Need help with best value in an iMac for my home use

[Kfamily]

I would love any advice on my current thinking for a 2019 iMac for my home use. My first priority is a machine that is future-proofed and "just works" so I can stay off these forums for as many years as I can make this new iMac last I would love to get 8 years out of this new one like I did with my current one.

I currently have a 27" mid-2011 iMac with a 2TB fusion drive and 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7; it had 8 GB Ram and I added another 8 myself a few years after I had it for 16 total. It had fairly high specs when I bought it. It was my first iMac and it's been amazing but started slowing down over the years and especially slow after upgrading to High Sierra last summer (I had to upgrade the OS to download the Photoshop to put together a large media guide on a volunteer basis - I am not a pro user but am fairly proficient in Photoshop). The fusion drive then crashed last month, and the graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB) has already been replaced once while under Apple Care, so I'm finally ready to move on.

My general uses - lots of HD home video from 18 years of my 3 kids, sporting events, etc. The iMovie library over 2TB in size and I really need to clear it out, organize it and put it to some actual use, but my current machine is just to slow to make it worth the time. A large photos library (about 300GB) that also needs some clearing out, and I would love a speedy enough computer that I can actually make use of some of the search feature like Faces, which pretty much crashes my current iMac. Also I do use Photoshop - producing a media guide with about 64 individual large-size .psd files just about killed me and my computer. So something that can handle large files and projects easily. Those are probably the hardest tasks I ask my computer to do. Other major uses are Excel, Safari, Quicken. Possibly Parallels.

My current thought:
27"
6-core 9th gen i5 CPU**
8GB Ram upgraded to 40GB myself***
Graphics Card - no clue either 580X or Vega 48 but don't really understand their role TBH
SSD - just need to determine size****

**I would consider spending more money on the 8-core i9 if it would be worth it for future-proofing, relative speed (although I think it's likely either 9th generation option would amaze me after my 2011 iMac). I realize I should wait to make sure it doesn't run too hot, and am happy to wait a month or so to let all the reviews and initial user experiences shake out.

***Saw this recommended somewhere on these forums to self install for a total of 40GB Ram. I did this on my 2011 machine quite easily and no problem, so happy to do it again although curious if it affects the warranty at all: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071H38422/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

****After my experience with the fusion drive, the SSD is a must. If I were silly rich, I would just buy the 2TB SSD and move on as I feel this would also help future proof my machine. But the price on these plus the fact my iMovie library already won't fit, makes me want to look at a smaller SSD and use external for my movie and photo files. My question here is... will putting these video and photos on an external drive slow my use of those files down? Working with those files is my primary use of the machine and I want to make sure that I don't spend a ton of money on a fancy machine just to have my external files slower to access and use. If external is fine, can I get away with the cheaper HDD for those or should I invest in the Samsung T5 external SSDs or similar?

I am completely clueless as to the graphics card choices and how my uses would be affected by either.

If I add the higher CPU and higher GPU and go for high internal SSD, I am looking at $4000 to $4500 with tax and Apple Care, which starts to stress me out. So I guess looking for the best place to not splurge and still be future proofed and good experience with my video and photo projects.

Thanks to anyone who has some input on my options.

 

[Juicy Box]

****After my experience with the fusion drive,

On your current machine, you made the Fusion Drive, correct?

How much of a SSD did you use?

 

[Kfamily]

On your current machine, you made the Fusion Drive, correct?

How much of a SSD did you use?

Yes it was a 2tb fusion drive. Im not sure what portion of it is SSD though. It was the original 2tb fusion drive offered with the 2011 27” iMac and when it died the Apple store replaced it with the exact same drive for me.

 

[Juicy Box]

Yes it was a 2tb fusion drive. Im not sure what portion of it is SSD though. It was the original 2tb fusion drive offered with the 2011 27” iMac and when it died the Apple store replaced it with the exact same drive for me.

