1/4 TB of storage in the $1800 model, 1/2 TB in the $2300 one. Ugh. (So before the lower-end one had 64GB? [Edit: Nope, 1 TB Fusion Drive, thanks smnrchrds!] That would be FULL just from installing the one game the press release mentions.)
What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices? Looking at the upgrade options (which aren't even available for the lower-end model), they charge $300 per TB.
I accidentally ordered the 'wrong' iMac (256gb SSD) which turned out to be the right option because the fusion drives seem to have issues. Had a 2TB SSD hanging off the back for the past 6 months until i finally went to install it internally. Sadly, if you didn't order your machine with a SATA drive, it doesn't have a SATA Cable -- hence having to disassemble the entire thing to get to the plug on the logic board that lets you add a drive.
No, the lower end ones came with "Fusion Drive", that was 32-128 GB of SSD merged with a 1TB HDD presented as a single disk.
The kind where Apple can make a 300% or more margin, knowing that people will still pay.
Don't think Apple have ever sold SSD upgrades at anything remotely resembling competitive $/TB prices. Clearly they don't need too because people still buy their machines.
Apple wants a certain profit margin for the model as a whole. Yet for customers who will never pay prices that will give Apple that full margin, they offer a model at a low price point with a compressed margin, but with a painful aspect that will encourage customers who can pay to go with a higher priced unit — here, the painful thing is the small SSD size.
So the idea that the minimal-SSD model is somehow the "real" price and Apple is selling SSD space at an exorbitant markup, isn't quite right.
You could almost think of it as Apple offering a discount if you'll go with the smallest SSD, so they can capture more of the market while still keeping their average profit margins high.
If Apple charged "competitive $/TB prices", the small-SSD option would likely be more expensive, rather than the larger-SSD options being cheaper.
The $1800 price point isn’t hard to grasp once you consider the display.
EDIT: I previously compared to / referenced possibly sub-$1000 5K monitors, but it seems the ones I was looking at in that range were actually 4K.
Sure, but more would buy at lower prices.
That said I don't doubt that Apple has researched this a zillion ways, and this price point is there for solid reasons.
Not anymore. Fast NVME drives are commonplace. Unless these drives are again significantly faster than the competition, which I doubt, that's just Apple doing their thing and not adjusting fast enough.
Apple's drives are no longer faster. They're fast. But high end PC drives are just as fast (and usually 1/3 the price).
Though let's be real here. I have a 2018 MBP with 256GB of storage. I have XCode, the XCode beta, Logic Pro, virtually the entire Adobe gamut of software, brew and a massive selection of brew packages, every browser, IntelliJ, GoLand, and just a tonne of crap.
I've used about 150GB. As fair disclosure I have a USB 3 1TB 970 Pro in an enclosure that I use for the occasional massive file download, purely because I'm paranoid about flash exhaustion, though by the system metrics I'm still at less than 1% wear.
Yeah, someone buying this for their kid to do their homework is going to be completely fine with 256GB. Though it's worth noting that the next option is just $200 more and gives you a faster process and 512GB. The lowest end one is just the one to frame the value, and presumably isn't their recommendation.
Developers write code for platforms that they're using. This is what drove adoption of Apple hardware in the early 2ks (a POSIX that runs MS Office!), which in turn set set the stage for the iPhone and iOS.
Unlike then, Apple now has a good grip on the consumer market: Not targetting iOS with a mobile/tablet release is a bad idea, regardless of whether or not devs are familiar with it. But OSX? There are a few areas where it's still has strong devotees: Color management in OSX is still fantastic, creating a lot of loyalty among artists, photographers, etc... It's still technically a POSIX, so it's still attractive to developers.
In short, OSX is not targetted at consumers. When someone needs a "computer" for their kid to do their homework, that's increasingly going to be an Android/iOS device.
For a platform to survive, it needs a healthy developer community. A developer community needs incentives (e.g., market-share or devs already using the platform). Right now, what are the incentives for OSX devs?
These drives are so tiny now they could easy offer an expansion slot which is accessible to the user, like the PS5 will. I miss the early-2000s era Apple who would actually do something like that.
Like this but for consumers. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11702/intel-introduces-new-ru...
$100-$150 for an enclosure, so that's still going to be cheaper than Apple's markup.
You may not find this adequate (actually, I don’t like it either) but it’s not an unreasonable position to take.
Having worked in the hw biz not only do memory sockets add to BOM, they reduce reliability (statistically — not on any one machine, but over your installed base)
It's $2k for the 27" with 500GB.
