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Mac Upgrade Time

Kian32

Kian32

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 21, 2018
42
1
My mac I have at the moment is: iMac "Core i5" 3.1 27-Inch (Mid-2011) 26 GB Ram. I have decided it is time to upgrade but not sure what to go with, either an iMac or a Mac Mini.

I will mainly be using the Mac for Surfing the Web, Watching videos, Video Converting with Handbrake, Photoshop for my design work.

if iMac it does not have to be another 27" as 21.5" will also be fine. (Does not have to be a newer iMac / Mac Mini - 2012 etc. will be fine just not looking for another 2011)

What are your guys recommendations and what is the minimum ram I should look for and also what is the lowest processor I would get away with to handle the stuff that I do.

Thank You
 
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Kian32 said:
My mac I have at the moment is: iMac "Core i5" 3.2 27-Inch (Mid-2011) 26 GB Ram. I have decided it is time to upgrade but not sure what to go with, either an iMac or a Mac Mini.
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What, specifically, is holding you back with the current iMac?

CPU/GPU improvements have been pretty incremental over the last 10 years - a 2012 Mac with a comparable processor will be faster but not night-and-day, and you'll probably have to go up to i7 for a substantial improvement (which may only show up in Handbrake* and some photoshop tasks). When I was - until recently - using a 2011 model Mac, the CPU/GPU power was pretty adequate and the biggest annoyance was probably the lack of USB3, which started appearing from 2012.

(*Handbrake loves more cores - you certainly don't want to drop back to 2 cores)

What can give a substantial new lease of life to an early-10s Mac is replacing the HD with a SSD - if you haven't already upgrade your iMac to SSD it might be an alternative to getting a "new" old Mac (unless you really need USB3). These days, a 1TB, 2.5" SATA SSD is ~$100 (you don't need a "premium" one to upgrade an old Mac - for general use its the 'seek time' that counts, not the peak transfer rate that benchmarkers obsess over - and in any SSD the seek time is order-of-magnitude faster than HD).

If you don't fancy cracking open an iMac then look for one that has already been upgraded to a modern SSD - an 'original' SSD from ~2012 is likely to be (a) very small, possibly in a fusion drive, and (b) 7 years closer to its demise (SSDs don't last forever).

As for RAM, bear in mind that the 2012 Mini and all the 27" iMacs are very easily (and "officially") upgradeable, so you don't have to gamble in advance on how much RAM you need - in other models RAM upgrades are harder, or impossible. 8GB is probably fine to start with when you can easily and cheaply upgrade it as needed. Otherwise, you might want more - Photoshop is the wild card, depending what you are doing with it.
 
theluggage said:
What, specifically, is holding you back with the current iMac?

CPU/GPU improvements have been pretty incremental over the last 10 years - a 2012 Mac with a comparable processor will be faster but not night-and-day, and you'll probably have to go up to i7 for a substantial improvement (which may only show up in Handbrake* and some photoshop tasks). When I was - until recently - using a 2011 model Mac, the CPU/GPU power was pretty adequate and the biggest annoyance was probably the lack of USB3, which started appearing from 2012.

(*Handbrake loves more cores - you certainly don't want to drop back to 2 cores)

What can give a substantial new lease of life to an early-10s Mac is replacing the HD with a SSD - if you haven't already upgrade your iMac to SSD it might be an alternative to getting a "new" old Mac (unless you really need USB3). These days, a 1TB, 2.5" SATA SSD is ~$100 (you don't need a "premium" one to upgrade an old Mac - for general use its the 'seek time' that counts, not the peak transfer rate that benchmarkers obsess over - and in any SSD the seek time is order-of-magnitude faster than HD).

If you don't fancy cracking open an iMac then look for one that has already been upgraded to a modern SSD - an 'original' SSD from ~2012 is likely to be (a) very small, possibly in a fusion drive, and (b) 7 years closer to its demise (SSDs don't last forever).