Oh, you didn’t install it yourself?

Are you sure your iMac is a mid-2011? Or, are you sure you have a Fusion Drive? The Fusion Drives didn’t come out until the Late 2012 iMacs.

You can make your own Fusion Drive in the earlier iMacs by adding a second drive, but the official Apple Fusion Drives didn’t come until it was announced in October 2012.

 

[Kfamily]

Oh, you didn’t install it yourself?

Are you sure your iMac is a mid-2011? Or, are you sure you have a Fusion Drive? The Fusion Drives didn’t come out until the Late 2012 iMacs.

You can make your own Fusion Drive in the earlier iMacs by adding a second drive, but the official Apple Fusion Drives didn’t come until it was announced in October 2012.

Definitely a mid-2011 so I guess not a fusion just a good old-fashioned HDD? I am not sure why I always assumed it was a fusion drive. I have the old crashed one on my desk and it is a Seagate Barracuda XT.

 

[mikehalloran]

The 2011 27” iMacs were the first to offer fusion drives. Back then, SSDs were extremely expensive. As the HDD gets full, it will slow way down, especially with AV files and Photoshop. That’s the way those work.

The 2011 has 3 SATA busses. You can rip out the HDD/SSD fusion array and replace it with an SSD. You can get a 2TB for less than $300. There is no advantage to recreating a fusion array in a 2011. I wrote more here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...2009-imac-to-2011-imac.2173750/#post-27219085


Back to the OP. If using Photoshop, you want the i9 and an SSD. Get the 8G RAM and add at least 32G from OWC or another vendor (user replaceable!), 64G is better with Photoshop. Consider the Vega 48 GPU. If doing this professionally, substitute the word need for want. Then consider that the iMac Pro already has about everything you need in the base model and is under $4.300 at the Refurb Store. I did some research and posted a real world price comparison here.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-imac-or-the-mac-mini.2174613/#post-27212015

Fusion drives are for the net surfer, YouTube watcher, posting on Facebook, word processing etc. They are not for the pro using FinalCut Pro, Photoshop etc. where Time saved=Money earned.

If doing these tasks but not on a deadline, then compromises may have to be made for budgetary concerns. Go in with your eyes open.

 

[Kfamily]

The 2011 27” iMacs were the first to offer fusion drives. Back then, SSDs were extremely expensive. As the HDD gets full, it will slow way down, especially with AV files and Photoshop. That’s the way those work.

The 2011 has 3 SATA busses. You can rip out the HDD/SSD fusion array and replace it with an SSD. You can get a 2TB for less than $300. There is no advantage to recreating a fusion array in a 2011. I wrote more here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...2009-imac-to-2011-imac.2173750/#post-27219085


Back to the OP. If using Photoshop, you want the i9 and an SSD. Get the 8G RAM and add at least 32G from OWC or another vendor (user replaceable!), 64G is better with Photoshop. Consider the Vega 48 GPU. If doing this professionally, substitute the word need for want. Then consider that the iMac Pro already has about everything you need in the base model and is under $4.300 at the Refurb Store. I did some research and posted a real world price comparison here.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-imac-or-the-mac-mini.2174613/#post-27212015

Fusion drives are for the net surfer, YouTube watcher, posting on Facebook, word processing etc. They are not for the pro using FinalCut Pro, Photoshop etc. where Time saved=Money earned.

If doing these tasks but not on a deadline, then compromises may have to be made for budgetary concerns. Go in with your eyes open.

Thank you for these thoughts! Glad I am not crazy to remember it was a fusion drive, and yes, I believe it was a high-end option and quite novel, as least from my perspective at the time. I'm not sure why, but I am wary of a refurb although that option looks amazing and will consider it thanks.

I appreciate the priorities. Will get an i9 and consider a Vega 48 but may opt to spend the money on more internal SSD space instead. I will wait to see the reviews and comparisons between the options as well as the heat considerations.