How much is it to get a really good quality 5k display with a Dell?
> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices?
I'm using 165GB of 500GB on my current system. Considering all the systems issued by work are configured the same and nobody complains about space issues, I don't think it's a big problem.
I'd take the 5k display over 1TB storage any time. Sadly my work issues laptops and not iMacs.
Personally, I am always inclined to buy my Apple products when travelling as most times it's a lot cheaper in the US or Singapore. I mean $2300 (incl. VAT) vs $1799+1.08=$1945 $350 cheaper.
I don't know about magic fairy dust, but Apple's SSDs are known to be phenomenally fast in benchmarks. $300/TB is compared to $200/TB aftermarket for a high end NVMe SSD. Is that markup? Yes, but it's not 300%.
My MacBook Pro has used 5% of its SSD endurance in 6 years or so? It has a 1TB SSD.
I'm not filling it up, but I'm not trying to optimize the writes or something?
Most people can afford to buy an iPhone of some kind. $1000 monitor stands and expensive iMacs is what makes their brand seem luxury.
I’d also speculate this means iMac won’t be the first computer getting Apple Silicon. I wonder if it will be the last?
What’s the consensus guess now? Perhaps a new MacBook Air with good performance but the real “breakthrough” is > 12 hours battery life?
They are fanless and have a 5W thermal envelope, which fits in with the current A12X too.
The major criticisms of the design at the time was: Butterfly keyboard, the Single USB-C port and the speed of the device (Intel CORE-M is truly, truly painful). But for a $600-$700 machine with an ARM CPU? that's insanely competitive, and is in-line with the "basic" macbook branding.
Apple's been consistent about ~10 hours of battery life for a while. They've hit their spec and think that most people don't need more in typical usage. So they'll be able to shave battery volume down to continue their trend of thinner without sacrificing other specs.
The recently discontinued MacBook was a vision statement that the hardware could not quite reach, much like the first MacBook Air. Here, I think that statement realized would be a MacBook Pro that is as thin as that MacBook, and is still notably faster than the current MacBook Pro.
I'm skeptical Apple's introduction of their high performance CPUs exclusively on a low end device. A super light/ high performance 12ish inch machine seems right up their ally, but they don't want the new CPU associated with being a low-end "Intel Pentium Gold" type device.
There might be a lower end ultra-thin laptop released, but they are going to go big and push out a high performance CPU right out the gate. They didn't launch their 64 bit A series CPU on a secondary device, they won't launch this on a secondary device either.
It's almost as heavy and as thin as the iPad, but it is a full-sized computer with a full-sized keyboard. I can play with Emacs for 20 hours writing and scripting without charging.
Also another unpopular opinion - I also love the butterfly keyboard of the 12-inch Macbook, it's quite uncomfortable but once I get used to it, I feel I can type pretty fast and it feels good. It feels firmer than the old Macbook Pro because the latter feels a little bit shaky. It also feels more clicky than the later Macbook Pro with the butterfly keyboard. It seems to me they have received too much criticism on the butterfly keyboard so they were trying to make it less edgy, but that made it lost the characteristics as well, thus they withdraw butterfly keyboard eventually.
No, it wasn’t. I used to ru Xcode, iOS Simulator, World of Warcraft, League of Legends on the fanless MacBook with 8 GB of RAM just fine enough.
However I suspect that if they can they’ll start with a “pro” machine that beats Intel specs as their first out of the gate, to demonstrate that it’s not a compromise option.
If they are really creating an ARM macbook, this will be a great product and this chassis is definitely the right one to start with.
Are their hubs yet that can turn one USB C port into several? Or do they still only turn one USB C port into several USB A ports?
A couple years ago what I read was that the hold up was that this required more complicated chipsets that would not be available for a few months and would be expensive. More recently, I've read that this won't happen until USB4.
Butterfly Keyboard get most of its criticism when it moved to MacBook Pro, Because now you are putting up with a keyboard that ~50% of the people find it to have worse typing experience at the expense of a possible ( or not as we have seen other vendor capable of doing without it ) 1mm decrease in thickness.
Personally I still want the old 1.5mm Scissor Keyboard.
It will have a SIM card slot, and get at least 12 hours of battery life while using LTE.
This would be a truly compelling product, filling a niche Apple has tried to inhabit a couple of times, with the distinct possibility of getting it right this time.
People realized how crappy the camera (an well mic) was on Macs compared to other computers now that we are all video conferencing. Its sad that every PC user with a Logitech looked much better.
