Agreed, but as I have said elsewhere, once you start upgrading a 21.5" iMac, you are getting dangerously close to the lower end 27" models, which puts it in an uncomfortable situation.
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Wouldn't a 5400 RPM HDD be the best choice in certain situations?
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Agreed, but as I have said elsewhere, once you start upgrading a 21.5" iMac, you are getting dangerously close to the lower end 27" models, which puts it in an uncomfortable situation.
If you don't know what you're missing out on, a $200 Windows PC might make you quite happy as well
While I like using Apple products, I don't get some of their lower end products. You are still paying a premium price without actually getting much of a premium experience.
I consider FD to be a great way to bring SSDs to the masses. True tech enthusiasts might spend the premium to go pure SSD, but if you want many of its advantages without breaking the bank, you could do much worse than FD.
If one hardly ever restarts the computer, starts new programs, copies files or saves big files and doesn't have programs with a lot of I/O, having a slow HDD might work out. But I consider this to be way too constraining, too many ifs. It'll likely hurt resale value (by hurt I mean lower it to a point where the extra FD would have mostly paid for it self) and I notice that I always have use cases when I just want to close or restart a program without thinking too much about the implications.
For sure, I agree that the fusion drive is a great compromise. I just don't like how there are so many vocal people stating that SSDs are the "only" way to go, as if the vast majority of people today didn't use HDDs and are plenty happy with their computing experience. You'd think that HDDs are a part of some ancient technology we have failed to overcome, which isn't the case at all. HDDs are still very practical and serve a variety of purposes today.
For you all non-believers, yes, money IS an issue. It was mentioned that RAM would not necessarily ever replace SSDs when I brought it up as the performance might not be beneficial enough. I disagree, there's no way you can predict what our future needs or wants will be, and if the price were right, I don't see any reason why not. People today chase benchmarks, and I don't think it'll be any different in the future. Not that I think this would happen anytime soon.
Well for me it did come down to price. I could not afford to spent $200 to upgrade to the 256GB SSD and then wait for the computer to arrive. I'm very happy with my iMac, though next time I'm hoping Apple makes the SSD standard.
As an FD proponent, I can hardly be against HDDs since they are what makes the big and affordable part of the FD. Furthermore, I use them in Raids, if you either want cheap or big amounts of storage, they still are the way to go.
You are right to defend the notion that it's still ok to build desktop computers with only an HDD, but I think that's only valid for very budget constrained setups. And while some rather general statements might have been made here, I don't think anyone meant to complain about $200 PCs still being sent out without SSDs.
But once you are selling a computer for more than $1000 without an SSD, you are taking people for a ride. There's simply no real reason to do that. A small SSD would cost small double digit money and it would benefit everyone. It's not like it's some specialized optimization component. It's not even something that only 50% of users would really benefit from, like a dedicated GPU. Charging such a high premium for a 24 GB SSD on an already rather expensive computer just seems wrong. If you ask me, this is almost as if they were only offering sound output or USB ports as a pricey upgrade. Sure, you can do without them, but it's unnecessarily limiting the experience of using the device.
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