One last question on how much internal space I need. Can I put my large iTunes library on an external drive? If I put my photo, music and video files on external drives, I assume if they are not SSDs will that slow my work down? And even if they are SSDs it will be much slower than the internal one? Should I plan to put the portion of files I want to work with (say, video from 2004 and 2005) on the internal SSD temporarily to work with it, and then relocate it back to an external drive when I am done? Just trying to determine whether to get the 512GB/1TB or possibly even splurge on the 2TB instead of the Vega GPU.

Thanks again for the input.

 

[Juicy Box]

The 2011 27” iMacs were the first to offer fusion drives.

This is incorrect. You could get a BTO SSD as a second drive on the high-end Mid-2011, they were not Fusion Drives, but just two different drives. The Late 2012 iMac was the first one to get Fusion Drives.

Thank you for these thoughts! Glad I am not crazy to remember it was a fusion drive, and yes, I believe it was a high-end option and quite novel, as least from my perspective at the time.

While the Mid-2011 iMacs can have their internal drives set up as Fusion Drives, the Late 2012 iMacs were the first Macs to use Fusion Drives.

Fusion Drives were the announced at the October 2012 Apple event along with the Late 2012 iMacs.

See this:

This is from the October 2012 Event:

New "Fusion Drive". Combined 128GB SDD and 1TB or 3TB HDD drive, "fused together with software." Core applications and the OS automatically go on the SSD while documents stay on the HDD. Mountain Lion determines apps you use most and automatically puts them on the SSD. Performance approaches that of SSD. Uses 50% less power when idle.

iMac starts at $1299 for 21.5", 8GB RAM, 1%B HDD, GeForce GT 640 graphics. Begins shipping in November. 27" starts at $1799, shipping in December.

Amongst the many new products Apple introduced today, they also announced a new storage option called Fusion Drive. Apple's website describes how the drive works:

For Macs that do not come with Fusion Drives like the Mid-2011 iMac, you can turn two internal drives into a Fusion Drive. You can add your own second drive, or it can be done if you did the BTO option for the 256GB SSD.There are a bunch of steps involved, you can see it here:

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/31/apples-new-fusion-drive-works-on-older-macs/

 

[Kfamily]

This is incorrect. You could get a BTO SSD as a second drive on the high-end Mid-2011, they were not Fusion Drives, but just two different drives. The Late 2012 iMac was the first one to get Fusion Drives.



While the Mid-2011 iMacs can have their internal drives set up as Fusion Drives, the Late 2012 iMacs were the first Macs to use Fusion Drives.

Fusion Drives were the announced at the October 2012 Apple event along with the Late 2012 iMacs.

See this:

This is from the October 2012 Event:




For Macs that do not come with Fusion Drives like the Mid-2011 iMac, you can turn two internal drives into a Fusion Drive. You can add your own second drive, or it can be done if you did the BTO option for the 256GB SSD.There are a bunch of steps involved, you can see it here:

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/31/apples-new-fusion-drive-works-on-older-macs/

Okay thank you I will stand corrected but for me it's a bit of a moot point as the answer is the same and I'll be getting an SSD anyway. I am just wary of the moving parts in a HDD or Fusion drive and so would prefer to get an SSD. I think that will future proof my machine as well and increase the resale in case I decide I need more space/power in the future and don't want to hold onto it for 8 years like I did with my current 2011. My biggest question is whether external storage will slow me down such that it's worth it to max out the internal SSD drive size to 2TB, and give up either the i9 or Vega instead.

 

[Juicy Box]

the answer is the same and I'll be getting an SSD anyway.

If you don't mind using an external drive, I would highly recommend a SSD for the reasons already mentioned.

I will stand corrected but for me it's a bit of a moot point

The reason why I thought it was important to figure out if you are really using a Fusion Drive was because of this:

****After my experience with the fusion drive, the SSD is a must. If I were silly rich, I would just buy the 2TB SSD and move on as I feel this would also help future proof my machine.

