I bet you know more people with older style USB devices, didn’t stop Apple removing them for USB C on MacBook. So either they want to ahead of the game (USB C), or in the Ark (HDD). Surely the people you know turn their devices on / off at some time, big difference in speed there. Anyway, are these people doing mundane tasks updating their Macs. Maybe they are happy with what they have. Some of us want to update, we are getting frustrated with the spinning beach ball. We have work to get done. We are reasonably savvy consumers and want a Mac that is built for 2020 not 2010.
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Thoughts on Forbes article re: iMac WTF???
- Thread starter ChromeCrescendo
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It's just click bait like many news articles. Buys the cheapest iMac... It's slow... No 💩 really?
Too bad Apple doesn't offer SSD-equipped Macs as an option for those who need the higher performance of SSD drives over spinning disk drives, right?
Apple was never about upgrading. For the longest time Apple has been about simplicity and convenience "for the rest of us", and if that means sacrificing a few (self-proclaimed) pros who demand the most upgradeable piece of hardware at the lowest price possible then so be it. Face it: if you are in the market for a cheap upgradeable computer then Apple has always been and will always be the worst possible choice. Because you are not their target audience. Never was, and never will be.
Oh, and FYI: of course these people still have "older style USB devices". Such as mice, keyboards, thumb drives, external backup disks, etc. Like most people do, and will continue to do for many years to come. Again, the internet bubble is not representative of the real world. Not even a bit.
No one in this thread has said about " a cheap upgradeable computer". Some of us have pointed out the crazyness of supplying old fashioned, slow mechanical drives in premium priced computers, especially when these devices are glued together, hindering repair.Too bad Apple doesn't offer SSD-equipped Macs as an option for those who need the higher performance of SSD drives over spinning disk drives, right?
Apple was never about upgrading. For the longest time Apple has been about simplicity and convenience "for the rest of us", and if that means sacrificing a few (self-proclaimed) pros who demand the most upgradeable piece of hardware at the lowest price possible then so be it. Face it: if you are in the market for a cheap upgradeable computer then Apple has always been and will always be the worst possible choice. Because you are not their target audience. Never was, and never will be.
Oh, and FYI: of course these people still have "older style USB devices". Such as mice, keyboards, thumb drives, external backup disks, etc. Like most people do, and will continue to do for many years to come. Again, the internet bubble is not representative of the real world. Not even a bit.
€2099 for the entry iMac 27" with 1TB fusion drive (next model €2299 1TB Fusion), with a whole 32GB of SSD! These drives havent had any magic dust sprinkled over them, still mechanical drives, slow and prone to failure. To update to a 1TB SSD an extra €600! I can buy similar drives for €300 (OWC Aura Pro X2, quoted 3316MB/s read and 2445MB/s write). To me, what Apple have done with current off the shelf iMacs, is a bit like Ferrari desiging a fantastic car and the CEO saying stick a cheap third party engine in it.
I agree, and maybe for the mid-range models, an all SSD Fusion drive. A small fast NVMe paired with a large not-as-fast SATA. They should have been able to do that change already.
Again - what's your point? Do you have a legal right to affordable upgrades without extra profit margins where you live? I am not aware of any country on this planet that does have a weirdly specific law like this but maybe I'm mistaken, who knows. We live in a free-market economy (well, large parts of the world at least) and Apple has the legal right to charge what they deem appropriate to for their products, services, and upgrades in the exact same way that you have the legal right to shop around for competing products, services, and upgrades if you don't like what's on Apple's menu.
Again, I'm not attacking you or arguing with you. I'm simply trying to understand what your point is, that's all.
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Who is talking about legal rights? With regard to the SSD, I mentioned the retail price, where a little person like me can buy from a big retailer who is making profit (maybe a quiet healthy one) on that device. Apple would be buying wholesale and getting the SSD at a much cheaper price. For many of us the iMac is over priced with HDD, and as Apple has the right to charge what it likes for its products, we as consumers have a right to decide whether to purchase or not at said price. Whats your point?
...and I know plenty of people who are perfectly fine with 128-256GB of storage because all they do all day long is simple word processing, web browsing, emails, etc. and, for that, a few tens of GB of space goes a very long way. (...and frankly, today, 128GB shouldn't even be on the menu...)
Heck, until the 16" MBP came out, Apple were selling 15" MBPs with 256GB as standard, and they are aimed at more serious users who will likely be using space-eating stuff like pro apps, video, uncompress audio and seriously high-res images.
...apart from much faster boot times, much faster application loading times, not grinding to a halt when you open too many browser tabs and the system starts swapping RAM to disc, less noise, less power consumption, cooler running, probably longer life...
True, these users wouldn't benefit from having top-of-the-line super-fast 4xPCIe SSDs, but even the cheapest 3.5" SATA SSD is night and day compared to spinning rust, and wouldn't cost significantly more than a 1TB hard drive.
