my understanding that many apps don't handle scaling well, or at all, over there.

Meanwhile on macOS basically any app scales properly - I think I have never seen one that doesn't. You can use fractional scaling on a mac, but in that case your whole output will be rendered in 5K and scaled down to the target resolution, which is of course an intensive task - I wouldn't recommend it and instead always use true 2x scaling.

Since you're using a desktop, what's wrong with the 2018 Mac Mini? Upgradable RAM, storage and GPU can be added externally. Dual 4k support out of the box or a single 5k should be enough for your single monitor?

Came here to say exactly that. Replaced my big 2008 MacPro with a mini and couldn't be happier. I do wish the storage were upgradable internally, but so far it hasn't really been a problem.

One big plus: it's quiet, so I can leave it on.

I want single pretty case, not some mess of wires. I want good Nvidia gaming GPU like 2060 for reasonable price, not some overpriced professional underpowered card. I want very fast CPU that will reach boost frequencies and keep operating there with quiet cooler and PSU, not laptop CPU which throttles on any prolonged load. Mac mini is tiny, but I don't need that tiny form-factor, I want huge case.

Because the cost of all that external junk adds up and you create what is essentially a dongle town on your desktop. It defeats the whole purpose of a Mini.

I know because I tried to do this with a 2018 Mac Mini. Aside from the very lackluster GPU performance, it's a pretty speedy machine.

I had a fairly generous budget for a new computer. 32GB of RAM was about $200 from Crucial. The external SSD storage options were pretty crappy. Any sort of TB3 option was a few hundred dollars to start. I ended up settling with a USB3 2TB HDD. I then had to copy my Photo and iTunes libraries over to it and re-point the apps to the right spots.

For the external GPU, you're looking at about $500 at a minimum. And then you have to find a place for that to sit, and it's essentially the size of a small ITX PC case.

I ended up returning the Mini and just breaking down and building a vanilla hackintosh. A 8700K/32GB/1TB SSD/RX 580 ITX box with quality parts that's all in one small case (Fractal Design Define Nano S) in the same desk footprint as just the external GPU enclosure, and it's not a thermally-constrained dongletown.

Would I recommend it to anyone? No. But after an initially scary couple of hours, I have for all intents and purposes a normally-functioning macOS box that is noticeably quicker than the Mini for the cost of just the base Mini -- sans all the other junk I had to buy. The macOS install is vanilla, with SIP enabled, and no janky kexts in the OS install - NOTHING custom in the OS install. The bare minimum shoved in the EFI partition.

Everything works (sleep, audio, iMessage, etc). It was marginally more trouble than getting Windows 10 installed. Less trouble than getting Ubuntu installed.

God, it's glorious.

This sounds interesting - do you have a description of the hardware you used to hand?

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/jake541/saved/#view=ZnVr6h

As of today, the prices are higher than what I paid. If you're going to buy, monitor /r/buildapcsales on Reddit and buy your parts when they go on sale. I bought my stuff over a period of a couple weeks and saved substantial money.

Samsung SSD prices fluctuate by 10s of dollars. Other SSD manufacturers such as Intel and WD offer steep discounts at times. The RX 580 GPUs go on significant sales pretty often.

At some point, I need to finish my guide and publish to Github. I largely followed corpnewt's Vanilla Guide for Mojave [1], and followed the Coffee Lake train. It's important to follow each step closely.

Again, I do not recommend a hackintosh, but for me it worked out really well.

1. https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-...

Thanks!

Just want to say thanks for sharing all this.

I'm tempted but after fiddling with Linux laptops for about 3 years I'm a kind of tired of having to deal with all sorts of minor annoyances, especially bugs/freezes/usability issues (e.g. HiDPI) introduced by hardware incompatibilities (the Linux system itself, especially Arch, is actually surprisingly stable). They do add up, especially past the initial excitement. With a Hackintosh you do get the OS but you don't really have guarantee that things will keep working in the future, nor easy warranty when things fail.

I don't really get the resistance about adding some external cables/cases to your desk. The desk has always been full of cables anyways (monitors, speakers, consoles, even my mechanical keyboard etc.) and I don't see any harm in adding a couple more for an external SSD and an eGPU. As mentioned by some other commentators, I'm pretty much past the days of having to constantly fight my main setup and just want to have everything working flawlessly most of the time.

I plan to get a Mac Mini soon and try it out. I think the performance should suffice for most of my use cases. If it seriously stutters I'll consider building a Hackintosh, or simply do those demanding tasks on another dedicated box.

I wonder if there's a product or market for those who want a Mini core but don't want the dongles visible (ie, make a breathable ITX/DTX box but you put the Mac Mini, dongles and peripherals inside).

This would be my choice over a hackintosh for parents or other family.

Sounds like something that could be 3D printed or

Interesting idea. There are countless companies manufacturing quite beautiful accessoires for Apple hardware. I'm sure soemone like Grovemade [1] could design a premium looking wooden enclosure for a Mac Mini with cable management as well as ample room and several compartments for external hardware.

[1] https://grovemade.com/monitor-laptop-collection/

Getting an external enclosure effectively doubles the cost of adding discrete graphics in some instances. That's a laughable solution.

If someone could figure out a legal way to offer recommended-hardware Hackintosh builds as a service†, that'd be pretty ideal for what you're talking about, in the sense of "you could buy one for your mom", and it would "just work" (and hopefully continue to "just work" through updates, if they do it right.)

† I guess, if you were to operate a "Hackintosh OEM", you could sell the hardware build itself without actually doing the step of installing macOS onto it. You'd have a team that would continuously figure out what drivers + config would work best for each given macOS update (with a perfected DSDT, etc.), and then that team would package those patches up and hand them off to e.g. the UniBeast team, such that the regular Hackintoshing process that everyone uses would detect your build by the CMOS vendor+model ID, and just plop that OEM package in instead of requiring any config. And would also install an updater that would update your patch-package, and also delay macOS's own OS updates until a tested patch-package is available.

I feel like anyone becoming too successful in this space would find the ol' Eye of Sauron pointed at them pretty quickly..

Whether through technical or legal means, I doubt Apple would sit around and let this openly thrive or grow into a viable option for the average consumer.

I do not think they would bother with technical, that has consequences (ie technical debt), legal is more than enough. Even if someone finds a loophole currently, it's pretty much guaranteed they will change the T&C of MacOS immediately to close it the moment they feel threatened.

You feel it when you try and use iCloud on a hackintosh. As you progressively lose access to your services, you begin to question the choose you have made. And that’s just a glancing blow. Never again.

I've been using iCloud on my hackintosh successfully for years now. You just need to get the SMBIOS stuff right (i.e. use a device serial number that comes from a valid production run, but which doesn't belong to any actual machine.) It's set-and-forget once it's correct. iMessage works for me. Handoff and Airdrop would too (I stuck a wi-fi card in my workstation and verified that it works, but I don't need wi-fi and it was hogging the PCIe slot.)

I think, these days, Clover does all the calculations and checks needed by itself. It used to be harder, but not any more.

Now, here's a real complaint: there's no Hackintosh driver to get the OS to treat an IBM-compatible PC speaker (you know, the one driven by an Intel PCH's onboard 8253 logic) as a sound device, so that I can configure the OS to play "System Sounds" through it, and thus have an extremely-tinny Apple "bwah" on start-up. What kind of loser OS is this? ;)

> If someone could figure out a legal way to offer recommended-hardware Hackintosh builds as a service†, that'd be pretty ideal for what you're talking about, in the sense of "you could buy one for your mom", and it would "just work" (and hopefully continue to "just work" through updates, if they do it right.)

Is this not what tonymacx86.com provides via the buying guide / golden builds forum?

You still have to buy the parts and put them together yourself; and then you have it follow the scene to figure out what to do for each macOS update (e.g. whether you should wait before installing it, whether you need to tweak some setting in Clover, etc.)

I’m willing to do that for one workstation that will live on my desk; I’m not willing to do it for a computer that’s going to be used by a relative who lives thousands of miles away, who I only see for a few days a year (and don’t want to waste those days building a computer.) Let alone several such computers, one per relative.

Whereas in the hypothetical I’m talking about, you order the computer pre-built from a website shipped to your relative, and burn macOS to a USB; and then, when you visit them, unpack the box, install the OS on the computer, and then forget about it.

Ah, by 'build' I thought you meant the parts list.

Pre-built systems has been tried before, but Apple shut it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation

I’m late to the party I see!

I don’t know how that’s ever going to be viable though.. for that scenario you would already have a Mac mini there because there is no need for hardware to run like Crysis. And then it can have service, comes with keyboard and mouse, as well as manuals. Then I am not sure how cheap you want to have that hypothetical alternative to make it worthwhile.

I run macOS on HP Z420s. Despite not really promoting this post, I've had a few people find it and ask various questions (sometimes about hackintosh). I always reply!