If you were actually using a HDD and not a Fusion Drive, then you shouldn't really make this decision based off of your experience.

Like I said, I still recommend a SSD over a Fusion Drive, and just about every one else on this forum would probably do the same, but if you have a lot of data to store and you don't want to mess with external storage, then a real* 2TB or 3TB Fusion Drive might be the way to go.

It sounds like you have a lot of data that is not accessed often, so having it on a slower HDD part of a Fusion Drive wouldn't be that big of a deal.

There is still the downside of it being a mechanical drive and it being internal, but it might be worth considering in your situation.

The 2TB SSD is $1100 upgrade from the 2TB Fusion, while I would recommend the SSD if you could afford it, the much cheaper Fusion Drive would probably be okay.

I used the original 1TB Fusion with the 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD, and the performance of it is decent, and I am sure the 2TB SSD today is much better, but I just don't like it do to reliability issues. That said, if I was getting a new iMac and I wanted to keep everything internal, I would get the 2TB Fusion Drive over the very expensive 2TB SSD.

 

[Kfamily]

If you don't mind using an external drive, I would highly recommend a SSD for the reasons already mentioned.




The reason why I thought it was important to figure out if you are really using a Fusion Drive was because of this:


If you were actually using a HDD and not a Fusion Drive, then you shouldn't really make this decision based off of your experience.

Like I said, I still recommend a SSD over a Fusion Drive, and just about every one else on this forum would probably do the same, but if you have a lot of data to store and you don't want to mess with external storage, then a real* 2TB or 3TB Fusion Drive might be the way to go.

It sounds like you have a lot of data that is not accessed often, so having it on a slower HDD part of a Fusion Drive wouldn't be that big of a deal.

There is still the downside of it being a mechanical drive and it being internal, but it might be worth considering in your situation.

The 2TB SSD is $1100 upgrade from the 2TB Fusion, while I would recommend the SSD if you could afford it, the much cheaper Fusion Drive would probably be okay.

I used the original 1TB Fusion with the 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD, and the performance of it is decent, and I am sure the 2TB SSD today is much better, but I just don't like it do to reliability issues. That said, if I was getting a new iMac and I wanted to keep everything internal, I would get the 2TB Fusion Drive over the very expensive 2TB SSD.

Got it. This breakdown was very helpful and I appreciate the help very much. I will have to look at the fusion drive option more carefully now as a real option. Thanks!

 

[mikehalloran]

My biggest question is whether external storage will slow me down such that it's worth it to max out the internal SSD drive size to 2TB

An external leaves the HDD inside. It will continue to turn the inside of a 2011 into an oven. If the GPU isn't heat-damaged yet, give it time. I've removed hundreds of HDDs from 2009–2014 iMacs and test every one. Take a wild guess: how many are still good? Not one is the correct answer. (I have drives from older iMacs that are still good). I test in TTP and they usually look something like this. Note that this passes SMART test in Disk Utility.

You can install a 2TB internal for around $350 in parts and tools. If you need more storage, you can install a second one.

Since the only way to get the speed and benefits of an internal that size is with a TB dock or enclosure ($140 up), why not? Takes a half hour or less for a technician who has done them before—an hour or so if you haven't. I do 'em one-handed (not a boast; I'm handicapped).

In the Silicon Valley, local techs charge $75 and don't want you to watch how little time it takes but, if you're afraid of doing it, pay the tech.

I need a new Mac because of my work but my wife does not.

Her mid-2011 i5 is cruising nicely. I threw away that spinning heat pump 4 years ago when SSDs were very expensive (yes, it tested bad, too). The 960GB 845 EVO cost me nearly $1,000 and was worth every penny (and still has a year of warranty left). No home machine needs an enterprise SSD nowadays and a 1T 860 EVO is about $140 if I ever have to replace it out of warranty. But she makes her living on her iMac, too.

