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Need advice on purchasing an iMac for School

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TechGuy18

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 8, 2012
59
21
I am thinking of purchasing the 21.5 inch iMac with the 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, with 8GB of ram, a 1TB hard drive, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics. The price $1249.00 with the education discount

I will be using the iMac for school reports, video browsing, lite gaming, and some coding/app development.

I would like to know if this is an okay computer for my needs. I appreciate any and all replies, much thanks in advance.
 
maflynn

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,489
43,414
Given your stated needs, the configuration you mentioned is more then enough. It will be fine
 
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TechGuy18

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 8, 2012
59
21
maflynn said:
Given your stated needs, the configuration you mentioned is more then enough. It will be fine
Click to expand...


Thanks for you reply, I've never really had the need for a computer until now so I need all the help I can get. I'm coming from and old Compaq Laptop so I'm really in need of an upgrade.
 
Y

yjchua95

macrumors 604
Apr 23, 2011
6,725
233
GVA, KUL, MEL (current), ZQN
TechGuy18 said:
I am thinking of purchasing the 21.5 inch iMac with the 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, with 8GB of ram, a 1TB hard drive, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics. The price $1249.00 with the education discount

I will be using the iMac for school reports, video browsing, lite gaming, and some coding/app development.

I would like to know if this is an okay computer for my needs. I appreciate any and all replies, much thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

It's absolutely fine, but I'd suggest a 1TB Fusion Drive if you really want your Mac to fly.

The 5400rpm HDD is the limiting factor.
 
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TechGuy18

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 8, 2012
59
21
yjchua95 said:
It's absolutely fine, but I'd suggest a 1TB Fusion Drive if you really want your Mac to fly.

The 5400rpm HDD is the limiting factor.
Click to expand...

I looked into the fusion drive and although it seems really great it's not in my budget right now and I need the iMac ASAP, hopefully I will see really fast speeds since I am coming from such an old machine.
 
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Thermonuclear

macrumors 6502
May 23, 2009
362
21
Because the RAM in the 21.5 inch iMac is no longer user upgradable, I'd suggest getting the 16 GB RAM option or, better, getting the 27 inch model and doing the upgrade yourself with third party chips.

Because of inevitable software bloat, you will need more memory sooner or later and the 27 inch can be bumped all the way to 32 GB. While 32 GB sounds like a lot, remember that just a few years ago 4 GB sounded like a lot, too.
 
MartinAppleGuy

MartinAppleGuy

macrumors 68020
Sep 27, 2013
2,247
889
TechGuy18 said:
I looked into the fusion drive and although it seems really great it's not in my budget right now and I need the iMac ASAP, hopefully I will see really fast speeds since I am coming from such an old machine.
Click to expand...

I have the 2.9Ghz iMac with the 750m GPU. The HDD is not slow (SSD's are faster, but I'm impressed with how fast it is). Boot up is 30 seconds, and once you open an app in OSX, it gets cached in RAM so the next time it is opened, it opens instantly. It is a different story if you have used an SSD computer for a few years and move to a HDD, but if you haven't, OSX does a great job in making it zoom.
 
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eduardrw

macrumors 6502
May 20, 2013
252
3
You will be fine with 8GB and a spinning drive unless you do video editing or something like it.
As for SSD you can always at a later time (when prices come down) connect an external SSD via Thunderbolt and boot from it. Its 90% as fast as internal SSD and much cheaper + you will be able to buy a larger SSD.
 
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