So same offer here, if anyone wants to go that route: https://www.matthewwegner.com/hp-z420-desktop-buying-guide/

Having used Hackintosh builds for several years, it's not something I want to do anymore. The whole point of using Mac hardware is to get Mac software along with it and be able to concentrate on actual work instead of endless fiddling with the system to get it to work. The Hackintosh experience is cool, but not for people whose goal is to get work done.

Well, sure. My point was that an OEM could do the "endless fiddling" for you, and then a Hackintosh would be just like an Apple-purchased computer (except with some OS update latency—a lot like the latency of Android-device OEM OS updates.)

> The whole point of using Mac hardware is to get Mac software along with it and be able to concentrate on actual work instead of endless fiddling with the system to get it to work.

To some, the point of using a Mac is to be able to develop and test software for Mac hardware using Apple's frameworks, and having to spend 3x the price tag just to get the hardware is something that makes little to no sense.

I mean, where on earth does it make sense to spend over 2k€ for a desktop computer just because you want to have more than 8GB of RAM?

"and having to spend 3x the price tag just to get the hardware is something that makes little to no sense."

But still probably cheaper than the value of your time spent building a Hackintosh and keeping it functional.

>cheaper than the value of your time spent building a Hackintosh and keeping it functional

I don't bother with hackintosh any more as I don't have any use for MacOS, but my experience was pretty seamless. I used hardware that was sitting around unused and after installing a couple of custom kexts everything just worked (^). I never had anything break even when upgrading from one major version to the next.

^ networking, sound, XCode etc. Not sure about apple services like iCloud or some of the iphone features since I never used them. Good enough for a cheap build machine when I was tinkering with some iOS dev.

I'm in a similar position. I visited Apple ecosystem with Macbook Pro, but that laptop was terrible and I switched to Windows PC despite loving macOS, I just don't want to pay Apple tax for things I don't need. But you should wait for their new Mac Pro announce. I don't have huge hopes for it, but who knows.

> I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors

Apple does a pretty good job supporting the needs of most people, in a slim clean form factor, with the iMac. It supports memory upgrades, and external monitors. There is a small group that needs nearly every component to be upgradeable or swappable, and they offer the Mac Pro for that use case. I don't see a scenario where the cost/benefit of adding removable graphics cards to an iMac would make sense. I would like to see the hard drive accessible like the memory is.

>> they offer the Mac Pro for that use case.

I'm not sure I buy this as an argument until the new Mac Pro is released.

Having said that, the Mac Pro is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. I think a lot of people want something between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro. Something that could be called Mac "Midi" that would allow for some commodity parts (ram, storage, gpu) to be used.

>> I don't see a scenario where the cost/benefit of adding removable graphics cards to an iMac would make sense.

In any case, this is probably a non-issue with TB3 and eGPUs.

I have one of the recent Mac Mini's and upgraded the RAM and hooked up an external eGPU that's working flawlessly. (But for an easy experience you're limited to AMD cards and apple approved enclosures...) For an apple product, it was quite user upgradable.

(Technically Apple says the RAM isn't user upgradable, but it's still relatively easy.)

If it were doing a good job of supporting the needs of most people one would question why 90% of people are using something else.

Upgradable/fixable everything is a feature of the $299 desktop machine you find at walmart or the $40 machine from goodwill. It doesn't start at $5000 that only 0.05% of planet earth can afford.

Edit: Holy shit it is much worse than I thought. The actual desktop option is basically a $700-$900 pc that starts out at 3-4K. It looks like they have ignored the mac pro for years but kept the humongous price.

If you actually want a capable machine you have to buy the imac pro option and if you actually select a fast processor its more like 8k for a machine wherein you could probably build an equivalent pc for 2.

The primary feature of a $299 desktop is the $299 price. That it is fixable and upgradeable is largely incidental. You are right though, I should have said Apple is supporting the needs of most people who value what Apple offers in a computer (OSX, physical form, etc). They aren’t going to boost their market share by adding swappanle graphics cards to the iMac or a j-mouse nub to the MacBook.

> You are right though, I should have said Apple is supporting the needs of most people who value what Apple offers in a computer (OSX, physical form, etc).

Veblen goods is more like it.

> They aren’t going to boost their market share by adding swappanle graphics cards to the iMac or a j-mouse nub to the MacBook.

Wanting to add/replace DIMMs or SSD HDs isn't asking much.

The 21" does not support memory upgrades.

The Apple support document[1] makes it sound like it can be upgraded, just not by an end user. Is that what you meant?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#note

"and they offer the Mac Pro for that use case"

Which was never popular with users, never good value for money, never sold very many, and hasn't been seriously updated since 2013.

"I would like to see the hard drive accessible like the memory is."

Allow hard drive and RAM upgrades for iMacs and Mac Book Pros, would instantly make all the performance sensitive customers much happier.

I'm in your boat. My history with Apple goes back even longer, to the Apple II and Mac SE. I've lost track of how much Apple gear I've purchased in the last three+ decades. The only non-upgradeable part that cheeses me is the storage. And the battery should be user swappable. Aside from reliability issues like the keyboard/display which Apple obviously has to fix, those are the only two parts which I almost always need to upgrade or replace later. Storage just keeps getting denser and cheaper over time. Batteries wear out. But CPUs and memory, these days I can figure out what I want at purchase time and those will be good for years.

I recently purchase a 13" air, despite the ancient design and shitty screen, because I refuse to buy something that I couldn't swap the SSD and battery. (And I couldn't find a suitable used 2015 mbp.)

I was just lamenting to my wife as I was browsing Apple's web site and the mess that is the Apple lineup: there's no way Steve Jobs would have put up with this shit. Yes, I know he was responsible for the G4 Cube, and some other silly things... but today's Apple lineup, shipping a brand new iPad with only Pencil 1 support? Cook would go to Jobs and say, "but look at the process efficiency" and Jobs would just say, GTFO! I'm sure of it.

Look I get that most consumers aren't opening their devices. But throw the pros a bone already. All Apple is making these days are Lamborghinis. That's not what pros want: just give us a really fast pickup truck! Please Apple?

For me, I think something like an sd express slot and their 1000MB/s performance profile, where cards would be flush with the laptop case, would be a good solution.

I do understand most of their trade-offs. But these little m2 nvme sticks should be just as easy to expose as ram is. That'd make a huge difference for me. Being locked in to a purchase-time decision doesn't sit well with how quickly SSD capacities and prices evolve.

Yup, I’ve upgraded two Apple laptops already with NVMe adapters and Samsung SSDs.

https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-201...

I had in mind the 27” imac which technically has replaceable storage, but you need to be comfortable taking a pizza cutter to the glass. While I’m glad for the trapdoor RAM slot, it does feel like a shame there apparently wasn’t any spare space on the 7 square miles of aluminium on the rear of the machine, to put an M2 slot behind a similar trapdoor.

"there's no way Steve Jobs would have put up with this shit."

The first thing Jobs did upon returning to Apple is reduce the product line to exactly four products. Consumer and pro laptop, consumer and pro desktop.

That’s true, but you shouldn’t assume he would do the same now.

Apple in 2019 with a market cap of ~1,000,000,000,000 is vastly different than Apple in 1997 a few months from bankruptcy.

> It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me.

It feels like these products are just an afterthought for the company.

They are using them as cash cows to just exploit. It is a closed ecosystem, so they can afford to overcharge and under offer.

I believe underdeliver is the word you want in this case.

Aren't the only people buying Macs those who have no choice because of the monopoly they have for iOS development? I mean really - crappy hardware (form over function), expensive, dated UI.

No; pretty much everybody I know in tech uses one and almost nobody I know in tech develops for iOS.

They're standard issue at most companies in the valley, at least, with "open" x86 laptops being a distant second (maybe 10% of the population) split between Windows and Linux.

People typically see MacOs as "Unix-family OS that doesn't suck". The day Linux delivers a decent desktop environment will be the day people ditch Apple. Unfortunately, that day is somewhere between "20 years from now" and "never"

> Even if Apple can't make the machines more upgradeable because of customer support issues,

As I understand it, it isn't a customer support issue but a physical limitation issue for what processing power these machines get. They are built with soldered components which means no upgradeability with the flip side being that the performance is 5 years ahead of the direct competition. In other words...you can't upgrade but you won't need to like you used to. It's a paradigm shift.

>They are built with soldered components which means no upgradeability with the flip side being that the performance is 5 years ahead of the direct competition

Who are they five years ahead of exactly? And who told them to make the enclosure out of a garbage can?

Their base model comes in at 3k. They are well behind anything I would build for 3k, sans the garbage can case.

If you're working on a Mac Pro, hang on another few months and you'll have a new Mac Pro to consider, one that likely hits all of these features:

> I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors

For me the incredibly obvious flaws are (a) not having a monitor line anymore despite pushing USB-C stuff, (b) the really awful keyboards on the laptops now, (c) the Touch Bar being completely pointless†, and (d) the price tags on prepackaged spec upgrades being absurd.

† The weirdest part of this is that there's an obvious high-value use case using exactly the same hardware: use that strip as a Dock replacement with app icons, so everyone can reclaim the bottom half-inch of their main screen.