 

[jeremiah256]

OP: No real input on your configuration because I think you've nailed it.

Any 6-core CPU, whether 8th or 9th generation, is going to last you 8 years and will work great with Lightroom, Photoshop, and iMovie. If you want to move up from iMovie, Davinci Resolve 15 is free and is easily comparable in professional features to Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere. Add Blender and you can start creating light saber special effects for the grand kids in no time.

You're going to have a total of 40GBs, which is fantastic as 32GBs is already more than great for home use (and many professional uses).

You're going to love the fast SSD in the iMac and even though you have a large library of photos and videos, 512GBs internally is the sweet spot. Like RAM, purchase more storage separately as you can get great deals on external SSDs, just make sure the enclosure is Thunderbolt 3.

The base configuration GPU you've chosen has 8GBs of GDDR5 memory. Wow. Again, more than enough overhead if you want to get into 3D or Virtual Reality programming and when the benchmarks come out, I wouldn't be surprised if the machine you've configured approaches the capability of the iMac Pro.

You're all set to chronicle family and friends for the next 8 years. Have fun!

 

[Kfamily]

OP: No real input on your configuration because I think you've nailed it.

Any 6-core CPU, whether 8th or 9th generation, is going to last you 8 years and will work great with Lightroom, Photoshop, and iMovie. If you want to move up from iMovie, Davinci Resolve 15 is free and is easily comparable in professional features to Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere. Add Blender and you can start creating light saber special effects for the grand kids in no time.

You're going to have a total of 40GBs, which is fantastic as 32GBs is already more than great for home use (and many professional uses).

You're going to love the fast SSD in the iMac and even though you have a large library of photos and videos, 512GBs internally is the sweet spot. Like RAM, purchase more storage separately as you can get great deals on external SSDs, just make sure the enclosure is Thunderbolt 3.

The base configuration GPU you've chosen has 8GBs of GDDR5 memory. Wow. Again, more than enough overhead if you want to get into 3D or Virtual Reality programming and when the benchmarks come out, I wouldn't be surprised if the machine you've configured approaches the capability of the iMac Pro.

You're all set to chronicle family and friends for the next 8 years. Have fun!

Thank you for the input! A quick question on your comment on the external SSDs with Thunderbolt 3. As far as I can tell from looking around, these are almost as expensive as what Apple is asking for the internal upgrades. I found a 2TB Samsung x5 (which is thunderbolt 3 vs. the t5 which is not I believe), and even discounted is almost $1000. If for similar performance I should be using a thunderbolt 3 external SSD, maybe it's not as ridiculous as it seems to purchase the larger SSD from Apple in the first place?

 

[Crash Davis]

Seems like the t5 would be plenty fast and they are pretty popular on here. I also know people that have and love the SanDisk Extreme Portables. Either one seems like a huge upgrade from running your video and photo libraries off a spinning disk.

 

[jeremiah256]

Thank you for the input! A quick question on your comment on the external SSDs with Thunderbolt 3. As far as I can tell from looking around, these are almost as expensive as what Apple is asking for the internal upgrades. I found a 2TB Samsung x5 (which is thunderbolt 3 vs. the t5 which is not I believe), and even discounted is almost $1000. If for similar performance I should be using a thunderbolt 3 external SSD, maybe it's not as ridiculous as it seems to purchase the larger SSD from Apple in the first place?

You and @Crash Davis are correct. I was thinking NAS. Got carried away.

 

[Kfamily]

You and @Crash Davis are correct. I was thinking NAS. Got carried away.

I can’t thank you guys enough for taking the time to help out. I think I will go with the Apple 512 mb SSD with a 2tb external SSD (usb3) and a new 4tb HDD to back it all up cost efficiently. Thanks!