For similar reasons, I don't think the iMac was ever slated to be the first Apple Silicon machine. The desktop form-factor just doesn't highlight the benefits of the new architecture the way a laptop does. Since they sell a lot more laptops than desktops, it's likely they don't even have a desktop specific CPU ready at launch time. That'll come next year or maybe even 2022 towards the tail end of their 2 year launch window.
The rest of the PowerPC line was brought to Intel within the calendar year, and iMacs and MacBook Pros received an additional refresh replacing the Core Duos with Core 2 Duos later in the year.
At the time I remember thinking the release cadence for which models they transitioned over made perfect sense. You could make a strong argument for them to follow a similar roadmap this time around because while Macs have changed substantially since then, each Mac’s place within the lineup has not changed very much, although a MacBook Pro and a new ultra-thin MacBook around the same to show off the advantages of Apple’s chips on both sides ends of the performance per watt spectrum wouldn’t surprise me.
Nano Glass is around $500 up charge which does not seem bad but I seem to recall it has special cleaning requirements so be careful if you have family or friends who are touch prone.
SSD upgrade from 512 to 1TB is reasonable as well, around $200
Reasonable for Apple maybe, but for $200 you already get a pretty decent 1TB retail SSD.
Same.
I own a 2017 5K model with an i5 and the terrible cooling is my only gripe with it.
It's totally fine for bursty workloads, but once you get into a light sustained workload (eg: music production) temps go to +70ºC and the fans become quite annoying.
There have been rumors about an updated smaller iMac which will shrink the bezels and basically look like an ipad pro on a stand, with a screen size increase to 24" and Apple Silicon, coming either later this year or early 2021.
I do wonder why separate the smaller and larger iMacs lifecycles, maybe because the desktop-level Apple Silicon chips aren't ready yet? That would make sense especially if they're aiming to replace the AMD GPUs even on the top of the line larger iMac and use integrated graphics there too.
- A super-lightweight 12" Macbook-like device that lets them demonstrate how Apple Silicon opens up new categories and form factors: small, powerful and amazing battery life
- A developer machine (MBP or similar) will be necessary. There are precious few DTKs out there, and they need more developers to be running Apple Silicon. I can't imagine them not shipping this in the first wave.
So this probably doesn't mean anything in that regard.
The strongest rumors are for a MacBook Pro 13/14 and a 24” iMac. The 24” iMac suggests that they will switch to new designs with the new chips.
I don’t think that Apple will restrict their new chips to just a little MacBook. It would make it look like that is all they can do. They are going to want to come in strong and have a range of chips on different machines. Some with high efficiency and some with high performance. They seem confident and I suspect they will pull this off.
Their new iPad Pro took a big step in that direction with the keyboard, but it still doesn't have macos and mac apps.
Not sure whether they'd position it more as a "Macbook Touch" or "iPad Mac"...
https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-the-iMac-27-5K-be-used-as-an-...
Previously, I would sometimes use screen sharing to use the desktop of my MacBook onto my iMac, but due to its slow speed, that is only an emergency measure.
It is a shame that iMac does not provide normal video input.
It's much more expensive but I needed to be able to hook in my work laptop to a 5k display while working and switch easily to my home setup with a single cable when I want to.
Ended up being perfect! It's paying off big time with COVID and WFH.
If Apple only offered a desktop class Mac, I would even start thinking about the pro display.
Target disk mode. Target display mode. Boot from an external drive using option. Boot from the network.
And you know the "decision makers" don't understand how much nicer it makes the computers to administer. (understand in the sense they would defend them for real in a feature-cutting meeting) Instead we get dongles.
sigh.
(After roasting several drives, thermal management was not a high point on those machines)
If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again?
I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
That makes less sense, though. Apple isn't using Arm's cpu architecture, just the ISC.
Apple is switching from Intel chips with x86 to Apple chips with ARM. You should, when comparing, use one pair or the other.
From x86 to arm
Or
From Intel to Apple
The whole industry of music software is kind of weird… their products tend to be somewhat “closer to the metal” than typical software, even a bit more than video, graphics, CAD and 3D… improvements and bug fixes are few and far between.
Also, like most artists (in my experience), musicians tend to learn one way of doing things very very well and getting them to try anything new is next to impossible.
Also notable, the rumored iPad-like style changes are conspicuously absent, these look pretty much identical to the older iMacs.
Otherwise this looks like a decent bump all around. Notably, the iMac Pro also got some love (though not too much it seems?)
In my experience, the companies who always buy the cheapest model tend to avoid Macs entirely. The big place I see the base iMac popping up is at schools.