I like Apple's current lineup but I do think they have lost a certain segment of users: people who don't care about appearance or thinness and just want a modestly priced, upgradeable box.

"people who don't care about appearance or thinness and just want a modestly priced, upgradeable box."

Not sure those people were ever Apple customers.

That's an overgeneralization. With Apple's move from a niche to a more mainstream platform in recent decades of course their customers choose Apple for all kinds of and increasingly varying reasons.

Personally, I use Apple for their software. Having that software in an affordable, customizable, upgradable package would be very welcome. I can get beautiful hardware from most manufacturersand brands these days, so that isn't a unique selling point any longer.

The iMac is a great machine. I have a late 2014 iMac 5K 27" and it's still going strong with 32 gigs of RAM and 512G SSD. It had the max CPU for the time (4.0 ghz i7.) Apple Care expired end of 2017, so unless the thing dies or OS upgrades become unsupported, I don't have a reason to upgrade it.

Same here. My 3TB fusion drive died at some point but it lives on with just the 128GB ssd that came with that. Also, I connected an external 2 TB Samsung SSD to it which ended up being a nice performance upgrade as fusion drives are slow. Apple should just kill the fusion drive option; bad idea. You are better off with a proper ssd and external storage.

I maxed out the specs at the time, which in retrospect was a good choice since it has lasted me for five years. The screen is awesome and with a quad core i7 and 32GB there's not a lot it can't do comfortably even today.

Games are the exception as this is not a gaming machine. Yet, I regularly use x-plane on it as well and I get decent performance given that it is running on a laptop grade GPU that is five years old. It's actually more sensitive to CPU performance and the 4Ghz core i7 is still pretty nice. CPUs have gotten faster but not a lot in the last five years. Certainly they have not doubled in performance twice. Rip Moore's law, I guess.

I don't run x-plane at native resolution because I gain a few FPS by using a slightly lower resolution but it is actually usable at native resolution if you can live with lower graphic settings. If you are into this, I maxed out most graphics settings like maximum objects, texture resolution, etc. but have reduced reflections to the minimum (kills performance with not a lot of visual impact) and reduced anti-aliasing settings and shadows as well. Tuning x-plane is a bit of dark art but generally it can look great on even modest hardware. I also use a lot (several hundreds of GB) of high resolution Ortho4XP scenery and and other custom scenery. Typically seeing between 20/30 FPS. So, looking pretty good and it uses the 32 GB. The AMD m295x with 4GB has been pretty good.

It's a bit disappointing that five years later the state of the art Imac is essentially the same with a slightly newer CPU and GPU. Sure it will be faster but a 2x performance boost will only be true for software that maxes out all 8 cores. Still, nothing wrong with the vega and i9 combo. I'd take that provided there are no thermal issues. I had the same kind of disappointment when I replaced my 2012 MBP with a new one a bit over a year ago. My java build ended up roughly 30% faster only (maxing out all cores). I suspect my comparatively ancient iMac might be faster.

Yup, I have a Retina 5k iMac and love it. I avoided going the all-in-one route for ages, but when I replaced my 10 year old Mac Pro and was still using the same 24" Dell display it came with, I decided that display and computer lifespans are relatively in sync these days.

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019.

It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.

With current SSD prices being at rock bottom, can a 128GB SSD cost more than a 5400RPM 2.5" drive?

It'll cost the same but your 5400RPM drive will have about 30x more storage.

I think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market.

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat...

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...

I was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available".

A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.

120GB SSDs are $20 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/

Both storage types will have comparable prices at 128GB, and their cost per GB will decrese at different rates as you increase storage capacity. It's not fair to compare pricing between different storage capacities across different storage types, that is why I have shared 1TB drives from the same vendor.

Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp...

128GB fills up quickly. A 1TB 5400RPM 2.5" drive is $45-50 on pricewatch.

Pricewatch is still around? I used it back in the early 2000s but forgot about it.

For EU prices also check https://geizhals.eu/ they got acquired by Heise Gruppe some years ago and are my goto-service for model comparison and extended filtering, also very useful outside EU. Haven't seen a comparable service yet for US with price trend and consistent feature tagging.

1TB HDDS are generally the most expensive. At such a low capacity it makes more sense to just get a 500GB SSD for $50. Alternatively if you really need the capacity of an HDD: for just $90 you can get a 3TB HDD. triple the capacity, less than double the price.

Edit: Apparently 3TB HDDs cost as low as 60€ nowadays...

"But we cant compromise profits of our high end line"

Sometime around 2013-2014 it began to be visible that Apple stopped trying to make "the best hardware in its class" and migrated to "how does this fit in a marketing matrix".

Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.

Cook is doing exactly what he's best at, which is what you said. Optimizing every last cent out of a process.

Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.

So you don’t remember back in the first Apple heyday of the 80s when Jean-Louis Gassée was leading the charge (no he wasn’t the CEO) to sell overpriced Macs with 40% profit margins?

There's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it.

I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.

But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.

The problem in the 80s was that the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow. When Windows became good enough, no one bought Macs and it almost killed Apple.

Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.

I know what happened and I'm concerned it's going to happen again, soon

> Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

Apple explicitly claims the iMac is for "pros" in the article this page is discussing:

"iMac is ideal for pros"

"iMac is loved by consumers and pros alike."

"the most demanding pro workloads."

"even a pro studio."

and more.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-perfor...

Not the same iMac. If all iMacs should be for consumers and Pros should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

So, yes, Apple describes some iMacs that are not iMac-Pros as "for Pros".

> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.

But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."

They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.

The difference is that you could not get a Mac as fast as the then current PC at any price until the switch to Intel.

Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.

2015 to be exact. Both the iPhone 6S and MacBook Pro 2015 are the absolute pinnacle of Apple tech before they started to do absurd year-on-year price raises and introducing backgrades (no 3.5mm port, bad keyboard, touchbar, no magsafe).

I purchased a (I believe) mid or late 2014 model Macbook Air with the upgraded CPU and RAM and it's one of the best computers I've owned. Very snappy still to this day, extremely durable, and it wasn't terribly expensive compared to other laptops with similar hardware/form factor.

Hasn't Apple always been more of a 'pretty good hardware, nicely integrated and packaged, for a premium price' proposition? I personally can't remember a time when this wasn't so.

Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?

You are right, but for a while this was not true. When Apple switched to x86 the MacBook was competitively priced. I remember buying one because it was cheaper than comparable PCs.

"pretty good hardware"

This is the part they gave up on, while keeping the other two.

It depends. Their SSDs are state of the art and among the fastest you can get. Their 5K display still hasn't any serious alternatives. Their own mobile (for now) CPUs are pretty much unmatched.

Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.

The iMac has other configs and if you are a power user, you can get the specs you want. Maybe Apple does have some customers for the low end config that’s not obvious. Why should your opinions limit their choices?

Because "ignoring your customers' opinions" isn't a particularly effective marketing strategy?

They aren’t. That’s why they offer multiple configurations.....

Because hard drives have become "this is so slow that it harms your products reputation to use them". The bottom of the SSD pile is still many, many times faster than the fastest hard drive.

I have an ancient Dell Precision M6600 with a Core i7... and an ancient 5400 RPM hard drive. The machine is unusable. It's worse than nearly any other machine with an SSD--even one with a much weaker processor.

it's SATA so you can replace it with anything you like; if you're not fond of paying the extra $200 for 25% of the storage capacity.

A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.

Getting max performance is not that obvious. You'll want to go through the the PCIe port and find a M2 NVME/PCIe Mac adapter.

Sure. But the drive that is inside is listed as being SATA. I haven’t seen a tear down but it’s not soldered or proprietary at least.

The spinning disc drive is SATA and non proprietary (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). The SSD is not and use a proprietary PCI-e connector (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). You can find adapters though (https://www.amazon.de/Sintech-M-2-PCIe-2280-SSD-Karte-MZ-JPU...).

That's pretty gross. Thanks for the info. :\

Replacing the hard drive in these macs requires separating the display. Possible but a delicate operation. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...

I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.

I boot off a Nvme SSD in an usb-c (https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_42600/merkmale.html) enclosure on my 2017 27" iMac. I do manage 1000 MB/s. Popping off the screen and using the right adapter and SSD you may be able to reach 2500 MB/s.

I recently replaced the drive on mine. The most annoying part of the process is the fact that you have to purchase adhesive strips to be able to re-seat the display.

Yeah, I bought my wife an iMac 4-5 years ago with the standard HD config and it feels almost useless being so slow. My even older MBA with half the RAM and an SSD is much more usable.

Worth popping an aftermarker SSD (or Fusion Drive) in there.

I did it once and removing the big glass plate assembly with magnets is nerve-wracking.

And no longer possible, think the newer models have fused glass.

Replacement is still possible (I used to work in a shop that did the same) but definitely way out of the reach of users. If I recall correctly, you have to order replacement adhesive from Apple, and when I was working there third-parties hasn't come out with their own replacement adhesive yet (Apple will not sell any sort of parts to users).

You can buy self adhesive strips on eBay, I upgraded a 21.5" machine last year.

