Is iMac pro worth it for me?

[pandadoggy13]

Here's my serious question: I have a 21.5 inch non-retina iMac from December 2013 500 GB SSD and 8GB RAM. It is currently dying due to old age, constantly lagging and glitching, and struggling and freezing with basic web browsing. I am due for a major upgrade, and have repeatedly done factory resets, full reinstalls, etc to no avail.

I use about 300 GB of storage, and do not play video games, or do any video or photo editing or graphics design. I am a heavy surfer, I often have 20+ web browsing tabs open, I have gigabit internet, use Netflix, download lots of stuff from BitTorrent, watch tons of YouTube and generally run Chrome/Safari/MS Office at the same time.

I believe that the 8GB of ram I have is inadequate, and often run out of memory and have severe memory pressure. I am considering getting a souped up iMac 27 inch, but the price for the setup I'm looking for (at least 16GB of memory and 500 GB SSD) easily gets jacked up to 3 grand including tax.

I have the ability to get the iMac PRO when it comes out for $4,200 total.

Should I just wait and get the iMac Pro, or save myself the $1200? I realize the 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of ram is overkill for my needs, but if the price is so close is it worth it for me to get?

I do not plan to buy another computer for at least four more years after this.

 

[ApolloBoy]

The iMac Pro is complete overkill for what you do, especially since you don't do any video or photo editing. Just get the base 27" iMac with a 512 GB SSD and you'll be fine. Also the 27" model has user-upgradeable RAM, so I'd suggest getting it with the base 8 GB of RAM and then upgrade the RAM yourself for far cheaper than what Apple charges. You can get an extra 8 GB stick for between $60-70, whereas Apple charges $200 for the same thing.

 

[kiwipeso1]

I would suggest getting the largest SSD and the i7 model of the 27 inch iMac. Then upgrade it yourself to either 32GB or 64GB. You will find that it uses around 8GB for Chrome at 20 to 30 tabs, and about 2GB for say Facebook alone on Safari.
You will find that Torrenting usually takes around 16kb per torrent active, at least in Vuze that is the case.
MS Office will take a large amount of ram also, so the bare minimum you want is 32GB for everything to run without lag.
Another thing worthwhile doing is to run memory clean 2 and free up ram automatically.
The additional space of a larger SSD will payoff when you acquire more apps or games, etc.

 

[throAU]

You could almost get away with your workload on an ipad pro. Probably could, even.

an iMac pro is total and utter overkill, any baseline machine with 16 GB of RAM will handle what you list with ease.

 

[kiwipeso1]

You could almost get away with your workload on an ipad pro. Probably could, even.

an iMac pro is total and utter overkill, any baseline machine with 16 GB of RAM will handle what you list with ease.

Yeah, nah. iMac rather than iToy would last for 4 years is the key here.
Only question is whether you want 32GB ram, or 64GB ram.
Obviously if you plan to do all the activities listed at once, 64GB ram will handle it like butter.
I'm currently finding that 16GB is just starting to not be enough with heavy browsing and a few other programs on my iMac.

Additionally if you have gigabit internet, you may as well get full use out of it rather than be constrained by the iPad Pro lack of screen size and lack of flexibility.

 

[Fishrrman]

iMac Pro?
You must have money to throw away.

Get a 27" "midrange" iMac with an added 512gb SSD and be done with it.

 

[pandadoggy13]

To all those that asked:

Here is the screenshot of the memory pressure. If you can figure out why my machine is dying a laggy death please let me know!

 

[throAU]

To all those that asked:

Here is the screenshot of the memory pressure. If you can figure out why my machine is dying a laggy death please let me know!

because you have 8 GB of ram. sierra and presumably high sierra (which won't be helping as it is still beta and perhaps not tuned either yet, still running with debug stuff enabled) do tend to be more memory hungry than say, yosemite in my experience.

going to 16 GB will give you 2.5-3x the ram for applications.

ram is your bottleneck. an imac pro is way overkill though. and that's not being elitist, you'd simply get better value out of your extra money spent to go for the imac pro by setting it on fire to keep warm. you jut won't need the cpu cores or ram beyond what a regular high spec imac will give and the imac pro is set to be a LOT more expensive.

