While this is bad news, indeed, I'm interested to know how and why this manifested technologically. Is the RAM soldered onto the main logic board like in the MacBook Air and the retina MacBook Pro? Or did Apple have to tuck it under a spot that would've made building a user-accessible slot nigh-on impossible. Really, the fact that they did this is unacceptable. Making a computer thin just for the sake of doing so, especially a desktop that needn't be any thinner is just plain wrong and stupid. If they made it thicker, we could have better hard drives, more hard drives, better expansion, better graphics. Hell, better everything. This is an area where they are making needless compromise. Stupid and unfortunate as for many, this is the sweet spot in the Mac product line.
That being said, I'll be really interested to look at and read the service manuals to these machines when they become available on GSX. If they neutered the 21.5" iMac by relegating its innards to solely use laptop innards, they may have fixed all of the thermal issues that were present on its predecessor. That being said, them not doing that on the 27" ought to be similarly interesting. Again, it'll be interesting to see what they end up having done once these things are more thoroughly revealed.
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There are only 17 people in the world who need to custom hand-install 16 GB of RAM in the smaller iMac.
But all 17 of them are about to post
And I feel your pain: you need what you need!
Custom hand-install is a good $130 (at least) cheaper than custom Asian factory worker install. I don't know about you, but I could always use an extra $130 in my bank account. And even if the users don't need to custom hand-install the RAM, I'm sure they will likely need their computer-literate friends and/or family members to hand-install the RAM especially since the labor cost on doing that sort of thing aftermarket would be quite pricey depending on where you take it. It's nowhere near as small of an audience as you think.
Apple clearly wants to make the iMac a "consumer" machine again, forcing pros to buy a mac pro. I think this new iMac update almost certainly means that we will see a revived mac pro, rather than a discontinuation
No, really, what you're seeing is the beginning of true differentiation between Apple's focus within the iMac line. The 21.5" iMac, now more than it has ever been (also counting its time as a 20" and as a 17" model when the 20" was the higher model) is being positioned as a lower-end Mac, alongside the Mac mini, the MacBook Air and the 13" MacBook Pros. You are not expected to care about wanting a RAM upgrade down the road, and I'm sure Apple has numbers on the amount of 2009-2011 21.5" iMac customers that have performed their own RAM upgrades. This is unfortunate, but that's what happens when making things needlessly thin becomes the driving focus of engineering.
Thats too bad, personally not an issue for me as the entry level comes with 8GB, but I'm sure it'll bother a lot of people..
Not sure why making an iMac this thin was necessary, seems we are continuing to make sacrifices..
- No DVD Drive
- 2.5" Hard Drive 5400RPM
- Memory not upgradable..
- $100 more expensive..
At least the graphics card is faster, the 640M is slightly faster then the 6770M..
To be fair, the 27" iMac fares much better, still retaining user-accessible RAM slots and a 3.5" hard drive.
But still, agreed, they didn't need to make it thinner.
As far as the optical drive is concerned, however, while Apple had no real NEED to remove it, their internal optical drives were always lousy and failure-prone. Given that this is a desktop that is designed to be stationary, buying a $50 LG external DVD drive (especially if it's of the 5.25" tray-load form-factor) will actually result in (a) a more reliable drive, (b) a faster drive (both in terms of burning and reading), and (c) a cheaper drive than Apple's internal (or external for that matter) would be to replace if and when it inevitably fails. They do provide four USB ports with the FireWire 800 port being replaced by a Thunderbolt port, so it's not like even with an external DVD drive you're at all cramped for expansion. Still though, much more cumbersome than having it all-in-one as the name implies.
F*... it . I'll buy some nice Haswell Mobo and CPU next year and will make myself a Power Mac G5 hackintosh!
Hackintoshes are great! I've always said that a Hackintosh provides much more flexibility in terms of hardware and expansion than any desktop Apple has shipped in years!
Shouldn't the model with 4 slots be able to handle 4x16= 64 gigs of ram?
Not if 16GB SO-DIMMS aren't commonly available.
I think the lack of an optical drive is more off putting than soldered in memory. I can understand getting rid of it on a portable, you can plug in a USB drive when you need it, but on a desktop if you ever need it you'd plug it in and leave it cluttering up your desk, filling up a USB port. Plenty of us want to watch a DVD, or rip it, rip a cd a losslessy or burn a cd or DVD.
I know someone that just bought last year's iMac and I felt bad I didn't warn about the upcoming iMacs. Now I know he's got a computer that suits his needs better, I just feel bad that he could have probably got it cheaper.
