It seems incredibly obvious what the AS iMac will look like

[burgerrecords]

I apologize if anyone has posted this sentiment already, but the AS iMac going to be "all display" (no chin, no bulge and no fans) It's the coming to full fruition of what started with the 128K mac.

(Also, it seems to me extremely unlikely that we'll see a new intel imac design. Possibly a refresh, but it doesn't make any sense to release a new iMac right before AS iMac is coming.)

(I wish they would sell a separate mac "mini" that had comparable specs to iMac up and down the line but that is unlikely. The next best thing, however, is that the old "use an old iMac as a second display" will be very simple to implement if apple chooses to bring it back (and it will not be a huge waste of energy this go around) and therefore it may be easier to justify buying an imac for me in the future.)

(I never should have bought an imac that didn't have an ssd, my 2013 imac is junk now even though the display has a few more good years in it.)

(Also, I wonder how many people would prefer 2K displays and 32 gb of ram and a 1tb nvme drive to 5K display with 8gb of ram and a "fusion' drive -apparently not that many?)

that is all!

 

[johngwheeler]

You can replace the HDD or Fusion drive with a larger SSD in your iMac. It's not for the faint hearted (plenty of 3rd party services to do it), but it's certainly possible.

 

[Juicy Box]

(I never should have bought an imac that didn't have an ssd, my 2013 imac is junk now even though the display has a few more good years in it.)

What are your specs?

I have a maxed out BTO Late 2012 iMac, except I got the 1TB Fusion Drive and upgraded the RAM myself, and even being 8 years old, my iMac is still really fast.

I figured I would have replaced my Late 2012 by now, originally I planned on replacing it after 3-5 years, but it is still running great.

I recently decided to start running off of an NVMe SSD with a TB3 enclosure, and so I am no longer using my Fusion Drive, but even when I was, I wouldn't say the experience was horrible. It was the bottleneck though.

OP, have you considered running an SSD on your iMac?


Also, why is most of your post in parentheses?

You can replace the HDD or Fusion drive with a larger SSD in your iMac.

Yeah, and it doesn't need to be internal, you can boot from an external SSD. I have been doing external booting for almost two decades.

It's not for the faint hearted (plenty of 3rd party services to do it), but it's certainly possible.

It really isn't too hard, and I think it is just the glue strips intimidate people. There are plenty of How-Tos to reference.

But again, it would be much easier to run external. Depending on the setup, it could be faster than an internal SSD, too.

 

[burgerrecords]

What are your specs?

I have a maxed out BTO Late 2012 iMac, except I got the 1TB Fusion Drive and upgraded the RAM myself, and even being 8 years old, my iMac is still really fast.

I figured I would have replaced my Late 2012 by now, originally I planned on replacing it after 3-5 years, but it is still running great.

I recently decided to start running off of an NVMe SSD with a TB3 enclosure, and so I am no longer using my Fusion Drive, but even when I was, I wouldn't say the experience was horrible. It was the bottleneck though.

OP, have you considered running an SSD on your iMac?


Also, why is most of your post in parentheses?


Yeah, and it doesn't need to be internal, you can boot from an external SSD. I have been doing external booting for almost two decades.


It really issues too hard, and I think it is just the glue strips intimidate people. There are plenty of How-Tos to reference.

But again, it would be much easier to run external. Depending on the setup, it could be faster than an internal SSD, too.

great idea I didn’t you I could do that - I have a bunch of ssds floating around.

the parenthesis are because this is the arm subforum and those things were off topic

 

[awesomedeluxe]

I apologize if anyone has posted this sentiment already, but the AS iMac going to be "all display" (no chin, no bulge and no fans) It's the coming to full fruition of what started with the 128K mac.

(Also, it seems to me extremely unlikely that we'll see a new intel imac design. Possibly a refresh, but it doesn't make any sense to release a new iMac right before AS iMac is coming.)

(I wish they would sell a separate mac "mini" that had comparable specs to iMac up and down the line but that is unlikely. The next best thing, however, is that the old "use an old iMac as a second display" will be very simple to implement if apple chooses to bring it back (and it will not be a huge waste of energy this go around) and therefore it may be easier to justify buying an imac for me in the future.)

(I never should have bought an imac that didn't have an ssd, my 2013 imac is junk now even though the display has a few more good years in it.)

(Also, I wonder how many people would prefer 2K displays and 32 gb of ram and a 1tb nvme drive to 5K display with 8gb of ram and a "fusion' drive -apparently not that many?)

that is all!

I kind of doubt it will have no fans. I do think Apple will start making their own GPUs but I expect for the iMac at least they'll stick with AMD for now. So it'll need a fan to cool the Radeon part.

 

[AVonGauss]

Deleted.

 

[Juicy Box]

great idea I didn’t you I could do that - I have a bunch of ssds floating around.

Yup, I have been booting from external HDDs and SSDs for years.

You can boot from USB, FW, TB, thumb drives, SD cards, HW and SW RAIDs, and I have even booted Mac OS X from iPods before.

Without doing a striping RAID, a NVMe SSD over TB3 would be the fastest for your iMac. That is my current setup for my Late 2012 iMac. But, just using a SATA3 SSD over a $7 USB to SATA adapter would still give you really good results.

It is highly unlikely the AS iMac will still utilize discrete graphics, of any kind.

IDK about that, or at least I hope not.

