4K and 5K iMacs Support 10-Bit Color Depth on OS X El Capitan

[Zellio]

I have a 2013 iMac with a spinning disk which replaced a 2009 MacBook Pro that had a spinning disk. I didn't get a fusion drive in it at the time because it was an emergency upgrade for work. I needed to walk out of the store that very day with a computer, and stores only stock base models. So no option to upgrade to fusion or SSD without waiting on the mail. I have also since acquired a 2013 15" MacBook Pro with SSD. And a 2015 13" MacBook Pro with the newer SSD. I also have a couple older minis with spinning disk.

All have 8GB or 16GB RAM. Two of them are even 2013 models with comparable processors. The only real factor differentiating the performance of these machines is the storage device. And it's a night and day difference. The SSD machines are impeccable computers. They uphold the Apple prestige no question. The spinning disk iMac is a piece of crap. Unsleeping it takes forever. Starting any app takes forever. Saving files takes forever. Loading web pages takes forever. All of these actions hit the disk, and it bottlenecks the whole computer. It makes using it very frustrating and painful. And it's been noticeably slow since day 1.

What's really sad is that it's not even entirely the fault of the disk. I've been using computers casually and professionally since the mid 90s. They've all had spinning disks until these most recent machines. But not all those old computers were slow garbage. The most telling example was when I replaced my 2009 MBP with the 2013 27" iMac. The iMac was actually slower overall.. because of the operating system. Newer OSXs hit the disk a lot more. They actually need SSDs just to equal the overal user experience of a years older machine running Snow Leopard and a spinning disk.


I get what you're saying about needing an established expectation in order to perceive the relative slowness. For me, having used tons of previous computers, the slowness of newer OSXs running on a spinning disk was glaringly obvious compared to Snow Leopard or Windows XP or 7 on a spinning disk. I instantly felt the difference going from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, and later upgrading to Mavericks made me practically stop using that iMac. Yosemite was no better. The only think that stops me from saying that Apple makes terrible computers is having gotten SSD machines in this last year. Apple's SSD based computers are great. It's unfortunate that OSX effectively requires SSD not to be a piece of crap, particularly since Apple will sell you one.

As for a Joe Blow buying his first computer, will he realize it's crappy? To your point? I don't know. I feel like he would, at least on some level. How could anyone not get frustrated at staring at the beach ball all the time, particularly when they forked over the big bucks for an Apple machine because of its reputation? There's still an expectation there, even if it's not based computer experience.

The problem is a cheap intel nuc with an ssd would feel faster to an average joe then a modern machine with an hdd. Hdds are largely 80's tech with a few advancements, nothing much is modern about them. And nowadays OS's are very advanced and require tons more from hdds as you said. The average joe WILL notice issues with the hdd.

There's reasons you upgrade, and a hdd, even a bigger one, is no upgrade. Upgrading while still using an hdd as a main drive is like buying a modern pc with 2-4 gigs ram. It's like buying an intel gpu to run 5k. It's like buying an old core 2 duo to run stuff that really needs quad core. Even if you got them to run it's going to do nothing but hang and be slow.

All that Apple accomplishes by doing this bull **** is tarnishing their reputation to people who don't understand computer lingo in the name of a few extra bucks in the short term. At the very least make the first option fusion.

 

[c0ppo]

That graph just proves my point. 99% of Apple's sales are from China, America, UK and Canada. Hence why everything launches there first. It doesn't have to cover 99% of the planet, just the areas where it makes financial sense, which it doesn't in the greyed out ones or Apple would be there.

I do agree that it is their most vital thing to cover the areas where they can sell the most. Basic economics I guess.
But what proof do you have that they sell 99% of their stuff in just those 4 countries? Same proof as in your last statement?

I never argued they will sell more of their products in Bulgaria instead of USA, so I really don't see the point in your post. I made my argument to a silly claim you made. Now u come with another 'fact' but with 0 proofs? Please tell me where you get your numbers?

Or don't. EOD from my part, enjoy

 

[manu chao]

I get what you're saying about needing an established expectation in order to perceive the relative slowness. For me, having used tons of previous computers, the slowness of newer OSXs running on a spinning disk was glaringly obvious compared to Snow Leopard or Windows XP or 7 on a spinning disk. I instantly felt the difference going from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, and later upgrading to Mavericks made me practically stop using that iMac. Yosemite was no better. The only think that stops me from saying that Apple makes terrible computers is having gotten SSD machines in this last year. Apple's SSD based computers are great. It's unfortunate that OSX effectively requires SSD not to be a piece of crap, particularly since Apple will sell you one.

