New iMac; SSD or Fusion Drive

[TwoBytes]

W
PCI-E based SSD, I think the best feature, but there is no performance boost between a 400mb/s read write SSD and a 800mb/s write read SSD,?

There were massive improvements macrumors posted from the PCIe SSD.

 

[fig]

There were massive improvements macrumors posted from the PCIe SSD.

At some point those speed differences become pretty negligible, however.

Going from a traditional platter hard drive to an SSD gives you something like a 300% increase in read/write speeds, it's a massive difference and one that any person off the street will notice in applications opening, transferring files, etc.

You can theoretically about double the read/write speeds from your current SSD with PCIe SSD, but if your data transfers are already practically instant are you really going to see a huge difference if they're more near instant? Enh, maybe.

Is that something worth waiting around months for? Not in my book.

Same goes for wifi speeds...your bottleneck is usually your router, rarely is your wifi card or lack of ethernet connection what's slowing you down. And the video card may be incrementally faster, but the current iMac has some pretty solid video card options available.

There will always be better, faster, etc. out there, but as soon as you buy something the next better, faster thing is going to be in development and coming out soon. any good Mac will last you at least several year and have a nice resale value when you decide to get rid of it, at some point you just have to pull the trigger.

 

[Bear]

...
Is that something worth waiting around months for? Not in my book.
...

That is the question that each person must answer for themselves. And of course they have to realize that one or more of the possible features may not happen.

Is the PCIe SSD worth waiting for? For some, the answer will be yes. What's also important is that there will likely be a SSD price drop with the new iMac, the same that there was with the Air. And some people are hoping for a bigger SSD in the fusion drive.

As for the 802.11ac - if you do a lot of home sharing, it could be important. For people who have one computer at home and an iOS device or 2, it's not a big deal.

I'm waiting because my iMac still does what I need it to do. If it died and needed an expensive repair, you can believe I'd just order a new iMac right away. Otherwise, I'm looking at replacing it this year or next depending on what I see in the actual iMac announcement this year.

 

[fig]

That is the question that each person must answer for themselves. And of course they have to realize that one or more of the possible features may not happen.

Is the PCIe SSD worth waiting for? For some, the answer will be yes. What's also important is that there will likely be a SSD price drop with the new iMac, the same that there was with the Air. And some people are hoping for a bigger SSD in the fusion drive.

As for the 802.11ac - if you do a lot of home sharing, it could be important. For people who have one computer at home and an iOS device or 2, it's not a big deal.

I'm waiting because my iMac still does what I need it to do. If it died and needed an expensive repair, you can believe I'd just order a new iMac right away. Otherwise, I'm looking at replacing it this year or next depending on what I see in the actual iMac announcement this year.

All good points.

I do notice a bit too often around here, however, the idea that people need to wait for the next revision of X machine.

For most people that extra horsepower is going to to make little to no difference for what you're doing, and if it does then it's probably billable and you can justify getting the faster one whenever it eventually comes out.

Just get a machine and start DOING whatever you do. You can always upgrade later.

 

[ek9max]

I replaced my mid 2011 27" w/ 1TB 7200rpm drive with a 2012 27" 3.4ghz w/ 768 gb SSd.

I will never got back to a spinny drive ever again.