What if drives were 3600rpm for many years, and 5400rpm was the new, fast speed. Would you be clamouring for Apple's premium machines to have that "much better" 5400rpm drive? This is totally a matter of perspective. At the end of the day, it's real-world performance that matters, and there is still a chance that Apple's 5400rpm drives offer more than enough performance, and equally important, reliability, for the vast majority of iMac buyers.
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Apple's New iMacs Up to 20% Faster Than Previous Models in Geekbench Testing
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What if drives were 3600rpm for many years, and 5400rpm was the new, fast speed. Would you be clamouring for Apple's premium machines to have that "much better" 5400rpm drive? This is totally a matter of perspective. At the end of the day, it's real-world performance that matters, and there is still a chance that Apple's 5400rpm drives offer more than enough performance, and equally important, reliability, for the vast majority of iMac buyers.
What about the new iMac 21,5" non Retina?
Apple also renews this model with two new processors: 1,6 GHz (Intel® Core™ i5-5250U Processor) and 2,8 GHz (Intel® Core™ i5-5575R Processor), why they are not news? Because now their Fusion Drive 1TB has SSD with 24GB instead 128GB?
Apple also renews this model with two new processors: 1,6 GHz (Intel® Core™ i5-5250U Processor) and 2,8 GHz (Intel® Core™ i5-5575R Processor), why they are not news? Because now their Fusion Drive 1TB has SSD with 24GB instead 128GB?
My mom has the last gen 21.5" iMac with the 1.4GHz processor and the 500GB 5400rpm HD and honestly it's not that bad. Yes, it's slower than an SSD and it's slower than the 7200rpm drive in my iMac but she absolutely loves the computer and has had no complaints about speed.
While I agree Apple is greedy for not at least including the Fusion drive standard most people don't notice or care.
While I agree Apple is greedy for not at least including the Fusion drive standard most people don't notice or care.
I think apple wants to pretend the Mac pros still have performance/value ratios
It was very hard justifying a 4 Core Mac Pro over the previous iMac. The new skylake is taking on the 6 core Mac Pro.
Now we just need the 4 core skylake Mac mini to make the Mac Pro look bad lol.....
I fully agree, and can relate to your thought process, and viewpoint of the subject. IO speeds on the 5400 RPM drive in my Mac Mini far surpass the speeds within my PowerPC G4 Digital Audio PowerMac with IDE.
Sadly people love to target fixate with the in problem of the week to either gain likes, or, because beating a dead horse is a favorite pass time. Last few weeks it was #TSMC, now #5400 is the hot topic, and quite honestly a tired joke. I am looking forward to the release of the newTV to see what 1st world issue plagues our forums with that device.
Predicting the new Apple TV is the wrong shade of black compared to the old. Model......
Wrong actually. The 1998 was IDE which is much slower than the current SATA.
I fully agree, and can relate to your thought process, and viewpoint of the subject. IO speeds on the 5400 RPM drive in my Mac Mini far surpass the speeds within my PowerPC G4 Digital Audio PowerMac with IDE.
Sadly people love to target fixate with the in problem of the week to either gain likes, or, because beating a dead horse is a favorite pass time. Last few weeks it was #TSMC, now #5400 is the hot topic, and quite honestly a tired joke. I am looking forward to the release of the new
Well said. Seems all this forum has turned into is people circle jerking around moot points and acting as if they're the end of the world. A lot of people that have absolutely nothing better to do with their lives than cry about things that have no real world impact on their lives.
Which doesn't matter because data has grown too. Back at in that day a large game was 100MB, now it is 8GB. Also a spinning drives has 150iops at best, a SSD does like 10,000.
You're right.
I'm going to pull the SSD out of my Mini and see if I can find myself a good old fashioned 5400 rpm spinner.
First off, all of the iMac GPUs are mobile AMD GPUs. Mobile GPUs have gotten a lot better over the years, but they still get smoked by their desktop counterparts.
Secondly, for many tasks (not all) Nvidia GPUs perform much better than AMD. The consensus is that Apple has chosen AMD as they tend to perform better at higher resolutions (ie. 5K). I'm guessing they are cheaper than Nvidia GPUs as well. I know dollar for dollar on the desktop side, AMD GPUs are generally cheaper.
Isn't there the possibility that its thermals, noise and reliability which made 5400 the good choice rather than anything else. Getting the highest density possible, with the least platters, on a slowest spinning drive should improve reliability, especially in a closed system like this with little ventilation.
Not just thicker, make more noise, make more heat, probably less reliable for a given price at least in non enterprise level drives. There are many considerations when building a system.
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Do you guys realize that if the low end options aren't available, it *won't* make the remaining options cheaper, right?
Nothing changes. If you can't afford an iMac with SSD you can't afford an iMac with doesn't matter whether the hard drive option exists or not.
What? You just replaced 5400rpm and 7200rpm with 3600 and 5400.