If it where up to IT everyone would have beefy computers as the most frustrating calls are "My computer is slow."
If you upgrade the new 27" iMac to the same specs, you can get a faster machine than the base model $4999 iMac pro for $900 less - it's a faster clock speed 10-core processor, better performing GPU with Radeon 5700 XT 16GB (as opposed to Vega 64 8GB), and same 32GB RAM and 10Gb ethernet and 1TB SSD for that price.
The iMac pro has even further upgrade options that the iMac doesn't, but still, I wouldn't expect a $5k non-upgradeable pro machine like that to be underspecced. It'll also be interesting to see some teardowns of the new iMac and compare actual benchmarks between these machines, the iMac Pro might still have better thermals that lets the cpu/gpu perform better in the real world.
The rumor that they would redesign for Intel didn't make a ton of sense.
The MacBook Pro design had a major pain point so they needed to push an update for their "final" Intel MBP. The iMac design is a touch dated, but has no significant flaws (at least none which Apple intends to fix).
It’s offensive
> iMac Pro now comes standard with a 10-core Intel Xeon processor. Designed for pro users who require workstation-class performance, iMac Pro features Xeon processors up to 18 cores, graphics performance up to 22 teraflops, up to 256GB quad-channel ECC memory, and a brilliant 27-inch Retina 5K display.
I think just a bump in the base CPU and maybe the graphics? There is a reason it's buried deep in the PR.
Though maybe I should be thanking them; I'd almost certainly have bought one if target display mode was available, so they've saved me money!
With Apple Silicon I suspect we will see the return of target display mode. I can't wait!
There's also some screen extender software, but you absolutely want a wired connection or it'll be painful.
Because Target Display Mode is no longer supported:
"Make sure that your iMac is using macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 or earlier. You can't use target display mode with later versions of macOS, or with Boot Camp and Windows."
Bezels are important to frame the screen content from functional perspective. Think of it like a frame for the art work. Black bezels occulude the distracting edges and background noise from the screen and you have always have a constant black border. They can be made to look nice as well like some of those Bang & Olufsen TVs[1] and Sony Trinitron Professional monitors [2].
Contrararily, there is no reason to the opposite besides "aesthetics". Can you think of any?
Alas - the momentum behind bezels is so massive, it is impossible to reverse this trend. Same with "borderless" trends in UI/UX.
[1] http://www.extravaganzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bang-...
[2] https://www.proav.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/...
To be fair I'm biased because the shift to bezel-less (on phones) was accompanied by a shift to humongous screens that I can't use. Now I'm stuck with the new iPhone SE as my only viable upgrade.
This can hardly come as a big surprise given that a maximum of 7-8 years of support for latest MacOS has been the norm for pretty much forever.
I had a tech come to the house and do it for under $100.
Also, having only 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports seems a little light as well. I would hope to have had 4 ports at least.
Apple only does value-based pricing. They'd charge you a percentage of your income if they could figure out how.
OTOH, I'd expect the average HN user to need a lot more. I'm currently finding 16 GB a bit constrained and would be delighted to have 32 in the same footprint. The server under my desk has 64 and the swap indicators tell me it should have more (or less stuff to do).
Dell did the same thing with the RAM in a 7740 and 7750 I recently ordered (work and personal), ironically about the same markup.
Is this a strategy of Apple (or Intel) to be able to get people to ignore (and therefore they can optimize the cost of) the generation of chip used? It's almost as if they realized people fixate on the GHz figure, and overlook the chip generation, which (I guess?) must contribute much more to effective clock speed than a small difference in Hz rate? I even fall into this trap sometimes.
It is a bit complicated for the casual buyer to have the clock speed which was the previous metric of "goodness" of your machine now have to be weighed with the generation of processor. When the name of the processor itself doesn't provide clear differentiation between generations.
Obfuscating the chip generation is almost a necessity at this point because the variations within and between generations is too complicated to keep track off.
Interesting deviation is how they've been highlighting the performance of the A-series chips since the A7.
Like, this has to be a totally artificial restriction. I'd much rather buy the cheap one with a bigger SSD, but instead I'm stuck paying hundreds of dollars extra for features I don't care about.
If anything, this is the first time i see an iMac which has a good GPU. Though considering iMac's form factor and my experience of having a PC with a 5700XT i wonder about thermals.
I used laptops for years until and rsi issue made me have to avoid trackpads. I can say I’ve been extremely pleased with having a desktop imac. I use an ipad pro when I need something portable. I like just having a station I can get in front of that signifies work, and the imac pro fans basically never make noise.