My last experience with a HDD-only Mac was in June 2012 under Lion (after having used an SSD-based MBP with 8 GB RAM for three years). My computer got stolen and I had to buy a new one the very next day. I obviously got what was in stock. A 13" MBP (with a 2.5" 5400 rpm HDD) and 4 GB of RAM. I went back into the store later the same day and got an additional 8 GB RAM chip (which upped things to 10 GB RAM I think). For me, it was the 4 GB of RAM that made the computer unusable (of course, a 'slow' HDD exacerbates the effect of not having enough RAM). But with 10 GB, I found it absolutely useable. Sluggish from time-to-time but certainly not terrible.

 

[alphaod]

Works great on the Dell 5K display as well.

Porn now just looks more magical!

 

[omnimoeish]

I feel like Apple thinks they are making more money by playing these stupid games like forcing people to buy $750 64GB iPhones and forcing people to pony up to the Apple tax on the SSD for the iMac. Although I have no statistically significant market data, it seems the loss of returning customers when people unwittingly feel like their 16GB iPhone and ridiculously expensive 5K iMac is hobbled is tarnishing the Apple image and actually hurting sales. Besides the fact that artificially limiting the storage on an iPhone just means less app and music sales because people physically can't buy any almost immediately, especially if they take any 4K video...

Then there's the fact that you can't get a Blu Ray drive in a Mac. That issue is kind of moot at this point since you pretty much can't even play discs of any kind in Macs anymore, but apparently it was to force people to buy movies on iTunes? For people that want to watch movies on their Mac, it just is sad that there's no way to play your 1080p movies in the hopes that they can force you to repurchase them from Apple on iTunes (even though even then theres plenty of other options like Amazon) so they might get $1 per movie you buy...might...if you don't buy it from Amazon or some other digital movie store.

I mean, assuming they make $10 million/year extra profits in iTunes movies sales by forcing people not to have Blu Rays on their Macs, it's just noise compared to their overall profits of $50 Billion/year or whatever. I would think they would make more money by improving the customer experience, offering a complete non hobbled system that's not forced to only play DVDs. Assuming they sold an extra 50,000 Macs a year by the increased attractiveness of buying a Mac that you can watch your HD movies on (Apple just sold over 20 million in the last fiscal year) would probably cover the profits (figure profits of $200 per Mac sold x 50,000 = $10 million) they lose from iTunes movie sales and they would be making more money from those 50,000 people in iTunes purchases of all types on top of it. 50,000/year extra Mac sales represents ~0.3% sales increase. A pretty conservative estimate for a feature so many complained about.

My parents couldn't believe you could buy an HD iMac that doesn't play Blu Rays and you're forced to watch DVDs on when I bought them their iMac in 2009. I know some young hip people will buy movies on iTunes but a lot of average Joes and older folks just want to go to Wal Mart and buy a movie and take it home and watch it on their TV or laptop or iMac.

TLDR: Apple just exudes greed when they do stuff like this 5400rpm drive, 16GB iPhone and DVD capability only. In my opinion, it's to their detriment.

 

[Jess13]

SSD wouldn't heat up not near as a HDD would, right?
And you are wrong, for lots of us only basic configurations are a choice. I live in a country without an Apple store. Sure, I can order a custom configuration form a 3rd party seller. But then I have to wait 2 months to get it, and it costs a fortune (far more then in US for example).

And putting any kind of HDD in such expensive computer is a joke. Even bigger one coming from the richest company of all time.

Plus the guy talking about “moaning” uses: retina iMac, rMBP and rMB, all with very fast SSDs.

 

[Gudi]

Stop it already with this nonsense. SSD's are still expensive and not everyone wants to pay for it and those who want to keep the prices down will be fine with the 5400 drive. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Stop with this nonsense. Everybody wants to pay for at least a 24GB/500GB Fusion Drive, even if he or she doesn't know. Apple has always been about giving you great stuff, you don't know you want until you use it. It's not even expensive thanks to Fusion Drive technology. Apple is purposefully crippling it's entry price desktop machines and there is absolutely no excuse for it.

