First iMac ever

Depends, you should wait for iFixit to open up the 21" to see if the RAM is replaceable or if it is soldered.
If it's soldered you might get the RAM, if it is replaceable I would go for the fusion drive and upgrade the RAM later, which is also MUCH cheaper than from Apple.

Habitual said:

Hi all,
I'm waiting from months for the june for the iMac2012, and now its the time

I have only one question, which is better?? fusion or 16gb RAM?? I only have money for make one upgrade. I'll buy the high 21", better GPU and CPU and i can put the fusion drive.

I'm multimedia student, so i'll use cs6.


pd. sorry for my englsh

Click to expand...

It depends...

If in average you were to use 4Go, then having 8 or 16Go would not change much, but the fusion drive would speed up your system

If in average you were to use 8Go, then having 16Go would be your best upgrade.

Since it's your first Mac, it's difficult to know. What I can tell you is that I am using Photoshop, XCode, Safari with 10 tabs open at once, Word or Excel, iTunes. When this is all open at once, I don't have much free or inactive memory on a 8Gb system, and if you have a similar profile than mine, I would advise on the 16Go upgrade.

If on the other hand, you never have more than a couple of tabs open in your browser and don't like to have multiple apps open at the same time, do a lot of file/apps opening/closing, you would enjoy the SSD more.

I remember when I upgraded from 4Go to 8Go, the difference was night and day, like getting a new computer. Then I switch to SSD, it was a nice upgrade but nowhere as dramatic.

Without the Fusion Drive, you are relying on a 5400rpm drive. Dog slow.