Why is my MBA so much faster than my iMac?

[houssein31]

I was just wondering why my 2013 MBA is so much faster than my 2012 iMac (even though the iMac has 2.7gHz while Air has 1.3)???

For example, it takes me less than 4 seconds to open Pages on my MBA but on my iMac it takes me more than 15-20sec. Another example, in iTunes, when I scroll down though my albums on iMac, the image of the takes a couple of seconds to load, while on my MBA, its instantly appear, they dont have to load on to the screen (dont know if I explained this clearly :$ )

Is it only because of the SSD? And if it is, would you recommend me having someone changing the hard drive to SSD??

And if I change the Hard drive to an SSD, will my iMac be as fast as my MBA?? (or is there something else thats speeding up my air?)

Thanks

 

[blueroom]

It's the SSD.

 

[motrek]

Swapping the 2012 iMac's internal drive is not a trivial thing to do. You might be able to find a certified Apple shop/technician in your area who is willing to do it for you. I suspect it would take about half an hour. You can decide how much is a fair price for that amount of labor.

Alternatively, a cheap and easy solution is to put an SSD in an external USB 3.0 enclosure and use that as your boot drive. You can use your iMac's internal hard drive for mass storage.

A nice 250GB Samsung SSD costs $99 on Amazon and a nice external enclosure that supports all the latest standards and protocols costs about $20. Plugging all this together should only take a few minutes and then you can run SuperDuper! to copy the contents of your hard drive to the SSD.

 

[26139]

Ssd

It's the SSD.

 

[MarvinHC]

No question, it's the SSD. But changing it is not that straight forward - check the instructions on fixit, Apple did not make that one easy.