Or just buy an external drive....

My similar aged, non-HD iMac became unusable until I wiped and reinstalled the OS. (I had been upgrading it in place for years).

The process was surprisingly fun, too.

Does it still hold that SSDs are harder to recover data from than HDDs? Or is that out the window?

Apple had a backup solution that was easy to use.

Yeah Time Machine is great. I'm not sure that was the issue. I think it's that SSD's are more expensive.

My wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on.

I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).

At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.

But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.

Restore form backups. Chances are if you're at the point where you're trying to do data recovery you're already hosed.

From my experience SSDs die hard and you will get nothing back from them. I always thought they may go into read only mode but I have never seen that.

Meh, not defending Apple in any way but RPM isn't a very useful metric without other specs on the drive.

Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.

This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.

This is Dongle Inc. we're talking about. These days, hard drives should be outside the iMac chassis, and its internal storage should be SSD only.

Fusion Drive is a hack.

Fusion with optane would be acceptable. Or even m.2. but not SSD and HDD at the prices they want.

Have you used a MacBook Pro (2012 or older) or iMac with a regular hard drive? You can't even surf the web with them and they take 2 minutes to boot up.

I'm writing this from a 2010 Mac mini with a regular hard drive. It's fine. Not snappy, but fine.

Have you used the 5,400 RPM iMac? It's incredibly laggy out of the box. Even booting takes 1-3 full minutes. It crunches just opening apps. With all that other hardware, it's just a waste: you're drinking an i7 through a straw.

It’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library.

My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now.

Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system.

I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.

The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.

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

So now you have to carry an external HDD around with you and plug it in every time you want it to boot up?

We're talking about iMacs. In case it's not clear, that's a desktop system not a portable one.

Ah. I got mixed up. Thanks.

They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.

Are you carrying around an iMac with you? If you are, the drive is the least of your issues.

You mean you dont? https://i.imgur.com/RUN11Hb.jpg

A $3k desktop for which you need to buy an external drive. At some point slavishness to the Apple brand must have a breaking point.

Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.

If you’re buying a “$3000” iMac you’re not buying one with a fusion drive....

Canadian price for a top-end 27" Retina iMac is $3079, and has a 2TB Fusion drive standard. The 512GB SSD option is $120 more than the Fusion drive.

A quarter of the storage at a premium price isn't exactly appealing to a lot of people, regardless of how much faster it may be.

You know there is a way that you can configure what you want for your budget....

I maxed out the CPU and got a lot of RAM, I assumed the drive would have enough cache that I wouldn't notice the spindle aspect.

And now that you see it isn’t the case after that you couldn’t just say “my bad” and spend the < $200 for an SSD drive?

I think the SSD would have been $500 more, which I would have happily paid if I had realized how poorly the fusion drive would perform.

So you would have been willing to spend $500 morethen but not spend much less and buy an external drive now?

I’m not unwilling to buy an external drive, but I’d rather have a better internal drive.

Isn't the point of an iMac the fact that it's a clean, uncluttered device?

If you are willing to accept separate components, you can buy much cheaper hardware.

Seeing that hardly any reputable company sells 5K displays anymore besides LG, the monitor itself is worth $1300. The cheapest 5K iMac is $1800. You’re not going to find computers “much cheaper” than $500 that match the iMacs specs.

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

In my experience most of what I end up needing ends up cold. Even XCode builds take forever on it due to the slow storage.

Now I’m wondering how to get visibility into it. I work with a ton of repos and never see this - it’s usually just things like old VMs.

Get a thunderbolt drive caddy and boot from external Thunderbolt disk. Refreshed an old iMac this wayz

I did the same. OS and apps on a cheap 240GB Thunderbolt SSD. Everything else on the internal 1TB spinning disk. Now it’s fantastic.

I pulled the screen off and installed an SSD. Easy to do

Any links to a tutorial on how to do this? I'd love to do that but also don't want to crack the screen in the process.

ifixit.com has _extremely_ well done step-by-step upgrade guides: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel

Something sounds wrong. I have an older 21.5 with the first generation 1 TB fusion and it is not at all slow.

First generation 1TB fusion drives had 128GB of SSD storage. 2017 and 2019 1TB fusion drives have 32GB of SSD storage [1], which is basically just enough for the OS and a couple of apps if you are lucky. People are not exaggerating when they say Apple hardware are regressing, not progressing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

That explains it. I hadn't actually used one before purchasing it but had used the previous generation model a few times.

The size need only be proportional to the amount of hot data. And realistically, it need only be proportional to the amount of hot data that's randomly accessed in small chunks, because that's where the bulk of the improvements will come from.

I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.

Putting/letting Jony Ive on designing the new campus is one of the dumbest things Apple has done. Effectively dereliction of duty.

Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.

If it's less than a year old, it's under warranty. Take it in (or send it in) and make Apple look at it. It should not be that slow.

I have the 5k iMac with slow hard drive. I ended up getting a USB3 SSD and booting the system from that drive. Works great. much faster.

I mean... they will notice that their computer sucks, but they might not know why. 5400 rpm is a joke considering you can buy a 7200 rpm drive with belly button lint and a serviceable SSD for $100 or less. There are budget laptops at Best Buy you can get with 7200 rpm drives standard, and even that is borderline unacceptable with how cheap SSDs are now.

You can buy 2TB M.2 SSD drives for $220 retail now.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...

QLC drives are not equivalent to TLC or MLC drives in performance or durability, which is what apple is using.

They will sell you a brand new macbook air with 128gb of storage that you can't upgrade. I can't even back up my phone with that. They literally don't care at all.

> lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

Because 90% don't need computing power; they just browse Facebook and Spotify.

The Fusion Drive is available for $100 more, if you actually need to access local storage.

Horrible. I bought a 2010 iMac with a 5400 HD and a MacBook Pro with an SSD at the same time. The iMac became unusable long before the MacBook Pro because of its spinning drive.

In fact, the laptop is still usable.

It's not an easy upgrade, but you could swap it out for an SSD. Checkout OWC (macsales) and/or iFixit for guides.

Probably worth it. It's 27" with 16GB of RAM and an i7.

That 5400 rpm hard drive was a bad mistake.

Apple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.

Lab settings? What school is buying hardware these days? The majority in my area are either investing in Chromebooks and dropping purchases of their own devices, or making kids buy Chromebooks.

Colleges aren’t buying labs full of Chromebooks...

They aren't buying iMacs, either. I work at one of the largest unis in the US and everything is dell optiplex from the libraries, to the lecture halls, to the research labs, and the hospitals. The only iMacs I've seen are requested specifically by faculty for their office, or are 10 years old in some windowless back room hooked up to a random microscope running snow leopard. That being said, I've never set foot near any art buildings so I don't know what happens in there regarding their machines.

Two colleges instead of one don't make it less anecdotal...

Are many colleges buying computers at all? My university CS and engineering schools both just required that students supply their own computer that was sufficient for the coursework.

Yes. There are departments outside of the CS and engineering schools and also colleges that cater to lower income students that don't require you to purchase a computer.

> It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting.

So why buy Apple?

The only time we use it for labs is running Adobe stuff, and given what students want to learn, you do need decent performing machines and something with a 5400 rpm drive is not it.

You know there are colleges all across the world, not just the one you go to....

This can't be good for Apple's reputation amongst kids in school though! Apple is basically pulling what Chrysler and GM used to do with rental cars where they sold an even cheaper version for rental use. It gives a terrible first impression of your product.

The weird thing is that slow spinning-rust is still highly usable in linux, at least in my experience. It helps that linux tends to leave a lot more RAM available as a disk cache.

”Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs.”

This doesn’t even make sense given how cheap SSDs are now. Especially with Apple’s buying power.

I’m sure some people still want high-capacity HDDs for various workloads, but that’s what Thunderbolt 3 is for, surely?

When I still gamed, I was one of the first people in my group to get an SSD. A few days later the game glitched the graphics card and I had to reboot. Restarted the machine, the game, voice chat, logged back in and playing again in just under 30 seconds.

That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.

Huh... The title of their press release seems to me somewhat clickbait-y... Why not 'iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance'? When I read this, I thought, 'oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations'.

Overall, I'm kinda disappointed that the 21' and 27' macs get different CPU gens. Why? Why not just have the latest gen in both of them? Is it price, or is it more about artificial performance impediment?

have you never seen an apple press release? Every product is 2x as fast as the old one, based on a cherry picked benchmark

have you never seen apple reviews by third parties? Their performance and battery estimates nearly always pan out, if they aren't a little pessimistic.

It is surprising they stop at 2x every single time. You would think Apple gets better at getting better because they are so elite...

Wow, I've never heard someone complain about 2x generation-over-generation improvements before.

I distinctly remember benchmarking by third parties for the iPhone 8. There wasn't even anything close out at the time.