 

[SkiHound2]

Thank you for the input! A quick question on your comment on the external SSDs with Thunderbolt 3. As far as I can tell from looking around, these are almost as expensive as what Apple is asking for the internal upgrades. I found a 2TB Samsung x5 (which is thunderbolt 3 vs. the t5 which is not I believe), and even discounted is almost $1000. If for similar performance I should be using a thunderbolt 3 external SSD, maybe it's not as ridiculous as it seems to purchase the larger SSD from Apple in the first place?

I tend to agree with Jerimiah256 on many points. The i5 9600k is a pretty dang fast processor. It benchmarks about as fast (a little faster from what I've seen) than the i7 7700k in the 2017 iMac. No one thought that was slow. Indeed, the 4 core 7th generation i5s run most software with ease. If you're running software that fully exploits more cores/threads, and especially if you're doing so often or as part of your job where time is money, then the i9 starts to make more sense. And, of course it makes sense if you simply want the fastest iMac on the block, or if money is no object. For Photoshop at this point, I don't think you'd see much difference between the 580x and Vega 48. Stuff I've read basically says that high end video cards with more than 4gb of vram, offer marginal advantage in LR and PS. That, I think, could change as software evolves. People crush Apple's pricing for SSDs. To some extent I agree. When you compare Apple's prices to prices for SATA based SSDs or things like the Samsung T5 the Apple prices appear very high. But Apple is pretty much using state of the art interfaces that are much faster than SATA, and then the prices aren't quite so out of line. So to get performance that is somewhat comparable to the internal Apple SSDs, you would need to use Thunderbolt 3. That said, I have a Samsung T5 on which I have my LR catalog and working files. I'm still using an old mini and am planning to upgrade. But putting the LR catalog and working files on the T5 has really improved my workflow when using LR or PS. So, even though it's slow relative to newer technologies, it's still pretty darn fast. FWIW I'm still kind of struggling with how I want to configure a new iMac too.

 

[Kfamily]

I tend to agree with Jerimiah256 on many points. The i5 9600k is a pretty dang fast processor. It benchmarks about as fast (a little faster from what I've seen) than the i7 7700k in the 2017 iMac. No one thought that was slow. Indeed, the 4 core 7th generation i5s run most software with ease. If you're running software that fully exploits more cores/threads, and especially if you're doing so often or as part of your job where time is money, then the i9 starts to make more sense. And, of course it makes sense if you simply want the fastest iMac on the block, or if money is no object. For Photoshop at this point, I don't think you'd see much difference between the 580x and Vega 48. Stuff I've read basically says that high end video cards with more than 4gb of vram, offer marginal advantage in LR and PS. That, I think, could change as software evolves. People crush Apple's pricing for SSDs. To some extent I agree. When you compare Apple's prices to prices for SATA based SSDs or things like the Samsung T5 the Apple prices appear very high. But Apple is pretty much using state of the art interfaces that are much faster than SATA, and then the prices aren't quite so out of line. So to get performance that is somewhat comparable to the internal Apple SSDs, you would need to use Thunderbolt 3. That said, I have a Samsung T5 on which I have my LR catalog and working files. I'm still using an old mini and am planning to upgrade. But putting the LR catalog and working files on the T5 has really improved my workflow when using LR or PS. So, even though it's slow relative to newer technologies, it's still pretty darn fast. FWIW I'm still kind of struggling with how I want to configure a new iMac too.

All these thoughts were very helpful. The key for me was how it “could change as software evolves.” I agree and think all the high end options will really last much longer as new software evolves to utilize their power.

Pulled the trigger yesterday! Thanks again for everyone’s input on this thread. Here’s my order and thoughts from another post:

Finally made a decision. Ordered yesterday:

27”
i9
Vega
8GB with 32GB more crucial memory coming from amazon
2TB SSD
Apple care

Delivery estimate 4/11-15

So, obviously nice to be able to make these choices. I was going to do the 512GB SSD but decided to buy truly equivalent external (say Samsung x5) was, while cheaper than Apple’s internal, still expensive, so I preferred to keep as much internal storage as I can.