That's a difference with no distinction. It's ironic you mention real-world in the same quote where you use a made up example to validate your point. Real-world? A 5400rpm drive is slow. Hell, forget about clamoring for an SSD or SSHD. Apple could have easily opted for a faster platter. A 5400rpm spinner reeks of some accounting wonk with a spreadsheet. In a $1500 premium machine, if you're going to use a 5400rpm spinner, at least use it in SSHD where the speed of the spinner won't matter. The thing is, the less than stellar hard drive won't even affect the sales of iMacs. The vast majority won't know how slow their computer is compared to one with a proper SSD or SSHD. But we know
People say upgrade to an SSD when you get one..its not so easy on a mac. Not only is is pretty hard to do but after its done the fans are stuck at 100% because the heat sensor is removed from the old HDD. So you need to DL an app which forces the fans to sit at a lower RPM. My roommate did an SSD on his 27" and the fans have a mind of their own now.
Noticed several things in this thread that should be given some clarity or correction:
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The Mac Pro runs an Intel Xeon processor, a workstation/server grade CPU. Much "faster" than desktop CPUs depending on how you define "faster". In server land we frequently define it by throughput. The Xeon CPUs trail the desktops by a year or more as far as process goes, not by performance. They are far more complex chips and take longer to bring to a new fab, and are more expensive to produce, and have a longer lifecycle.
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The Mac Pro is already available with 6 or more cores (4, 6, 8, or 12). There will be no 6 core iMac unless Intel changes the design of their desktop chips or Apple tries to shoehorn a Xeon CPU into one.
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A computer's storage device is the single biggest factor in perceived performance of the machine. Most people don't spend their time rendering massive scenes or doing scientific analysis, they spend most of their time waiting for files to open or to save, to view pics or tweak spreadsheets, or make Word docs. The speed of the hard drive (or SSD) is absolutely paramount. It doesn't matter what Apple's competition is doing, a 5400 RPM drive in today's iMac is an embarrassment. Apple computers are the flagship devices of the entire PC industry, and their configurations should reflect that. A fusion drive of 500GB should be minimum, and straight SSDs (256GB+) for everything else, with plenty of BTO options. A 128GB SSD as a fusion cache was probably overkill, but 24GB is cheap and pathetic - it should be 64GB.
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So many people are down on the Intel integrated graphics. Perception people. What you may not know is that the performance of Intel's latest GPUs are significantly improved, on par with many discrete GPUs. Integrated used to suck, yes, but no longer. The most recent Intel integrated GPU has plenty of oomph to simultaneously drive three 4k displays. There are still plenty of discrete GPUs that can't do that.
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I'm afraid that what Apple has been doing lately with substandard hard drives, 16GB iPhones, grossly overpriced accessories, etc. is just going to breed resentment, and if not today, there will come a day in the very near future where sales will start to tank, and this short term profiteering will end up destroying the company - if they don't change course. History can repeat itself. This is some of the same crap they pulled in the 1990's and it almost did kill the company.
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The Mac Pro runs an Intel Xeon processor, a workstation/server grade CPU. Much "faster" than desktop CPUs depending on how you define "faster". In server land we frequently define it by throughput. The Xeon CPUs trail the desktops by a year or more as far as process goes, not by performance. They are far more complex chips and take longer to bring to a new fab, and are more expensive to produce, and have a longer lifecycle.
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The Mac Pro is already available with 6 or more cores (4, 6, 8, or 12). There will be no 6 core iMac unless Intel changes the design of their desktop chips or Apple tries to shoehorn a Xeon CPU into one.
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A computer's storage device is the single biggest factor in perceived performance of the machine. Most people don't spend their time rendering massive scenes or doing scientific analysis, they spend most of their time waiting for files to open or to save, to view pics or tweak spreadsheets, or make Word docs. The speed of the hard drive (or SSD) is absolutely paramount. It doesn't matter what Apple's competition is doing, a 5400 RPM drive in today's iMac is an embarrassment. Apple computers are the flagship devices of the entire PC industry, and their configurations should reflect that. A fusion drive of 500GB should be minimum, and straight SSDs (256GB+) for everything else, with plenty of BTO options. A 128GB SSD as a fusion cache was probably overkill, but 24GB is cheap and pathetic - it should be 64GB.
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So many people are down on the Intel integrated graphics. Perception people. What you may not know is that the performance of Intel's latest GPUs are significantly improved, on par with many discrete GPUs. Integrated used to suck, yes, but no longer. The most recent Intel integrated GPU has plenty of oomph to simultaneously drive three 4k displays. There are still plenty of discrete GPUs that can't do that.
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I'm afraid that what Apple has been doing lately with substandard hard drives, 16GB iPhones, grossly overpriced accessories, etc. is just going to breed resentment, and if not today, there will come a day in the very near future where sales will start to tank, and this short term profiteering will end up destroying the company - if they don't change course. History can repeat itself. This is some of the same crap they pulled in the 1990's and it almost did kill the company.
Perhaps you didn't quite understand the post.
Apple releases new machines every year, do they not?