In this case it's not just marketing speech: the new top end CPU is i9-9900k, it's ALMOST 2x faster than the previous top end CPU (i7-7700k) for multi-core benchmark.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2548

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/1779

Of course it's almost 2x faster; it has 2x the cores. Meanwhile the single-core score is almost the same for both. I've never seen anyone try to put together a good breakdown on how various common workflows stack up, but I would bet that most benefit very little from the extra 4 cores.

To me, it makes no sense that only the latest CPU generation should be used in new hardware. It’s not like the latest generation is a big improvement, not since the 2000s or so, and older CPUs are cheaper to manufacture (because problems in the manufacturing process have been fixed)

Intel has been using the same manufacturing process for the past 5 generations of CPUs, the problems in that process were fixed a long time ago.

>Why not 'iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance'? When I read this, I thought, 'oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations'.

To me it is obvious it's about HW. These are new iMac release notes, not new macOS announcement.

> These are new iMac release notes, not new macOS announcement.

How do you know that though?

First, new OS releases are in WWDC in June. Not on random days.

Second, OS optimizations of the kind that yield such a big speedup would have applied to the whole Mac range, it makes no sense how they'd be only applicable to iMacs which run more or less the same hardware.

Third, the very first words of the PR is: "Cupertino, California — Apple today updated its iMac line with up to 8-core Intel 9th-generation processors for the first time and powerful Vega graphics options, delivering dramatic increases in both compute and graphics performance. "

Because it mentions the specific hardware line in the title and doesn't mention the OS at all. If it was a software boost, it's hard to see why it would only apply to the iMac line specifically and not say MacBook Pros or Mac Minis as well.

I'm pretty sure it's a cooling issue. An 8-core CPU running at 5GHz generates a lot of heat - it's likely they can't dissipate it fast enough and encounter thermal throttling issues with higher end chips. I would _assume_ the 9th gen chips are more power efficient than the 8th gen, however, so who knows...

My guess is that many edu and corp customers buy hundreds at a time for computer labs, low demand office jobs, etc. The purchaser isn't the one that has to suffer from obsolete CPUs and slow spinning drives. The purchaser just wants to stay within budget.

Blame intel maybe? 9th gen only has the 95W SKUs fleshed out; at 65W TDP the 8th gen parts still have SKUs with higher clocks.

(as in there is an i5-9400 to replace i5-8400, but no refresh of the i5-8500, i5-8600, or i7-8700, which are all faster than the i5-9400.)

I hope this is indicative of Apple starting to get it, no one wants to buy a machine that is 3-4 years behind the curve. I could live with having a fast hardware refresh cycle and a slower design one.

Agreed. Updates 2 days in a row is a bit of a new thing for Apple. It is a good change if they are setting a precedence for doing more frequent spec bumps outside of events. We will not know for sure until 6-9-12 months from now.

They have an event soon and seem to be getting other announcements out of the way.

re: RAM, I bought a 2015 iMac with a 1TB drive on Craiglist last month, thinking it might be the perfect machine to edit and store/serve family photos (mac --> Google Photos and mac --> BackBlaze).

It never in a million years would have occurred to me that 1) 8GB on a 2015 machine would be utterly, pathetically underpowered for even browsing the web, or 2) that an iMac would be sold in 2015 that would not let you upgrade the RAM.

I quickly re-sold it to another person who I bet also hadn't imagined these things.

I'm quite surprised that you found 8Gigs a problem - what was the memory pressure indicator showing? It should be fine.

...how is 8GB underpowered for browsing the web?

My 2016 MacBook Pro has 8GB and it's perfectly fine.

I can't even imagine what web you're browsing.

I would have thought it would be ok too, but I'm guessing your machine has an SSD, so when it occasionally needs to use swap space you barely even notice. On a machine with a bare spinning platter drive and no fusion drive, going to swap can be awful for performance. You’ll really notice it. So most of the time everything will be fine, but now and then it will suddenly start crawling.

Also Chrome with a dozen tabs open is a bit of a memory hog. Safari is a lot better, but eh.

It's probably not even swapping. It's that operating systems use additional memory for I/O caching. Less memory means fewer blocks in the cache which means more slow reads from spinning rust every time you open a program or document. But replacing HDD with SSD fixes that too.

You misconfigured aomething if social media taxed your 8GB. Or had a performance bottleneck elsewhere.

It's probably bogged down by the harddrive, not the RAM.

Agree. My 2011 Mac mini with only 2 gigs of RAM is almost as comfortable for web browsing as the 1350-usd brand-new Windows 10 box in the office with 8 gigs of RAM.

A recent experience qualifies me to say that using a recent version of MacOS on a 5400-rpm hard drive is infuriating compared to using the same version of MacOS running on the same Mac with an SSD.

My 2011 Mac mini has an SSD in it. Everything is fine with my Mac till a few months ago, when I get careless during an upgrade of MacOS with the result that my system is unbootable and I cannot wipe the SSD and re-install because there is data on the SSD I don't have backed up, so to recover I install an empty 5400-rpm hard drive I have lying around next to the SSD, then install the new version of MacOS onto that.

Like others here, it amazes me that Apple still sells computers where even the system files are stored on spinning rust. Right after installation (of High Sierra) the aforementioned hard drive had less than 32 gigs of data on it. I am mystified why Apple doesn't solder at least that much solid-state memory to the motherboard.

> I couldn't just reformat the SDD because there was data on it that I didn't have a backup for

Not used time machine or is it not backing up all necessary?

I wasn't using time machine. (I am now.)

I bought one of those from best buy and quickly hit the wall with the 5400 rpm drive. I bought the iMac repair kit from ifixit and put a 1tb ssd in its place. It screams now. I have literally never had a drive swap make such a HUGE performance improvement.

Can confirm. 2012 Imac with 1TB rust disk was truly feeling its age. Swapped to small SSD I had laying around just to see what would happen and just SuperDuper-ed the old OS. Could not believe the difference. You just have to see it happen to get it. Best upgrade ever.

Agreed. I had a 2009 iMac with 640GB (7200 rpm) disk and 4 GB ram. I swapped to a smaller (250 GB) SSD and upgraded to 8 GB ram and it's like a new machine for me--a great upgrade.

Is using an external SSD drive with USB 3 a reasonable alternative? I'm considering an iMac, but I'd rather not do that iFixit kit on a brand new machine if I can avoid it.

huh - back to Craigslist for me!

My $999 Asus from Costco 18 months ago came with a 480GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and a discrete GPU.

The screen is 1080p, I would've had to pay a couple hundred extra for a 4k screen instead, not worth it when I'm mostly connected to external, and battery life is better with 1080p when I'm mobile.

My desktop is 7 years old now. I've spent ~$1400 in parts over the years. 32GB of RAM, CPU that does its job (Intel i7-whatever), and a GPU that consumes more power but is just as good as a GTX 1050 (A lot less VRAM though!).

I fully expect that machine to last me until the physical components start to give out.

Probably the capacitors. It is always the capacitors.

I’ve always had a fondness for the iMac which I’ve been using as my main Desktop since the last PowerPC version, IMO they’ve always been a mark of the best all-in-one of the day, lots of people like to focus on the internals but it ignores the noise and clutter free desktop and top build quality I’ve enjoyed for over a decade.

I’ve upgraded 4 times since and am currently enjoying the iMac 5k, this floating screen is beautiful on the inside and out, the 5k is gorgeous and its form factor is near perfect, still just a single power cord disappearing out from behind it and wireless for everything else.

I’ve got the high-end version with Max CPU and SSD so I’ll skip this version but will in all likelihood get the next unless someone ships a better all-in-one, which never happens.

Did you guys see this?

"iMac Pro now available with 256 GB RAM option … for an extra $5200"

sort of pricey.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/19/256-gb-ram-imac-pro/

Looks like it costs $3,381 off-the-shelf: https://www.avadirect.com/256GB-4-x-64GB-Quad-Rank-DDR4-2666...

also has one more added graphics option now

If you're buying a machine that needs 256 GB of RAM, presumably you or your company is using it for the type of graphics/video work that pays well enough to recoup $5200 in costs. The comparison is to professional equipment like cameras and audio interfaces, not to consumer products.

It seems to me this product is on life support and Apple is simply doing performance bumps to avoid big capex expenses on designing/tooling for something new? It ships with a 5,400 RPM disk, an outdated display technology, omits T2 chipset, doesn't include Face ID, nor any of their other innovations over the last year. It's actually egregious to stuff old hardware in a workable form factor and hock it, while ignoring that they're not backporting _any_ of their other innovations back to these devices.

And that's not to mention: buying a $3500 screen glued to a computer is massively risky.

Well the Mac Mini got a recent refresh with decent processors, the new Mac Pro is reputedly just around the corner and there is a rumour they are going to release a new display soon. My guess is you are right, it's on life support.

Outdated display tedhnology? Care to elaborate?

I find it curious that Apple is starting to communicate major product updates decoupled from an event. Just good old press releases.

Maybe they already have too many announcements to fit into the narrative of the handful of events per year.

They want to talk about services. I guess arguably small iPad and iMac refreshes don't fit into that.