16 will be a massive improvement but more is better. there big jump in performance will be form 8-16 for you however.


edit
my initial ipad comment was a little tongue in cheek but your home usage mirrors mine mostly and i've been getting by just fine for most stuff with there ipad pro 10.5 as of late. i have similar memory pressure on my macbook with sierra.

i wouldn't seriously suggest running only an ipad, just get a machine with 16 or preferably 32GB and you should be ok for a few years.

 

[ZapNZs]

Isn't it possible to upgrade the RAM on that model to 16 GB? If so, the most economical option seems to be a RAM upgrade, unless you want a larger/high res screen, or updated GPU/CPU.


Even if you upgrade to a newer system, this is a LOT less than the iMac Pro, and would probably do everything equally well for your needs...under 2 grand for a quad core/16 RAM/512 SSD/M390 dGPU/5k screen
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/...uad-core-intel-core-i5-with-retina-5k-display
...that leaves you over 2 thousand dollars to also buy a nice nTB MacBook Pro and several extra displays + hard drives...or beer.

 

[pandadoggy13]

21 inch iMac does NOT have user upgradeable ram. Even if it did, after 5 years machines stop being supported and its been 4 years. Not worth repairing a car with 350,000 miles.

I am also 100% sure I have a 500 GB SSD

 

[ZapNZs]

21 inch iMac does NOT have user upgradeable ram. Even if it did, after 5 years machines stop being supported and its been 4 years. Not worth repairing a car with 350,000 miles.

I am also 100% sure I have a 500 GB SSD

I am pretty sure the RAM is upgradable, but more complicated than on older generations.

If spending $150-200 at an Apple Authorized Service Provider gives me an extra 2+ years as opposed to spending $4,000+, to me that makes financial sense. Especially since that model will likely have OS support for much longer than two years considering some 2009 iMacs are supported for High Sierra. YMMV.

 

[26139]

To all those that asked:

Here is the screenshot of the memory pressure. If you can figure out why my machine is dying a laggy death please let me know!

...could it be because you're running a developer version of an OS with programs that have yet to be optimized for it?

Do the same things happen with Sierra?

 

[alembic]

Here is the screenshot of the memory pressure. If you can figure out why my machine is dying a laggy death please let me know!

Could you upload another screenshot of your memory usage but sort on the Memory column, descending (highest value on top)? Thanks.

 

[mmomega]

I am pretty sure the RAM is upgradable, but more complicated than on older generations.

If spending $150-200 at an Apple Authorized Service Provider gives me an extra 2+ years as opposed to spending $4,000+, to me that makes financial sense. Especially since that model will likely have OS support for much longer than two years considering some 2009 iMacs are supported for High Sierra. YMMV.

Yes, Yes and Yes.

To OP, I hve 2 - 2009, a 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 iMac staying on 24.7 and worked Mon-Thurs 7am-7pm.
I opened the machines, installed SSD's and as much RAM as I could to extend the life as long as possible and other than myself, noone who uses them have a clue that some are 8 years old.
6 machines at around 3 grand each already so $18,000 instead of shelling that out every 4 years. I put maybe $150 of RAM and $100 SSD in them.
Had I replaced 6 machines every 4 years I'd be at $54,000 after 8 years.

I have 33 more Macs on top of those and I promise those puppies will work until the day they start costing me money.

 

[fierarul]

Could you upload another screenshot of your memory usage but sort on the Memory column, descending (highest value on top)? Thanks.

Your iMac is too good to be misbehaving on "basic web browsing". More information about your memory usage might help us figure out the true cause.

Most likely you do not need the iMac Pro. Any new iMac should suffice. But if you fix your current iMac there is really no need to buy anything new, it's a decent machine as it is.

 

[ApolloBoy]

...could it be because you're running a developer version of an OS with programs that have yet to be optimized for it?

Do the same things happen with Sierra?

Yeahhh, maybe you should try downgrading to Sierra for now until High Sierra is in a better shape.