Again, I would second the optical drive sentiment; after all, that is a good part of why I opted to go for a non-retina 2012 15" MacBook Pro over a retina model. With laptops, I'd argue that the convenience of it being integrated is much more important, though on a desktop, there's no good reason for it not to be. That being said, Apple's internal optical drives are failure-prone...almost as much as, if not more than hard drives are. It's terrible how failure-prone these drives are. Given that the iMac is a desktop, you can buy an external optical drive, hell, a traditional 5.25" tray-load form-factor USB drive, and not only will it be faster than what Apple's internal would've been, but it would be tons more reliable and much cheaper to replace if ever there's an issue. I know it sounds crazy, but frankly, as someone who still reads and burns optical media on the regular, I really feel like it's almost more preferable to what existed in the last generation. Still though the point still stands that it really didn't need to be thinner to begin with.
Me too. How do-able is the SSD? I seem to remember reading that the HD used some custom cable with a heat sensor or something?
Barring everything up until after removing the glass and the panel, it's pretty easy. The heat sensor refers to a drive plugged in the SATA slot that is used for the hard drive; there is a different one for the SSD. The heat sensor stuff referred to replacing the stock Apple drive with a third-party hard drive. I'm pretty sure that if you have no hard drive connected to that SATA slot, the logic board and SMC and sensors (as well as AHT and ASD) won't care. But I'm not 100% positive. I try to shy away from iMacs as the impressiveness of the design is only skin-deep. Under the hood, it really is a poorly designed computer.
reading people whine is really exhausting D:
Then don't do it. You always have that option.
I'd think that "professionals" would probably get either the bigger imac or a different model entirely. While I'm a fan of expansion, especially ram, it doesn't really bug me when the other model has four ram slots.
Yeah, this is definitely Apple further segregating the 21.5" iMac as a lower-end consumer-geared Mac from the 27" iMac as a higher-end consumer/pro-sumer Mac.
I checked the Apple site, and there's no way to see build options for the iMacs. Does this mean we can't see them until Nov/Dec.?
That would appear to be the case. Don't worry, you're not alone, I am also bummed as it would be helpful to see what options exist before I make recommendations to friends of mine that are prospective 2012 iMac customers.
I need some advice....ive been waiting for an iMac since June and I thought waiting for the new one would be worth it but after seeing it im now a lil disappointed. Not disappointed with the loss of the optical but the upgradable ram.
I plan to use it for logic pro so should I wait and get this with 8 gb or buy current version (which is cheaper) and just upgrade the ram myself and for cheaper!!
USB 3 isn't really that important for me yet specially since the current version has thunderbolt. Also it being thinner is cool but useless for a desktop. I'd rather they made the ram upgradable and the hd 7200
The 2009-2011 design that the 2011 models have was a very poor design. These new ones have the potential to remedy a lot of those problems. I'm skeptical, but it's possible. In the meantime, if you're talking about the 21.5" version from yesterday's announcement, I'd definitely up it to 16GB as you won't be able to later and doing so future-proofs the machine to last as long as the rest of the hardware will allow. If we're talking about the current 27" iMac, no worries, you can always expand the RAM later.
Professionals dont have much choice in a different model entirely. Like I said, Apple doesnt give a damn about professionals, the different model available is the Mac Pro which has been completely ignored for the last 4 years.
Uh...the 2010 Mac Pro update, as I recall, was fairly impressive for the time at which is was released. Two years later, not so much. But to say that it has been neglected for four years isn't true. It's been neglected for two, soon to be two and a half. Still bad, but not quite that bad...at least, not yet.
No replaceable RAM is one too many FU's from Apple.
Stick it, Cook. I'm done.
While I agree that it is an FU from Apple, to have that be the final straw, when we're talking about Apple's most un-upgradable and worst-designed Macs is sort of ridiculous, especially since the RAM on the 27" iMac is still replaceable and since most 21.5" iMac customers tend to not care about upgrading their RAM aftermarket.
who the hell needs 16 GB of ram. Jesus christ. Unless you are running video software, my 2 year old i7 with 8 GB ram can handle just about everything I throw at it.
It's called "Future-Proofing". The practice of making sure that your hardware will still run everything you want it to down the road.
Then those people can upgrade the RAM to 16GB in the store. Case closed
Right, because spending $130 extra on the Apple RAM at the time of purchase is really preferable to going to Crucial or Kingston and spending substantially less money for what is essentially the same hardware upgrade. Because $130 is nothing. Because $130 just grows on trees. Go out into the world and learn the value of $130, because I'm pretty sure it's still worth more than you think it is.