My post was not meant to be exclusive to Macs, however, if you want the latest and greatest, you'll want to upgrade, particularly if you buy base models. For example, the 21" in iMac was not 4K last year, if you want to multitask on an iPad you need the latest model available, etc. Putting a 5,400rpm drive in a machine that expensive is BS, period. A clever scheme to steer you into spending more. There is actual sales science behind this (Brain Games is awesome).
I didn't suggest that people should upgrade every year. What I mean is that Apple leaves things out on purpose, so that you'll want to upgrade to the next one. They've always done that, but now, with soldered RAM and non-replaceable HDs, if you run out of space or want or need more power (even a year or two or three out) you're stuck with, guess what, having to get a whole new machine.
Thus the example of my 2011s. I can upgrade storage and RAM with ease, allowing me to have not only a machine that has lasted well over 4.5 years but one that Apple's current offerings still cannot match capability/flexibility-wise. I literally cannot buy an Apple portable that can store everything that I need to store internally (again, big family). Seven people's worth of photos, videos, music, documents, college papers, and film school projects spanning 15 years fill up a 1TB SSD real quick. And I'm sorry but frak the cloud. I want my stuff locally. In the event of a fire, love, relocation, vacation, divorce, military deployment, end-of-the-world, etc, I grab my 2 portables and go (my iMac is cloned and n-synced across the 15" & 17" MBP).
I grant, for some of this the iMac is an exception if, and only if, you upgrade it up front. But then again, that is true of all Apple products. The power and longevity may come at the high-end, which is a good strategy for them, but certainly not for me.
I'm not wealthy. I make decent money, but I have a big family so I have to save up for my Macs. The value is just not there anymore.
If your system is mainly stationary that is an awesome setup. I have externals setup for each of my 3 machines (iMac, 2 MBPs).
But in my case these function as backups/test beds. I n-sync all three machines, so I need the storage requirements in each to be the same or equivalent.
I think that the low drive capacities pervasive in most (if not all) Apple's current offerings point to their shift in focus to the single-user experience and/or the cloud (and charge you for it, of course).
I mean, why the F does the iPad still not have the ability to have multiple user accounts? Why are iOS devices still sold in 16Gb storage formats?? Who the hell can have a family's worth of stuff on a 256Gb drive?? I mean, we are even moving to 4K video now. That stuff is huge as it is.
So yes, with internal storage, as in everything else, size matters and bigger is better.
Bigger screens on our phones (were finally there, though), bigger screens on our tablets, bigger screens on our MacBooks (bring back the 17, dammit), bigger screens on our all-in-ones and monitors (27" is nice, but 30" would be spectacular), bigger pixel counts, bigger capability for RAM, and hey, bigger trackpads!
Those that want smaller are puny, weaklings, and have size envy. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Is the RAM user-upgradeable?
Main reason I haven't bought a new MacBook Pro yet is you can't upgrade the RAM, and are stuck at only 16GB.
Haven't bought a new Mac Pro because no drive bays forces crappy China-made external enclosures over disconnecty cords or expensive ugly Sonnet 4U rack thing.
Sigh
Main reason I haven't bought a new MacBook Pro yet is you can't upgrade the RAM, and are stuck at only 16GB.
Haven't bought a new Mac Pro because no drive bays forces crappy China-made external enclosures over disconnecty cords or expensive ugly Sonnet 4U rack thing.
Sigh
Good post. I never minded apple leaving things out of thier machines on purpose, as parts were user upgradable and down the line I could update as needed to get greater life span out of them. Now you are in a situation of either getting the top model and paying a lot for it, or having to upgrade the machine a lot quicker. It's a deliberate move to make more sales.
The other thing to consider is serviceability of the machines, the old ones parts could be replaced or in my case where a ram slot was playing up on me, I removed the ram and the machine continued to work. Anything goes wrong with the new ones, you are up for a motherboard replacement, and frankly you might as well buy a new machine.
If you are a person who updates every year to the latest and greatest, no Impact, if you are a person who updated thier macs every 3-5 years, the value for money is not there. Once these machines with everything soldered on start failing down the line, and cannot be repaired people will realise buying a appLe computer is risky, especially second hand, and if you purchase a brand new Mac, and the used prices start to suffer, well value for money is dropping and I would expect sales to follow. My last IMac was 2009, I've been put off the new machines due to he upgrade issues, price of the top end models and knowing that if something goes wrong , the damn thing is so difficult to service, and even upgrade the HD, cause frankly those sea gate models don't last long.....
I looked at the new iMac, and checked how hard it would be to replace the useless 5400 HD, and as you said, apple made it very difficult on this model.
The issues associated with this, resulted in my giving up on the iMac.
Oh, it is THAT much! 50 EUR when I buy a 128GB SSD on the street, +240 EUR when I buy one from Apple. Which is actually a price cut from the +300 EUR they wanted before. Anyway with a starting price of 2.099 EUR for the cheapest 27-inch iMac, this doesn't end anywhere near justifiable for a high-end consumer desktop. Self-made Fusion Drives and RAM upgrades is what kept me as a customer of Apples desktop line. But no more, right now I can't recommend any of their desktop offerings. They are all either way too expensive or way too slow and still expensive.
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