 

[dannys1]

I have a 2013 iMac with a spinning disk which replaced a 2009 MacBook Pro that had a spinning disk. I didn't get a fusion drive in it at the time because it was an emergency upgrade for work. I needed to walk out of the store that very day with a computer, and stores only stock base models. So no option to upgrade to fusion or SSD without waiting on the mail. I have also since acquired a 2013 15" MacBook Pro with SSD. And a 2015 13" MacBook Pro with the newer SSD. I also have a couple older minis with spinning disk.

All have 8GB or 16GB RAM. Two of them are even 2013 models with comparable processors. The only real factor differentiating the performance of these machines is the storage device. And it's a night and day difference. The SSD machines are impeccable computers. They uphold the Apple prestige no question. The spinning disk iMac is a piece of crap. Unsleeping it takes forever. Starting any app takes forever. Saving files takes forever. Loading web pages takes forever. All of these actions hit the disk, and it bottlenecks the whole computer. It makes using it very frustrating and painful. And it's been noticeably slow since day 1.

Mate you're comparing spinning disks to SSD's of course its night and day difference. I've been running ONLY SSD's since 2008 when Apple didn't even sell them, I was ripping open my Macbook and iMac' taking the useless optical drives out and putting SSD's in with spinning drives for more space.

The same observation would go if they had 10,000rpm drives in, never mind 5400...a step up to 7200 is not going to make a spinning drive seem like a decent experience compared to an SSD. All spinning drives suck. You won't get a 7200 in a 21" iMac without heat issues. Thats why its there and you'll see little to no difference between a current gen 5400 WD Green drive and a throttled 7200rpm low power drive they'd have to put in for heat reasons so its a moot point. The only way they could fix it is to make the 1TB fusion the lowest you can order, maybe they SHOULD do that.

 

[dannys1]

LEL, you either haven't tried a pc with a hdd as main drive in a long time or you just mindlessly defend Apple. You realize first of all that hard drives are basically 80's tech? All that has changed is some added cache and a little faster RPM.

Try booting up an old machine with a regular hdd, everything hangs.

You're right i've used only SSD's in all my computers since 2007/8 - and I ditched ALL optical media in 2005... both technologies suck.

 

[dannys1]

They're not 3.5" drives though, they're 2.5", which have even slower performance than their desktop counterparts. The reason they're laptop hard-drives is because they made the iMac so thin and light, which is the most important thing to consider for an all-in-one that would seldom be moved.

Its not the 5400rpm drive which is the issue though, its that they don't come with an SSD cache as standard. All the fusion drives have 5400rpm drives. You wont see hardly any difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm, it'll be awful either way - but the argument should be about no small SSD cache as standard, not the spinning drive spindle speed.

 

[sudo1996]

Quite a bit of people have these Macs because of the phones (or vice versa). It's their ecosystem that sells most of their products and having a weak link (which a 5400rpm drive certainly is in any system) doesn't bode well for the overall system.

Unfortunately, despite huge iPhone sales since 2007, Mac market share hasn't moved much.

 

[sudo1996]

Oh, you own the new 21" Retina iMac with the 5400rpm disk do you? No. No I didn't think so.

Not only is any PC with an HDD much less responsive, but it's especially been the case with Macs since Mavericks for some reason. Both my laptop and desktop were very difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming to use after installing Mavericks until I put an SSD in each, and then they were fine. That is, the SSD seemed to make a disproportionate difference for a machine running Mavericks or later. Maybe the system accesses the disk in random places a lot; HDDs are especially bad for that. I heard them spinning a lot. But they were just fine running ML and SL.

 

[springsup]

It is a curious thing to be sure but our displays need to process far more colors than any of us can discriminate. The color bands are evidence more colors are needed regardless of our own limitations.

I have always thought that through better programming we could eliminate the banding we see on our 24-bit displays and TVs, the way we use to dither 8-bit GIFs on 256 color displays an eon ago. But our direct color displays of the modern era must not be quite good enough at dithering as they should be. Short of coming up with another approach to direct color (coupled with better dithering...so no longer use true direct color but a smart hybrid of the technologies), 30-bit displays may be the answer to eliminate the ugly bands we see everywhere today.