I'm curious whether they take this PR option with AirPods 2 / AirPower as well or if those make it to an event.

iPads yesterday, iMacs today, maybe AirPods/AirPower tomorrow. Spreading out announcements is unusual for Apple, perhaps they're trying something new here.

they want to push iOS. They are begrudgingly updating their Mac line, with horrible specs such as 5400 RPM drives, and are avoiding holding an event for the announcements.

This way they get to ward off accusations that they have forgotten about the Mac, and they get the profits from the sales, while still trying to drive consumers to iPads.

The Mac line still makes enough revenue to be a f100 company by itself.

spec bumps don't get anything more than a news release. I figure they are leaning towards only new product debut or when devices get more health related features which is where Apple seems to trying to position themselves.

pcs, tablets, and phones, pretty much are well developed markets.

now if the air pods get some new health monitoring ability I expect them to get a presentation but right now the only remaining product is air power; their charging mat.

Some media is reporting Apple will be launching their own streaming video service next week [1]. Maybe they want to keep that launch event focused to guarantee maximum exposure.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/business/media/apple-cont...

This is not the first time that they have significant updates days before a major announcement.

I suspect that Apply keeps a lot of options for things to talk about until the last days. They wait for every key aspect of the announcement to be confirmed (which can be days earlier). That allows them to focus on the expected change if they are ready, or, if there is a last-minute issue, they can talk about spec upgrades to fill the hour, or rather to ramp up the announcement (e.g. “With all that memory, HD videos are going to look _gorgeous_. And you know where you can find HD videos? Boom! New VOD service!”). It’s consistent with descriptions of how Steve Jobs would scrape large segments of his keynotes at the last minute.

They've been doing this for about a decade. New Mac products (iMac Pro) and form factors (new MBA) get a mention at events, but spec bumps almost never do.

I just wish there was a way to run OSX on a high-performance server, or a cloud virtual machine, for continuous-integration purposes. The iMac Pro doesn't cut it, and is a pain to host anywhere. I'd like to test-build applications for OSX alongside CI builds for Linux and Windows, and there's no sensible, legal, scalable solution for that.

Searching for "macos hosting", here are the first seven links I found:

XCLOUD - macOS Cloud Hosting - https://xcloud.me XCLOUD is an enterprise-class IaaS for macOS. It is perfect for developers and companies that need to run one or hundreds of dedicated macOS VMs in the Cloud. In fact, each XCLOUD instance is a dedicated virtual machine running macOS version of your choice .

MacStadium | Apple Mac Infrastructure & Private Clouds - https://www.macstadium.com MacStadium is the only provider of enterprise-class Apple Mac infrastructure. Whether you need to deploy a private cloud for large-scale CI/CD or just need a single Mac mini to test your iOS app, MacStadium has a solution for all of your Mac development needs.

MacHighway | Mac Web Hosting | Website Builder & VPS Hosting - https://www.machighway.com MacHighway's renewable energy initiative means that not only do we reduce our environmental impact, but you do, too - simply by choosing us as your hosting provider. We purchase enough wind energy credits from Renewable Choice Energy to cover what our servers, network center, and offices use.

macOS Server Hosting - Colocation America - https://www.colocationamerica.com/dedicated-servers/mac-os-x... Colocation America has a dedicated server for all the Mac heads out there that are looking to run the latest Mac Operating System (OS) server hosting with their favorite operating system. Reap the benefits of Apple's latest macOS with its airtight security features and its world renowned user-friendly interface.

CloudXMac - Mac VPS macOS VPS Cloud - https://cloudxmac.com High-quality macOS VPS with incredible support from multiple locations around the world.You can connect to the macOS VPS from any devices to use iMessage, develop iOS and Xcode applications, run any MAC software and more!

HostMyApple: Mac VPS cloud Hosting of macOS - https://www.hostmyapple.com/macvps.html With up to 8GB of RAM and the option to expand storage HostMyApple offers powerful and affordable Mac VPS hosting. With no hardware to purchase, running your own macOS server is an easy choice for anyone looking to host their own website, share files, run mail services or develop iOS applications, all with the power of macOS Mojave.

macOS in the cloud. - Mac mini Hosting & Colocation - https://www.macminivault.com/try/ macOS in the cloud. We specialize in hosting Macs in data centers. Our two data centers (Milwaukee and Phoenix) host thousands of Macs. We have high density cabinets for both the Mac mini and Mac Pro.

I'm aware of such services; however, I said "high-performance server". Where do I get a 72-thread server I can build OSX software on? Nowhere.

More importantly, who has a scalable cloud where I can spin up as many such servers of varying sizes as I need?

You haven’t investigated these services. MacStadium will help you do this if for some reason their virtual Mac cloud product doesn’t work for you.

I did investigate all of those services before I replied. I see that MacStadium will manage Mac Pro systems, but those don't have nearly the processing power I'd want. As I said, where can I get a 36-core 72-thread Mac? Nowhere, at least not legally.

Why doesn’t their private cloud service give you that? It doesn’t seem reasonable to insist you get all your computing power from one physical machine if another solution is available.

Because I can't do make -j72 (or the Ninja equivalent) across multiple machines.

There are multiple reasons to want a single large machine rather than distributed systems. I can get that for a Linux or Windows machine, quite easily, from hundreds of vendors.

You’re right. I thought they could abstract away the network parallelization but they can’t.

I really wish I could buy a headless Mac with similar performance (including a real video card) and price. The mini doesn't quite meet my needs and the pro at $3k+ is way too expensive. These specs look good (although I would greatly prefer SSD) but I really don't want an extra monitor on my desk.

The Mac Pro is also unchanged since 2013 (they're selling a six year old computer at full price).

I'm curious: why would you want a headless machine with a real video card?

If, as I'm guessing, you want to connect an external monitor, what would be your monitor choice (and how would you connect it) to get 5K?

From my research, the iMac (or iMac Pro) was pretty much the only way to get a working non-crappy 5K setup.

I have a 27" LG 4k monitor that I connect to my work MacBook pro during the day. Then I'd like to flip a switch (or swap one plug) to use my personal computer with the same monitor. Currently that personal computer is a 2013 iMac sitting right next to my LG monitor but I'd love to get rid of it and free up the desk space.

Ok, thanks. That's a similar setup to mine, but I'm very tired of plugging, re-plugging, and using the stupid OSD menus in monitors. Plus, I really think that for 27" a 5K resolution is required.

The mini + eGPU seems like it would be a candidate then?

I suppose so. I don't know much about eGPUs. I see the cheapest one available on the Apple store is $700 which includes a Radeon Pro 580 (appears to be the same card offered on the top of line iMac from today?). With SSDs on the Mini being as expensive as they are ($800 to upgrade to 1TB), I'd probably want an external HD as well, so minimum 3 boxes on my desk and more chords to deal with.

It would meet my needs and I might reluctantly get one.

Hey Apple! While you're on this upgrade sprint, I wish out of the blue, an iPhone SE 2 is also announced.

The more time passes, the more it looks like they released an SE by mistake, still be best phone ever made IMHO but doesn't fit the strategy of upselling as much as possible.

Reading your comment on my iPhone SE. It really is the best ultra-portable smartphone ever released :)

I'm a bit puzzled as to why they don't just keep selling it, maybe with an upgraded SOC but no other new components. I don't think it would cannibalize sales of their mainline phones, and it would give lower income people a path to buy into their ecosystem. They're taking that approach with the iPad line. Maybe it didn't sell as well as I thought it did.

Maybe the best feature:

> 8GB (two 4GB) of 2666MHz DDR4 memory; four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible

Already were: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

I haven't needed to touch my memory in forever; why is this still apparently weighed so heavily? Or is that one of those things where you try to go around the Apple tax of more memory by installing your own?

Because when RAM was dirt cheap, you would pay triple the price if ordered from Apple. It's ridiculous.

Yes, and not just initially. Right now you can save something like $600 over the 64GB price but in a year those numbers will probably have improved and Apple won't have lowered the stock price at all.

RAM is currently my only major limitation on a computer.

Being able to upgrade it down the line (or immediately because only small sizes are offered) is ideal.

> 2666MHz

Isn't that slow? And expensive, as usual. I'm looking at 16GB (8x2) 3200MHz for $109 on newegg. The iMac upgrade from 8 to 16GB is $200!

Still have an old first-gen i5 powered 27" iMac. I pulled it out of the closet a year ago and replaced the dead OEM hard drive with an SSD and set it up in a corner of the living room as a GP/web machine. The optical drive is dead and a couple of the USB ports don't work, but it's still useful (nice screen, still). It's the last mac in the house, though, and I'll never buy another one.

I'm still running a 2012 iMac with fusion drive and it still feels slicker to me than a high spec Windows machine.

What would you consider a "high spec" Windows machine?

Dell XPS laptop from 2018.

That's not a high spec Windows machine, that's just a high spec Windows laptop.

High spec is subjective.. it’s high spec compared to a 2012 iMac

Well, it depends. Which particular 2018 XPS are you referring to?