My biggest motivator is to future proof the machine and even the large SSD had that in mind. I spend hours on these forums (thank you to everyone on their amazing knowledge and input here) and researching and now look forward to hopefully avoiding all that for another 8 years and more if I’m lucky. My 2011 lasted me almost 8 years, and one of my biggest priorities is for my new one to do the same, while making my photoshop and home video projects as easy as possible to work on, and therefore actually get finished.

Another factor that helped was that Amex currently is running a promotion on their Plan It so I can spread it out over 2 years with no fees or interest. So I started looking at the various upgrades from a monthly cash outflow over the next 24 months, as well as a hopefully practical life of 5-8 years.

Now if I can make my 10-year old Volvo keep going another handful of years...

 

[macduke]

All these thoughts were very helpful. The key for me was how it “could change as software evolves.” I agree and think all the high end options will really last much longer as new software evolves to utilize their power.

Pulled the trigger yesterday! Thanks again for everyone’s input on this thread. Here’s my order and thoughts from another post:

Finally made a decision. Ordered yesterday:

27”
i9
Vega
8GB with 32GB more crucial memory coming from amazon
2TB SSD
Apple care

Delivery estimate 4/11-15

So, obviously nice to be able to make these choices. I was going to do the 512GB SSD but decided to buy truly equivalent external (say Samsung x5) was, while cheaper than Apple’s internal, still expensive, so I preferred to keep as much internal storage as I can.

My biggest motivator is to future proof the machine and even the large SSD had that in mind. I spend hours on these forums (thank you to everyone on their amazing knowledge and input here) and researching and now look forward to hopefully avoiding all that for another 8 years and more if I’m lucky. My 2011 lasted me almost 8 years, and one of my biggest priorities is for my new one to do the same, while making my photoshop and home video projects as easy as possible to work on, and therefore actually get finished.

Another factor that helped was that Amex currently is running a promotion on their Plan It so I can spread it out over 2 years with no fees or interest. So I started looking at the various upgrades from a monthly cash outflow over the next 24 months, as well as a hopefully practical life of 5-8 years.

Now if I can make my 10-year old Volvo keep going another handful of years...

I'm targetting 6-8 years with what is probably a more demanding workload (42MP RAW editing from my a7R III including stitching panoramas, stacking dozens of 42MP RAW photos for astrophotography, large retina website design mockups, heavy multitasking in design apps and development apps including testing using virtual machine instances of Windows, occasional video editing of 4K HDR footage from my a7R III, and gaming in Windows using Bootcamp) using the same specs as yours so you should be good as long as the hardware doesn't malfunction.

I'm planning on moving up from 40GB to 64GB after a few years and adding an eGPU at some point for some higher end gaming in Windows. With Thunderbolt 3.0 and RAM access it's fairly upgradable. External SSD prices will also continue to fall as they get faster so that's another avenue for expansion. I would like to not think about what machine to buy for a long time as well because it was using up too much of my spare time contemplating what to do.

The only thing I'm worried about is Apple pulling the rug out from under us on macOS updates in the 2023-2024 time frame if they switch to Apple CPUs next year. They dropped support for PPC two OS X versions after switching to Intel, but back then OS X was on a longer cycle, so I think it was around four years later. I used Macs in computer labs a lot back in high school and college but didn't get my own until early 2008 when they had already moved to Intel so I don't remember exactly how it all went down. Hopefully we don't get screwed over by a platform shift. If we continue to get support these machines could last even longer as local devices become more of a thin client and most computing is done in the cloud. I don't trust many companies other than Apple with my privacy and data though, so hopefully they excel in the area of machine learning in the coming years. One day a Mac may be nothing more than choosing a display option and form factor (desktop/laptop and all at a much lower price) with a cloud service subscription for computing. So our next computer may be a much easier decision, lol.