More colours are most definitely needed and are on the roadmap. See Rec. 2020.

"In coverage of the CIE 1931 color space the Rec. 2020 color space covers 75.8%, the digital cinema reference projector color space covers 53.6%, the Adobe RGB color space covers 52.1%, and the Rec. 709 (HDTV) color space covers 35.9%.[6]"

Apparently it's possible to meet 97% of the Rec2020 colour space with LCDs and quantum-dot films. There are lots of QD 4K TVs today, but I don't know how big the benefit is right now. In any case, Apple aren't using them. Probably too expensive for now, but in time...

 

[theluggage]

Why Apple go to all this trouble with amazing technology and then cripple it by shoving in a 5400RPM drive is beyond me.

Maybe, just maybe, they've actually done market research and found that there's a demand for a non-SSD machine? Customers who haven't got over the "SSDs have a limited number of write cycles" fear? Perhaps some educational/government customers that haven't worked out how to securely dispose of SSDs yet? Or calls-for-tender where you don't get past square one without a 'minimum 1TB HD'? Companies where you don't merit a SSD unless you also qualify for a 2000cc company car?

Same reason as they're still flogging the 13" non-Retina MacBook Pro?

 

[scottsjack]

Why Apple go to all this trouble with amazing technology and then cripple it by shoving in a 5400RPM drive is beyond me. You've made 11 billion dollars profit in 3 months. Just make SSDs standard in all your computers already.

It's for the people without much money to spend who just gotta gotta gotta have a Mac. The thing doesn't work very good but they've got Jony's aluminum art piece sitting on their desk for all to see.

The truth is that buying the cheapest mini or iMac is like buying the cheapest Mercedes-Benz. Sure, you've got your Benz but is it really any good, especially compared to the slightly cheaper top of the line Camry or Accord.

 

[iSee]

It's the fact that they deliberately put in the 5400RPM option to shout out the lower price and drive sales to the SSD's that's the issue. Unfortunately, some people will buy it anyway and wonder why their iMac is sluggish and a bad user experience. It's bad for Apple and bad for those of us that are called upon to fix our friends and families issues especially since it cannot be easily upgraded.

I think we're mainly disappointed that Apple would stoop to these marketing tactics and are already fed up with them doing it with the 16GB iPhones. The iMac is just more telling of where they are going as a company (trying to squeeze blood from a stone). Apple used to be known for great experiences. Lately that isn't the case.

Providing options is a deployable marketing tactic? Only if you assume people buying $1000+ computers are generally stupid. I think you do. I just took a look at Apple's iMac ordering page. There are five whole decisions to make. If you're not sure about storage and click the help link this is what Apple tells you about SSDs:

Flash storage delivers significantly improved performance compared to a traditional hard drive — speed you’ll notice when you start up your iMac, launch an app, or browse your photo library. Flash storage also uses no moving parts, so it operates silently.

How dastardly, confusing customers with simple and accurate information on the benefits of an SSD. How low will they stoop?

BTW, my wife has a 16 GB iPhone. It's not even half full. The fact that you and your option-hating compatriots cannot understand why someone would want a particular low-end option doesn't mean there's on good reason for it. Have you considered that when you exclaim to yourself, "I don't understand why they would offer an option like that!" that, indeed, it is simply that you don't understand? Do you really think you have a better insight into how people use Apple's products than they do?

 

[dasmb]

Then why does steganography work?

The psychology of perception is complex. I mean, when we look at a JPEG of a friend we see their image and not overlapping boxes of color variance -- this is because the brain forgives minor unexpected variation in chaotic regions. One form of steganography encrypts information by hiding it an image, but this only works in those noisy, chaotic parts of an image. You couldn't, for example, as easily hide information in an 8 bit image of a constant, medium grey area -- our brains would pick it right out, the same way they identify JPEG noise in poorly compressed text.

Or, to put it another way, you can certainly hide data in images. But you can't hide any data in any image from every observer. Most steganographic algorithms correct for this automatically.

 

[redscull]

Mate you're comparing spinning disks to SSD's of course its night and day difference.

More than that. I'm also comparing old vs new operating systems. I lived with spinning disks in my computers for 20 years, but that wasn't always such a big deal. My first experience with OSX wasn't until Snow Leopard, a 2009 Core 2 Duo with a spinning disk. And the user experience was fantastic. This wasn't ignorance of expectation or anything like that. The computer was smooth and effective for getting my work done (software developer). Just like my various Windows boxes prior to it. Wait times to perform standard operations were not painful or distracting.