Some Passmark CPU comparisons:

2012 iMac with the i7 3770 - 9282

XPS 13 i7-8550U - 8305

XPS 15 i7-8750H -12477 (Note that XPS 15s tend to be thermally throttled also)

Desktop i7 9700K - 17257

Desktop i9 9900X - 22883

Desktop Ryzen 2920X - 21920

A high spec laptop doesn't compare with a high spec desktop CPU, especially if it's a U class CPU like the ones used by the XPS 13 (which seems to be way more popular than the XPS 15).

If you have an i7 2012 iMac, it still holds its own to any top end ultrabook (U) class CPU.

The Vega 48 GPU seems disappointing for a machine that expensive.

Agree, I would want at least a Vega 64 for that amount of money (Or even a Radeon VII!). But then Apple has to think about cooling inside the small chassis, so they might not have a choice. (They managed to fix a Vega 64X in the iMac Pro, but the Pro lineup has different thermal management than the normal one)

It seems crazy to me that Apple compromised the cooling solution of their desktop machine to save 5mm of thickness. Does anyone outside of Apple's marketing department care about the thickness of their desktop machine as long as it is below an inch or two?

We're not the target audience. For programmers, developers etc, Apple has the Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro has not been updated since Dec 2013.

Yea, I agree. I'm pretty sure you could just plug in a Radeon VII as an eGPU, however. I've also heard that NVIDIA cards can work as eGPUs as well.

true. OTOH, an eGPU would be connected by Thunderbolt 3, which offers basically the same max communication speed as 4 PCIe lanes.

and so i wonder: at what point does that communication speed limit the performance of such a set up? why do people normally plug high end graphics cards into a x16 slot? how good a GPU should be used in an eGPU housing before it's a waste of money? etc

Depends on what you're doing. For playing games you're going to be getting a fair bit of texture pop and stutter. For machine learning you might be totally fine.

It seems that the price point of i9+32GB+1TB SSD+Vega 48 is about the same price ($5000) as the baseline iMac Pro. Imac Pro comes with Xeon processor and Vega 56 though. Is the iMac Pro better at this price point?

For that price tag, I can build a full server with more pimped specs and that can do much more. 5000$ are too much

There aren't really options if you want the form factor, silent operation and MacOS.

Also, I won't be upgrading my main work computer in at least 5 years. I'm now on 2011 iMac which is still a great computer, but unfortunately can't be updated to the latest MacOS any more.

An interview with the iMac product manager. Mostly a fluff piece but Jason Snell did ask about the continued use of non SSD hard drives. (Link will bring up a web page if you don’t have Overcast.)

https://overcast.fm/+Fcm8vPRGM

Proof that Apple has anorexia: 5mm thin on the outer edge of the all-in-one computer and monitor. Thinner than a lot of monitor-only's everywhere else. What is the purpose? Who would not trade a thicker stationary monitor for better upgrade-ability and/or a cheaper price? Look behind your monitor - odds are, it's just a bunch of empty space behind it on your desk. I would love to be a little bird on the wall in the Apple strategy meetings where they decided that iMacs need to be that thin. I still have an old iMac G3 kicking around from 1999. It's over a foot deep, just takes up the empty space behind the screen on the desk - no big deal.

As a counterpoint: Aesthetics matter to a non-trivial percentage of computer users. I love the iMac’s design and it was a pretty big selling point to me and differentiated the model from the other available desktops. I use an arm-style mount and couldnt be happier with the overall lack of wires and thin aesthetics.

My 2017 MacBook pro is definitely my last Apple laptop because it's just too expensive and unreliable (for reasons well discussed on HN). I have definitely considered getting a Mac Mini, but the new iMacs are definitely interesting. One thing I'd be concerned about is cooling. I know the iMac Pros are not ideal from a cooling perspective - I can't imagine an 8 core processor @ 5GHz plus a Radeon Pro GPU runs cool. I'll wait for the user-upgradable Mac Pro before I make a decision.

I've been saying for 10 years, that I am going to switch from a Mac to a ThinkPad running Linux. Yet I keep buying Macs. My latest was a MacBook Air. It really wasn't that much more than the ThinkPad I was looking at.

Their steps backward in MacBook functionality (keyboard, ports, touchbar which is at best a wash) and the price hikes over the last ~4yrs have me thinking about going back to Linux. But I need a laptop, and don't want to feel like I have to have a mouse to use it and not be miserable. And good battery life, and power management so reliable I never have to think about it (close the lid, pick it up, walk off). They're so far ahead of everyone else it's hard to justify switching even when they keep screwing up and raising prices for years. It's more a testament to how bad every other hardware+software combo is, at this point, than how good they are.

It won't be cool. It'll throttle. 9900K requires very good cooling, preferably water cooling to keep that 5 GHz and there's no way to put that cooling, especially along GPU into tiny iMac. Also I'm afraid that constant heating would damage some electronical components after few years.

I was in a similar situation in late 2017 and ended up getting a 5K iMac since I didn't need portability anymore. Best Mac I've ever had.

The 5K iMac couldn't cool the i7 7700K properly, and since fan noise is extremely annoying for me I got the i5 6500K model. In over a year I've heard the fan a couple of times, but it is silent most of the time. Performance wise, I've never found myself wishing I had gotten the i7. I do mostly dev, but also video editing, photography, and music production as hobbies. Of course I got the SSD and 16GB.

The CPU increases are welcome, but I was hoping for the rumored 6K displays.

No space grey, no T2 chip, no Touchbar.

Somehow they still sell the 1080 21" model for $1099.

The non-Retina version wasn't updated so it's rocking some pretty old hardware now. It's probably going to be quietly dropped from the store once the remaining stock runs out.

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

Have you tried remapping esc to capslock? (Or ctrl to capslock and esc to ctrl). I would never go back to normal esc.

For my part: I've thought about it, but I have huge hands. Sometimes, when I'm reaching for Shift or Tab, I hit Caps Lock on accident. I would be frustrated if I hit Caps Lock on accident and it broke me out of insert mode.

I can understand how it can be more ergonomic and usable for some people, though.

The irony is that I do have capslock mapped to escape, but my fingers frequently rest where the esc key should be, so I catch it when I wasn't expecting it.

Sure, this is my problem, its just only my problem on MacBook Pros.

> Have you tried remapping esc to capslock? (Or ctrl to capslock and esc to ctrl)

¿Why not both?

I have (on Linux, not on Mac, but it shouldn't matter):

* "caps lock" + key = Ctrl+key

* "caps lock" (release) = Esc

It works like charm and I can definitely recommend it.

How do you map it to do that?

Karabiner - https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

I have mine mapped to:

* caps (no other key) => esc * caps + home row => corresponding symbol key

Extremely nice for programming when '(' and ')' are on 'L' and ';' keys - directly under my fingers.

You can use https://github.com/alols/xcape on linux.

I guess there are other ways and tools, I use this:

1. to put Ctrl on CapsLock:

    setxkbmap -option caps:ctrl_modifier

2. to have "dual" CL as described above:

    xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'

So simple, I wish I had thought about it before. Thanks.

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

You should probably stop using the tiny escape key long before that happens. Either swap out caps for esc (my pref), start using ^[ or do one of these tricks: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I don't know if you've tried this, but consider using caps lock for ctrl (the other tiny harder to reach key) and jk for esc. The home row reachability of jk is actually really nice and having ctrl remapped seals the deal for me.

Vim user as well. My 2014 rMBP died in 2017 and I've had the 13" MBP w/ touch bar ever since. I'm utterly disappointed with the machine. I don't like anything about the touch bar, it's literally completely useless to me, however, the escape key doesn't drive me insane. I work about half of my day using my laptop keyboard and the other half docked w/ a mechanical keyboard.

I've tried mapping esc to the backtick (`) key and tried 60% keyboards - I can't get used to it.

Depending on what you do you could look into the MacBook Air?

I considered that a month ago for doing some graphic stuff which doesn't run on Linux (on my XPS 13 main machine). But the Air w/ 16 GB is a bad deal compared to the MB Pro, and the low-end MB Pro (the only one without the freaking Touch Bar) has a worse display and specs than the high-end so I didn't buy anything. I'm wondering why Apple can not just get over the idea of coupling "Pro" machines with the Touch Bar. As a touch typist and vi hard-core user, I'm never going to buy a Touch Bar device, period.

There are decent non-Apple laptops now, like the Dell XPS 13. Unless of course you need to use Mac OS.

I purchased a new laptop this year to replace my 2014 MBA and decided to go with the Razer blade. I like it a lot, and am glad I didn't go with a current MBP or MBA

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

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

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

Ctrl+c is same as esc in vim.

Was in the same boat... except my 2014 rMBP did die and I had to replace it with a 2018 model.

I also dreaded the soft-escape, but that turned out to be the least of my problems. Remapping caps lock to escape wasn't hard to get used to at all (even after 30+ years of vi use). Within a couple days that felt fine. Seemed like an OK trade for getting touch-ID unlocking.