 

[burgerrecords]

it’s highly unlikely Apple silicon macs are going to have discrete graphics. Unnecessary for all but a very narrow group of users. And those users will be plenty taken care of with future versions of soc over the coming years

 

[awesomedeluxe]

It is highly unlikely the AS iMac will still utilize discrete graphics, of any kind.

Why do you think so? Even the 21" is configurable with up to a Radeon Pro 560X. There's a limit on how many graphics cores Apple is going to stuff into an APU.

 

[AVonGauss]

Deleted.

 

[awesomedeluxe]

Cost, thermals, performance and product continuity. I also believe Apple pretty much directly stated that dGPUs will not be used on the Apple Silicon platform as well during one of their sessions.

I would like to see that. It's one thing if they aren't using AMD GPUs, but not making their own dGPUs? Something has to go into the Mac Pro eventually. I could speculate on some kind of monster chiplet design, but saying that "doesn't have a dGPU" is just semantics.

As for the iMac... certainly an APU is fine for the base model. But do you guys really Apple to make a dozen different APUs with different graphics core counts? There ought to be a GPU solution somewhere, I don't care if it's Apple-made and Apple-glued-to-the-same-package-so-it's-technically-not-a-discrete-GPU.

 

[Woochoo]

I apologize if anyone has posted this sentiment already, but the AS iMac going to be "all display" (no chin, no bulge and no fans) It's the coming to full fruition of what started with the 128K mac.

that is all!

Those are some fast aproximate calculus, may have made a mistake so correct me if I'm wrong.

The backplate of the iMac 27" is 65 x 44cm aprox. Let's say that it's thickness is 1mm (which is pretty fine for aluminum). That gives us a total of 2.860cm2 of surface, or virtually 286.0 cm3 of aluminum volume if we consider it a heatsink.
A wild guess: the A chip it'll have will be probably around 15-25W (the iPad Pro is bout 7W). Let's put 25W.
If we consider a volumetric thermal resistance of 500 (which is basically passively cooled, no fans/air), and a max 40ºC of ambient temperature (no one uses an iMac in such a hot place, but to give it some headroom) it can dissipate enough heat that the max SoC temperature would be 83.7ºC which is pretty fine for a modern SoC (Intels reach up to 105ºC before they shut down).

If they just used the backplate as a passive giant heatsink, connecting the ARM with various fins to distribute it through all the surface, they could just use it passively cooled. Now, that would make the rest of the components hot enough (as they would share the dissipator) or the screen could be damaged due to heat? Probably yes, that's why even if it's doable for the ARM alone I think they will end up putting fans, specially when iMacs are theorically cappable of long 100% CPU workloads without throttling as far as I know

 

[burgerrecords]

Those are some fast aproximate calculus, may have made a mistake so correct me if I'm wrong.

The backplate of the iMac 27" is 65 x 44cm aprox. Let's say that it's thickness is 1mm (which is pretty fine for aluminum). That gives us a total of 2.860cm2 of surface, or virtually 286.0 cm3 of aluminum volume if we consider it a heatsink.
A wild guess: the A chip it'll have will be probably around 15-25W (the iPad Pro is bout 7W). Let's put 25W.
If we consider a volumetric thermal resistance of 500 (which is basically passively cooled, no fans/air), and a max 40ºC of ambient temperature (no one uses an iMac in such a hot place, but to give it some headroom) it can dissipate enough heat that the max SoC temperature would be 83.7ºC which is pretty fine for a modern SoC (Intels reach up to 105ºC before they shut down).

If they just used the backplate as a passive giant heatsink, connecting the ARM with various fins to distribute it through all the surface, they could just use it passively cooled. Now, that would make the rest of the components hot enough (as they would share the dissipator) or the screen could be damaged due to heat? Probably yes, that's why even if it's doable for the ARM alone I think they will end up putting fans, specially when iMacs are theorically cappable of long 100% CPU workloads without throttling as far as I know

i dont expect it will be razor thin, and it may have a fan, but it will have the same external dimensions as an Apple display that will be sold separately (the new display will be released at the same time to demonstrate how “ powerful” the new platform is to look like it’s a “pro” setup )

or maybe in the spirit of the 128k Mac it will have thermal problems.

 

[Woochoo]

I think they could make a single panel of about a MBA thickness which is pretty thin even for TVs, but more than enough to fit all the screen panel + PCB + fans. If they wanna get fancy they could even go for a non uniform thickness like the MBA itself having the PCB and SoC in the thicker part, and only screen in the thinner, although for something that users won't notice it would be just unnecessary extra headaches and an uniform panel would be (and probably look) better. If they actually manage to proerply distribute the heat across the backplate (maximizing the disipation surface), the fans would just be a quite silent afterthought (like 1200-1800 rpm) that would only crank up on heavy loads like any Macbook Pro

 

[ksodell]

You can replace the HDD or Fusion drive with a larger SSD in your iMac. It's not for the faint hearted (plenty of 3rd party services to do it), but it's certainly possible.

I replaced my Fusion boat anchor with a 1TB SSD. It was pretty easy to do, I think. If you're in the USA and buy from OWC, they have kits and videos to help your cause, too.
[automerge]1594943179[/automerge]

I replaced my Fusion boat anchor with a 1TB SSD. It was pretty easy to do, I think. If you're in the USA and buy from OWC, they have kits and videos to help your cause, too.

And by the way, my system is a mid-2011 27" iMac.