But that MBP ultimately had a disk failure (ok, so that part of spinning disks always sucked), and I decided to "upgrade" to a 27" 2013 iMac that very day. Walked out of the Apple Store with a base model cause that's what they stock. Faster processor than my 4 years older MBP, same 8GB ram, same spinning disk, but this machine was on Mountain Lion, not Snow Leopard. And it was immediately noticeably a bit sluggish, not so bad that I truly had a problem with it, but certainly didn't feel like an upgrade. The newer OS hit the disk more, and that bottleneck outweighed any benefit of the new CPU. Then a bit later that year, Mavericks was released with cool new features I thought I wanted, so I updated. And my computer became painful to use. Non-stop beach balls.

Mavericks and later OSXs may not say it explicitly, but they require Fusion/SSD. They need it just to match the performance during typical mundane tasks of older OSXs running on spinning disks. Apple may give away their software now, but this tactic is continually downgrading our hardware so that we need newer and better just to keep even. I could forgive this for Mavericks because it was nice, but Yosemite is buggy crap, and that experience has me avoiding even trying El Capitan.

Anyway, point being, if you walk into an Apple Store right now, buy a brand new computer, and take it home, the overal user experience is going to be night and day worse than if you did the same thing back in 2009-2013. Apple should not sell computers with a newer OSX than Moutain Lion unless they also come standard with at least Fusion drives. I can't make the same complaint about the newer OSX's need of more CPU/RAM because Apple has been upgrading the base CPU/RAM as necessary not to cripple their products.

 

[sudo1996]

Maybe, just maybe, they've actually done market research and found that there's a demand for a non-SSD machine? Customers who haven't got over the "SSDs have a limited number of write cycles" fear? Perhaps some educational/government customers that haven't worked out how to securely dispose of SSDs yet? Or calls-for-tender where you don't get past square one without a 'minimum 1TB HD'? Companies where you don't merit a SSD unless you also qualify for a 2000cc company car?

Same reason as they're still flogging the 13" non-Retina MacBook Pro?

At least make it 7200RPM...

 

[sudo1996]

Then a bit later that year, Mavericks was released with cool new features I thought I wanted, so I updated. And my computer became painful to use. Non-stop beach balls.

I've noticed that Mavericks or later is basically unusable without an SSD. My theory is that the RAM compression or some other new optimization feature writes to random places on disk a lot, which is tough on an HDD. Because I heard lots of disk activity and saw beachballs when I was running off an HDD, but there didn't seem to be very much disk throughput (in terms of # bytes total read or written).

Even with an SSD, Snow Leopard is much faster than Mavericks. Even Mountain Lion is noticeably faster. Ugh.

 

[Marx55]

When Apple Thunderbolt 3 display?

 

[ManuelGomes]

Soon I guess, as soon as the nMP comes out.

 

[toke lahti]

I can't make the same complaint about the newer OSX's need of more CPU/RAM because Apple has been upgrading the base CPU/RAM as necessary not to cripple their products.

I can complain, however, about Apple's greed on memory. Prices Apple charge are nuts and making it non-upgradeable is how they keep selling them. I was not pleased after less than year my ipadAir1 does not have enough ram. Especially when Apple don't tell how much ram it had and no way to upgrade...

 

[theluggage]

At least make it 7200RPM...

Heat - as has been discussed a thousand times.

Just pretend that the "entry level" iMac is the one with the 256GB SSD, realise that the HD models are there for some logistical/marketing reason and stop worrying.

The silly things are (a) a machine designed like an iMac having an internal spinning rust option at aii and (b) the state of the PC market that prevents Apple from making a basic mini-tower.

 

[sudo1996]

Heat - as has been discussed a thousand times.

Just pretend that the "entry level" iMac is the one with the 256GB SSD, realise that the HD models are there for some logistical/marketing reason and stop worrying.

The silly things are (a) a machine designed like an iMac having an internal spinning rust option at aii and (b) the state of the PC market that prevents Apple from making a basic mini-tower.

Don't SSDs produce more heat than 7200RPM HDDs? And why is that such a concern in a desktop Mac anyway?