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Zaft

macrumors 601
Jun 16, 2009
4,553
4,032
Brooklyn, NY
Yeah I agree, this is poor value
I switched to the M1 24” from a 2017 4K 21.5” with a fusion drive and it’s night and day.


The SSD is definitely better than the fusion drive but the display is pretty bad so they’d have to lower the price another 300-400 USD before this becomes “a good deal”
I honestly don’t get why apple even bothered with a “fusion drive”.. it’s over engineering.

Jeez, just stick an SSD in there and call it a day.
 

jeffpeng

macrumors regular
Aug 9, 2021
227
359
I honestly don’t get why apple even bothered with a “fusion drive”.. it’s over engineering.

Jeez, just stick an SSD in there and call it a day.
At the time when fusion drive came around SSD prices were still pretty stiff. 1TB Fusion drive sure as hell sounds better than 128 GB SSD and 1TB slow-as-frak HDD. And in theory that even is a good idea, since properly done this can actually really offer close to the same speed as an SSD while preventing the hassle of shoveling data around manually. But the implementation never really was up to the task as the software wasn't quite intelligent enough to really just keep the stuff that is actually required on SSDs, and things like system updates still felt unbearably slow. I mean, they aren't fast even now, but back then..... phew.
 

cwwilson

macrumors 68000
Jan 27, 2009
1,860
1,365
Oklahoma City, OK
At the time when fusion drive came around SSD prices were still pretty stiff. 1TB Fusion drive sure as hell sounds better than 128 GB SSD and 1TB slow-as-frak HDD. And in theory that even is a good idea, since properly done this can actually really offer close to the same speed as an SSD while preventing the hassle of shoveling data around manually. But the implementation never really was up to the task as the software wasn't quite intelligent enough to really just keep the stuff that is actually required on SSDs, and things like system updates still felt unbearably slow. I mean, they aren't fast even now, but back then..... phew.

I agree but lets be real, I have a 2015 iMac Quad Core in my house as well as a 2017 quad core 4K... Both are 1TB but my 2017 has a fusion drive and it is quite a difference maker compared to the 2015 without it. Big Sur cannot even run effectively on my 2015 at all (had to downgrade to Catalina) while my 2017 handles it just fine. Now it could just be that the i5 on the 2017 is a bit newer than the one in the 2015 (clock speed is about the same [3.0 vs 2.8]) or the fact the retina has a dedicated graphics card (Radeon Pro 555) but I tend to believe all in all they're fairly similar computers except that Fusion has that tiny SSD attached and in my experience that seems to be enough to make it far more usable computer.
 
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UnusedLoginID

macrumors 6502
Feb 28, 2012
343
290
I honestly don’t get why apple even bothered with a “fusion drive”.. it’s over engineering.

Jeez, just stick an SSD in there and call it a day.
Cost! That’s the reason.
When SSDs were expensive, putting a 32GB or 64GB SSD with a traditional 1TB hard drive really sped up the system without reducing the storage capacity, all for a fraction of additional cost. Issue of course is that now you have two devices instead of one which means you lose on reliability and you increase the risks of the software messing up things.
I had an iMac with Fusion Drive (the one with the 128GB SSD / 1TB HD) and I loved it. It was actually very fast and well engineered.
 

russell_314

macrumors 603
Feb 10, 2019
6,045
9,006
USA
Reading the comments I was thinking wow this post bought every Apple hater out of the woodwork but then I realized it’s 21.5” and not 24” iMac ?
 

alien3dx

macrumors 68020
Feb 12, 2017
2,188
525
I honestly don’t get why apple even bothered with a “fusion drive”.. it’s over engineering.

Jeez, just stick an SSD in there and call it a day.
old times , ssd is expensive.

SSD not much diff in normal user except startup. The introduction of finder and some search in microsoft windows crawling and indexing making it super slow.

Actually the idea is good but also need to implement in apps also
E.g

10 core cpu

2 core default to operating system
6 core for application (Big Core like arm)
2 core for burst (small core like arm)

dedicated gpu core is not the same as cpu core.
** the reason if application stuck , os wouldn't hang at the same times.
 

maxoakland

macrumors 6502a
Oct 6, 2021
694
997
I think Apple should look into these cheaper markets that are being taken over by Google. And a big part of that is price and Google Apps. Apple used to be really strong in education and it seems that’s not the case anymore
 

alien3dx

macrumors 68020
Feb 12, 2017
2,188
525
Not wise to buy this model.
even i got macbook m1 air, i most develop app in this your not wise. Not all people have same criteria to buy thing. Some people just want stability instead the fastest
 
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