Problem is, Apple are still pricing their SSD options like it's 2012 and SSD is some sort of luxury for the deep pocketed. It's 2020, and it isn't (unless you must have the very fastest) - the SSD pricing & minimum specs for the 16" MBP are a bit less ridiculous, but don't seem to have filtered down to the rest of the range yet.
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You didn't get the memo: criticising Apple for poor value for money/lack of options == "sense of entitlement". It's the last card in the pack when your dogma is "Apple can't be wrong".
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It's pretty wild that anyone would accept a computer with the iMac's price being slow, purely because it's 'the cheapest'.
I guess they don't want anyone to be buying the 21" model.
I think it's pretty wild that anyone would buy a PC with 4 GB of RAM or a spinning HD just because they're cheap but they fly off the shelves. Should people be allowed to buy such a computer? I think so for the USA because it's a free market and people are allowed choice. I won't speak for other countries though. Now if Apple didn't offer an SSD as a choice in 2020 I would say that is pretty dumb. Also slow is a relative term. My boss's five year old laptop is so slow to me that I refuse to use it but he's happy with it.
Yes, and they cost ~$500-$800 and have names like "Dell" and "Lenovo". Oh, wait, my mistake, even the $600 Lenovo has a 128GB SSD boot drive... Get anywhere closer to the $1000 mark and 256GB SSD + 2TB HD is pretty common. Apple, meanwhile, wants a $200 upgrade on top of a $1300 base price for a 256HD TB (...that's not even good value compared to Apple's own $200 upgrade for an extra 512GB on a 16" MBP)
...but apparently they're not allowed the information and advice they need to make an informed choice. Which is where the whole naive "free market" thing goes a bit runny.
Bottom line: unless you are doing something like video/audio production that can make good use of multiple cores and/or GPU-based processing, the biggest step forward in personal computers over the last 10 years has been the introduction of affordable SSDs. Anybody who has upgraded their older Mac with even a basic SATA SSD will know how much more responsive it feels. It's 2020 and buying a Mac with a spinning HD is like buying a diesel-powered Tesla.
...and that's all the Forbes article is saying. No "Sack Tim Cook", no "this would never have happened while Jobs was alive" no "Apple sucks - buy Windows!" just "PSA: the entry-level iMac is knobbled by it's slow HD and you might be better off adding a SSD to your old iMac".
...which is the same advice regularly dished out here on MR when people ask which Mac they should buy.
Is Apple going to go bust this quarter because the bas iMac has a HD? No, of course not, but unless Apple stop relying on MacOS loyalty/lock in to extract ever-higher prices from a stagnant pool of users, and start doing more to attract PC users into the fold and retain the more agnostic Mac users, then the Mac isn't going anywhere in the long term.
Oh really? Pray tell, who exactly is keeping that highly protected secret from them? Is it the government? An all-encompassing powerful organization at the highest level of international politics? Or even worse, is it Apple itself suing all those people all over the planet in order to silence them to keep that clandestine information secret?
There has never been a better time in human history to make informed decisions about your purchases, be it car, computer, or the carton of milk that your toddler is craving at 2am. And yet people still buy computers with hard drives in them not because they don't know any better but because they simply don't care. The large majority of computer users don't care about specs and details and nitpicking between a SATA and an NVMe SSD. Does it get the job done? Is it cheap? SOLD!
This I actually largely agree with. Yes, for many people an SSD is a great upgrade to their aging computer and will give them a few extra years of usage. However, it is not a magic bullet for everyone, and depending on workload and habits it might not make any difference at all. If all you do all day long is get to work in the morning, power up your Mac, go get yourself a cup of coffee, power up Word, Outlook, Safari and maybe one or two other business applications to use all day long and then shut it down when you go home eight hours later than the only benefit an SSD will bring is that your computer will power up faster in the morning and shut down faster in the evening. Congratulations, you saved yourself 5 minutes. And if, like me, you never shut down your computer but only put it to sleep you won't even notice that because it'll keep everything in RAM and will wake up and go to sleep just as fast as an NVMe-powered iMac. No difference at all.
The one thing I agree on with you is this though: it wouldn't hurt Apple to offer an SSD option at the same price as a FD option. That way people would be able to choose between speed and storage space depending on their individual needs. Then again Apple was never about choice and always about telling us what we want while making sure we don't have too many options and don't swerve off the beaten predetermined Apple path, so I guess that is wishful thinking. I fully expect the next iMac to have a T2 chip and a 128GB or 256GB SSD in the base model though.
Did you just realize Apple computers cost more than Windows computers? I'm glad you came to this amazing revelation in 2020 but I'm not sure what this has to do with Apple allowing customers to have another option.