As for RAM, bear in mind that the 2012 Mini and all the 27" iMacs are very easily (and "officially") upgradeable, so you don't have to gamble in advance on how much RAM you need - in other models RAM upgrades are harder, or impossible. 8GB is probably fine to start with when you can easily and cheaply upgrade it as needed. Otherwise, you might want more - Photoshop is the wild card, depending what you are doing with it.
Click to expand...

My current mac is having issues with a failing GPU so decided it is time to upgrade plus have been thinking about upgrading now for the last 6 months, I brought 2 SSDs a while ago and only ever used 1 so I have a spare one that I never used so I would use that with the new mac I get. USB3 is needed. Photoshop I just do design work for pubs, clubs etc with advertisements and things so not heavy graphics work.
 
I would honestly just get a Mac Mini with maxed out RAM.

I just bought a used 2012 MM and manually upgraded the storage & memory, I'm not paying $1699 for a 1TB Mac Mini that only comes with 8GB RAM.

I just paid $500 total for a 16GB RAM upgrade, 1TB SSD storage, and the slightly old Mac Mini. But at least if the board dies I have my files, unlike this ridiculous soldered storage they have now.
 
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SpeedyTheSnail said:
I would honestly just get a Mac Mini with maxed out RAM.

I just bought a used 2012 MM and manually upgraded the storage & memory, I'm not paying $1699 for a 1TB Mac Mini that only comes with 8GB RAM.

I just paid $500 total for a 16GB RAM upgrade, 1TB SSD storage, and the slightly old Mac Mini. But at least if the board dies I have my files, unlike this ridiculous soldered storage they have now.
Click to expand...

upgrading the RAM on the current Mac mini isn’t that hard if you know what to do.
 
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In my experience, Chrome is a memory hog. YMMV. But, I think 16GB will be fine for what you are trying to do. Mac OS X is pretty efficient with memory these days, but it does depend on an SSD for adequate performance. SSDs are inexpensive in the aftermarket, though depending on the model they can be difficult to fit into a Mac after the fact. Check iFixit for information on your exact model.
 
Are you certain that your current machine is a mid-2011? It doesn't look like Apple offered an i5 clocked at 3.2 in 2011 (however, they did in 2012). Asking only because it may make a difference in comparing what you have to what you are looking at.
 
phairphan said:
Are you certain that your current machine is a mid-2011? It doesn't look like Apple offered an i5 clocked at 3.2 in 2011 (however, they did in 2012). Asking only because it may make a difference in comparing what you have to what you are looking at.
Click to expand...

Just clicked on about this mac and the below is what comes up:

iMac (27-Inch, Mid 2011)

Processor 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory 26 GB

Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB

I have corrected my original post as I put 3.2 by accident it was meant to say 3.1 :)
 
It looks like that Mini will be marginally faster than your current machine. In Geekbench, the single core scores are nearly identical. The multicore score for the Mini is higher than your current machine because the processor in the Mini has hyper-threading (4 cores, 8 threads), while that in your iMac does not (4 cores, 4 threads). However, I expect the cooling headroom in your iMac is superior to that of the Mini. So, for sustained workloads, like Handbrake, the multicore performance delta will shrink.

With less ram; slower, integrated graphics; and similar CPU performance, I don't see the Mini as being an upgrade. The only solid improvement that you would see is the upgrade to USB 3 on the Mini. The SSD in the Mini will make it feel snappier, but you could install that in your current machine for ~$50.
 
phairphan said:
It looks like that Mini will be marginally faster than your current machine. In Geekbench, the single core scores are nearly identical. The multicore score for the Mini is higher than your current machine because the processor in the Mini has hyper-threading (4 cores, 8 threads), while that in your iMac does not (4 cores, 4 threads). However, I expect the cooling headroom in your iMac is superior to that of the Mini. So, for sustained workloads, like Handbrake, the multicore performance delta will shrink.

With less ram; slower, integrated graphics; and similar CPU performance, I don't see the Mini as being an upgrade. The only solid improvement that you would see is the upgrade to USB 3 on the Mini. The SSD in the Mini will make it feel snappier, but you could install that in your current machine for ~$50.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the reply.
 
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Sorted Now, Thanks for the help
 
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