RAM or SSD or Ports? A budget question

[the8thark]

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask a hypothetical question (and thank you in advance if you choose to answer here). I say this as I already made this choice but I would like to know what your choice would be, based on your use case scenario. This would also help new to iMac (and new to Mac in general) people as well.

The question is:

Say you have a limited budget and the base model is: 2 ports AND 512GB SSD and 16GB Ram.
You can upgrade one of the 3 options to: 4 Ports OR 1TB SSD or 24GB RAM.
Each option costs the same to upgrade to
Which of the 3 would you choose and why?

I chose the 24GB RAM option (on a M4 iMac) as that best fit my use case scenario. I felt for future proofing the Mac, I can always get an external SSD or a powered USB if needed. I need neither at the moment but the option is there. I can't upgrade the RAM later.

Which option would you choose of the 3 and why?
I am interested to hear what you would choose.

 

[MacCheetah3]

🤔
Primary would be RAM, very close second would be storage, and I/O (especially if the focus is on number of ports) would be quite a ways lagging in the priority run.

And even though you can attach more storage, I still dislike major fragmentation. For example, I have a backup drive attached, a movies drive (e.g., ripped movies), and two ‘working’ (as in video editing and other projects) drives. All of the main, personal ‘collections’ (documents, personal photos, etc) are on the primary, internal drive. In other words, the content on the external drives would be disappointing to lose (caveats with the backup drive, of course), but they aren’t mission critical, so to speak.

 

[throAU]

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask a hypothetical question (and thank you in advance if you choose to answer here). I say this as I already made this choice but I would like to know what your choice would be, based on your use case scenario. This would also help new to iMac (and new to Mac in general) people as well.

The question is:

Say you have a limited budget and the base model is: 2 ports AND 512GB SSD and 16GB Ram.
You can upgrade one of the 3 options to: 4 Ports OR 1TB SSD or 24GB RAM.
Each option costs the same to upgrade to
Which of the 3 would you choose and why?

I chose the 24GB RAM option (on a M4 iMac) as that best fit my use case scenario. I felt for future proofing the Mac, I can always get an external SSD or a powered USB if needed. I need neither at the moment but the option is there. I can't upgrade the RAM later.

Which option would you choose of the 3 and why?
I am interested to hear what you would choose.

Depends on your workload.

What is it?

I could not live inside of 512 GB of storage for example (and refuse to store stuff externally outside of archive), but could live within 16 GB of RAM with some sacrifices (smaller VM and no local LLMs). Ports can be expanded with a dock.

But that's my workload, what's yours? All the RAM in the world means nothing if you can't work on your project due to lack of storage.

 

[theluggage]

Which option would you choose of the 3 and why?

None of them.

If my budget were that tight I'd just get the 16/512/2-port model and save the $200. You'll need that cash when you come to buy external storage or USB hubs - and you'll need some sort of external storage for backups. Yes, external storage is far better GB-per-buck than Apple's upgrades - but it still costs money (and is currently undergoing inflation). Plus, I'd rather chew my own hand off than use the bundled Tragic Mouse (but that's highly subjective). Or look at refurb/used options with better RAM and storage specs if you really don't need the extra performance of M4.

RAM: Yes, there's some logic to the "get the RAM because its the only thing you can't supplement with external storage and hubs" - but its actually very hard to estimate how much RAM you'll actually need or how much you might benefit from "future proofing", and there are very few things that won't run in 16GB (unless you're talking about specialist video/graphics/AI-training workloads for which you're gonna need a bigger budget). You'll just lose some performance. 16GB isn't great for a >$1000 system but it's workable.

Ports: Personally, I couldn't live with just 2 ports because I've got a bunch of USB devices, some of which prefer to be connected to a host port - but that's a non-issue for others, some of whom won't need any ports. Hubs and docks are available, but see why iMac below. However, also, note that the 4-port iMac also comes with a slightly better CPU/GPU and Ethernet (which may or may not interest you).

Storage: NB: AFAIK the base iMac is still 256GB - so I'm assuming that you've either budgeted in the upgrade or are assuming a future M5 iMac will start at 512GB like the other M5s. You really, really don't want your system disk to get anywhere near full as that will clobber performance. I wouldn't touch 256GB with a bargepole unless it was purely for wordprocessing/email/browsing. 512GB is liveable - I'm currently living with 1TB (plus externals) and it's a bit over half full, but I could work with 512GB by being more methodical about moving more stuff to external. Unless you're doing high-def video editing or "big data" the greatest advantage of super-fast SSD comes from having system, temporary files, applications, swap and "work in progress" running from it. Having your documents, photos, media library etc. on cheap externals or even networked storage isn't too much of a problem.

why iMac: The beauty of iMac is that it's an elegant, all-in-one system. That advantage starts to evaporate as soon as you start hanging external drives and hubs off it and, come upgrade time, you're having to replace what would likely still be a very good screen. Personally, I've already got external displays so I'd probably look at a refurb Studio where all my money wouyld go on the computer. Mac Mini + third party display is another consideration. It's just sad that there aren't many (if any) 4k @ 24" displays around, but there are plenty of 27" 4ks.

 

[Fishrrman]

"You can upgrade one of the 3 options to: 4 Ports OR 1TB SSD or 24GB RAM.
Each option costs the same to upgrade to
Which of the 3 would you choose and why?"

A "desktop" computer with only 2 ports is ridiculous.
(nothing more to say about that).

I'm thinking that in the future, more RAM will become of greater importance than disk size.

But having said that, anything less than 512gb today is inadequate.
Even 512gb is going to become cramped over the life of the iMac.

So...
It's not a choice of "one of the three".

You need ALL THREE.
- 4 ports
- 24gb RAM
- 1tb SSD

That's my opinion and I'm stickin' to it.

Suggestion:
Buy Apple refurbished.
Looks as good as new, and you get the same 1-year warranty as if it were new.
You can even buy AppleCare.

2nd suggestion:
These days, I wouldn't buy an iMac.
I'd get a well-equipped Mini, instead (which is what I did, again, Apple refurbished).
You can get more for your money that way.

 

[volkwagen1300]

I was in the same situation last summer and chose the 1 TB option. I picked up a refurb 2-port base model (in this case a custom configuration) to save a few more $. My use case is very light - document creation, affinity photo editing etc. If I ever do light video editing, it'll just take a little longer - not like the base model can't do that - and I couldn't stand having extra memory hanging off the back since the computer resides on a table in our kitchen. So most of the time neither port is being used anyway. I'm happy with it so far.