What is absolutely not ok is this keyboard. It's the third generation "membrane" version that supposedly is better, but it's near unusable for any real work. So many keystrokes double register that my overall typing speed is probably but in half. I'm just having to backspace over the keyboard's mistakes so much! (Twice in that last sentence, for example)

And even if I put up with the keyboard somehow, I can look forward to the screen probably dying in a year or two anyway: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/22/apples-latest-macbook-pro...

I've become so used to Apple being the premium laptop brand -- yes I had to pay a bit more for a given machine spec but the overall build quality was top notch. Now they're still premium priced but are delivering the worst laptop hardware in the industry. After being sucked into the Apple ecosystem for so long I'm being forced to switch back to linux simply because they no longer sell a minimally functional laptop at any price.

So please treat that rMBP well -- you'll definitely miss it when its gone. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple never makes a laptop as good as that one again.

I get that people don't like that. I do, however, have no problems with it, coming from a developer perspective. It's in the same position, but without the tactile feedback. You'll get only visual feedback in the app you're running.

I love the touchbar, mainly because you can customise it any way you want. I have a lot of macros and shortcuts put on there for while I'm programming. Of course, I did that with the F1-F12 keys before, but now it's just more intuitive for me and aesthetically pleasing.

I would like to hear your thoughts on why a tactile device, the keyboard, is better when tactile feedback is replaced with visual clues. And why a device you touch and don't look at is more aesthetically pleasing when you remove the bits that the way you use it more pleasant.

For my money the innovation we're missing is more tactile feedback. A device that allows you to modify the click of a key, the amount of force required, the position and shape of those keys.

There should be a fingerprint sensor, though. Pairing that with the touchbar that nobody wanted in the MacBook Pros was a bad idea.

Apologies, I'm confused - isn't this a pure iMac change? Are there MBP refreshes announced somewhere else?

If only they offered with a Nvidia GPU

If you’re in the market for this model, do yourself a favour and don’t buy the base configuration with the unusably slow 5400 rpm HDD. I bought the previous model with that hard drive and the startup performance is appalling

The "upgrade" to 512GB SSD is not so bad, but to upgrade to 32GB RAM it's $600? Yikes...

Looks like Apple is starting to put a premium on OSX rather than going quality-first for its hardware.

RAM upgrades from Apple have been ridiculously overpriced for decades.

Why can't you upgrade to the new CPU on the 21.5" models?

Probably the same reason you can't on the MacBook Air

So... No real reason?

If you're intending to Bootcamp your iMac, remember that Windows will only use the slow AF spinning rust portion of the fusion drive. The SSD is worth it in this case.

Disappointed we have another year of the same iMac design, especially with serious Mac Pro rumors swirling.

Guess I'll wait for the laptops this year to see HOW Apple gets my money lol.

What rumors? That it'll be released or there are more details?

I'm out of the loop on rumors, but I think it's about the "modular Mac Pro". I first heard about it in this article: https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

I don't get the craving for a new design, the form-factor is pretty great as it is. Surely they'll eventually update it as well, but I'm a lot more interested in the internals/display/IO than the chassis.

humm I'd love to see thinner bezels and also face ID on the iMac.

The price for upgrading remains as ridiculous as ever (especially if you're not in the US).

RAM:

8 GB -> 16 GB is 2200 SEK (239 USD)

8 GB -> 32 GB is 6600 SEK (717 USD)

You can get 32GB as low as 1689 SEK (183 USD) on Newegg.

This has been the case ever since I can remember. When I was buying a MBP in 2012, this was the case as well. Of course, at that time, you could say 'screw it' and buy your own ram stick. Good ol' times. Nowadays, Apple is just not worth it (especially in Europe).

isn't the RAM soldered in on iMacs?

I don't think so at least as of mid-2017, I just searched and found videos on how to do the upgrade. Basically turn the thing over, open a latch, and swap out the ram.

It's been user-replaceable on all but a very few models. Apple even puts a little panel on the 27" models that you can easily pop out to replace on your own OWC has been selling iMac upgrades for a long time, but you can use any brand memory.

I don’t think so - but you used to have to separate the screen from the base of the computer which while very doable was much more involved than popping open a case and inserting an additional stick of of ram

The 21 inch model seems to have RAM slots, but not easily accessible like its larger sibling. The 27 inch has 4 user accessible SO-DIMM slots.

In most models there's a door on the back for a quick swap.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1

In 2017 generation it was not soldered. It's soldered in 21" from 2014 and 2015 years. I think that even CPU is not soldered in latest generation.

iMacs still have a latch to swap out RAM [1]. That, too, may soon be gone. Because on the iMac "Pro"s you have to disassemble the whole unit to get to RAM [2].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Pro+Teardown/101807 and https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac-pro/imac-pro-faq/ima...

thanks all for the answers.

@vbezhenar posted a link to Apple Support in his comment: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

right at the top, if you scroll past “27-inch” you’ll see this gem: “*Memory is not removable by users on iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013), iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2014), iMac (21.5-inch, 2017), and iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017). If the memory in one of these computers needs repair service, contact an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.”

i call this the “iMac pitfall”.

Those price have nothing in common with logic. 16 -> 32: +$400, 32 -> 64: +$400. They just put random prices based on marketing research, not on component cost.

Companies don't price products based on component costs.

With healthy competition product price is reduced almost to component cost. Not the case with Apple, sadly.

There's tons of competition in the PC space.

If nobody makes alternative Mac-like machines people want to buy for cheaper (or if Macs are seen as Veblen goods), that's a different matter.

But Apple doesn't charge $4000 for a MacBook Pro for lack of competition in the laptop space.

"But only Apple makes MBPs" is not an argument. Only Acer makes Acer machines, and only MS makes Surfaces too.

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

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

All PC makers had to do was come up with their own competing operating system around 2000. It’s not like Apple was rolling in cash back then.

PC manufacturers only have themselves to blame for being low margin commodities.

>The argument is that only Apple makes computers that run macOS well

Apple also makes macOS. Dell, Acer, and co are free to make their own OS. MS and Google already did. Heck, even some student in Helsinki did IIRC.

Can't blame Apple if people don't want their PC+generic OS bundle and prefer Mac+macOS.

Soldering in the RAM amounts to apple resorting to extortion. Where else are you gonna get this RAM other than paying the toll troll hundreds of dollars over what it should cost solely because apple greedily removed alternatives.

The RAM is quite frankly easily upgradeable on the iMac.

I hear some models they have a nice little door but some models involve a lot more frankensteining. At least on macbook's its been impossible for a while.

I would never buy an iMac but from what I hear, storage options and their pricing are even more frustrating than RAM (which you can upgrade yourself on the iMac 5K). While a neat trick when it first came out, I don't think fusion drive makes sense in 2019, so you're left with very expensive NVMe SSDs, when a 500GB or 1TB SATA SSD would be plenty enough to most people, for a fraction of the cost.

Why use a sata SSD as your primary boot disk and not a M.3 drive which is the goto primary drive for performance PC builds

You can get a 500 GB Samsung nVME for about $150 now, not much more than what a regular SSD was a couple years ago... but totally agreed that a regular SSD is more than fast enough for most people. If it was manufactured this decade, it should probably boot to desktop in less than 20 seconds.

I'm curious how the thermals will be with the i7 and i9 chips.

The 2017 5K iMac had cooling problems with the infamous i7 7700K.

it's easy to add an external SSD to an iMac, install the OS on it and configure it to boot off of it. I have gotten great performance out of an old iMac by doing this.

And if you buy two of these, you get a 4X performance boost!

I'm going Razer for higher-end upgradeable laptops & custom builds for anything which isn't going to be portable.

5400RPM HDD in 2019

“Apply,”.... is now making Macs wonder what “Apple,” thinks of this?

When will they produce an Ultra-wide (21:9) screen iMac?

Once they figured out how to make it sound like a new revolutionary thing :)

Cool HW, however fusion drive in 2019? Apple wake up!

"iMac gets a 2x performance boost"

[Citation needed]

The link you just copy/pasted is literally the citation

It's 2x faster because Apple says so. OK.

The general rule on HN is to use the same headline as the article you're linking to and not to editorialize in your title. So when you're linking to an Apple press release then of course it's Apple saying it.

One word: hackintosh.

I started fiddling with hackintoshes in 2010 and since then I've built maybe a dozen ones for me or my friends.

I now own a 5K iMac. My time is worth more than the difference in price between a hackintosh and a real mac.

Of course if you are in it for hardware freedom instead of cost then a hackintosh is your only option, but it's very difficult to get a perfect build and updating the OS is always a Russian roulette game.

@dang typo: This has been up for 5 hours with the title "Apply" instead of "Apple"?

Typing fail—sorry!

The submitted title was "iMac gets a 2x performance boost" but I changed that about 15 minutes before you posted, because we try to avoid press-release language on HN.

> ...ideal for pros with graphics-intensive workloads...

Did a bot write this? No one uses "pros" in writing like this to refer to professionals.

Really, this release was either written by a bot or a non-native English speaker.

> From consumers to pros alike, users will notice their iMac is faster for everyday tasks all the way up to the most demanding pro workloads.

This is not a natural sentence.

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