And even for professional artists, I have to imaging the portability of an iPad Pro probably blows it out of the water for those use cases. Some people think it's more natural to move their canvas around the pen than vice-versa, so just being able to move the device/screen around is huge.
Smart move since it increases the appeal of the Apple-powered Mac devices. The pricing difference will also help, as based on the expensive base configurations (RAM, SSD as others have pointed out here), it will make the new devices look that much more attractive.
The 32gb additional memory option costs 4x the price of the entire 32gb of ram in my desktop. It costs independently 60% of the cost of my desktop pc base unit just for the upgrade.
The bottom end unit features 256gb SSD (probably soldered) and the next tier up wants +£200 to go from 512 to 1TiB. My entire 1TB Samsung evo plus nvme cost £165.
The 5k display isn’t worth it for my use case so I’ve got a 27” iiyama 4K display I paid £379 for. I suspect for 90% of people the story is the same.
Add the shit show that has been Catalina so far and this is a comedy gouging.
Edit: equivalent spec of my desktop build is £3399 here. I paid £1520 for my desktop approx: ryzen 3700x, 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, gtx1660, 27” 4K display, decent mechanical keyboard, decent mouse, Windows 10 pro.
Where is the £1879 advantage?
Well. Wow.
> Apple today also announced that its 21.5-inch iMac will come standard with SSDs across the line for the first time.
Double wow
I'll be holding out for complete iMac redesign with ARM. I'm hoping something will be announced at their event?
One gripe is the 27" iMac comes standard with only 8GB, while the 15" MacBook Pro has came with 16GB standard since 2014... I'm guessing most people are going to the aftermarket to throw 32-64GB in there anyway. Apple offers the 16GB upgrade (from 8GB) for $200, but you can buy 32GB of RAM for $150 and install it yourself.
what? Since when did they offer a DIY upgrade path?
For the less than five years bet, if you’re referring to macOS updates, I can personally bet my entire wealth (which is a decent figure) that you’ll lose. There’s no way the Intel Macs released this year are going to lose macOS support for another six years (into 2026), at the very least. The latest macOS (Big Sur) that’s now in beta supports models that are seven years old (or even older than that).
If you’re referring to hardware support and repairs, there are standard ages for each model that Apple uses for that purpose to define what’s obsolete, vintage, etc. I’m sure these will follow the same cycle.
Not exactly a "major update". Looks like the magic on this iMac is already wearing off and the magicians want their reality distortion spells back.
[1] https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-gu...
I guess the next update will get rid of any vestigial spinning metal storage.
And like others, it made me think of their transition to ARM. I know the first ARM Macs this fall will be their lowend MacBook and 13" MBP line, but at WWDC they said the Intel to ARM transition would be complete in under 2 years (like they said with the PPC to Intel transition). And since the PPC to Intel transition only took a little over a year, it could mean that ARM-based iMacs may be here next year to replace the current iMac lineup, and I'm dreadfully curious as to whether they'll be lower performing than this iMac update (which is quite impressive, performance-wise). Or perhaps they'll use multiple ARM CPUs to boost performance. Regardless, every time I see a spec bump now from Apple, I can't help but think of these things.
Matching encoding speeds with Apple Silicon is probably an easier task, since they can create on-chip, hardware accelerated encoders, which exist on iPhones already.
So the T2's processing power is used to augment the main CPU and graphics card's power.
This seems like a new development, but maybe it's been known for awhile?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/04/09/apples-t2-chip-ma...
How in hell is Apple squeezing a Xeon into an iMac without the thing either melting or being louder than a jet turbine?!
https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/larger/pu...
I wonder what took them so long.
Starting it with `Cupertino, California -` as if it's breaking news and then launching into a complete sales pitch is just so slimy.
I wonder how they justify charging US$ 500 for the coating on the iMac and US$ 1.000 on the Pro Display XDR. 32" vs 27" don't seem enough.
It's good that they've finally improved the webcam, but Apple clearly went out of their way to ensure people looking to get an Intel Mac because they need to dual boot weren't going to get anything too compelling.
Edit: Downvotes be damned, it is mediocre. Not bad, because it is a spec bump, but there are lots of things about the iMac's architecture that are beginning to show their age and are unchanged here, despite becoming bottlenecks. The cooling system is a big one, and the storage controller support another.
Don't forget it includes a 5K display...
It's really a great win for Apple marketing that anybody even discusses such a silly news...
Great machine and no Apple Silicon as yet (which may be a huge advantage if you still need to run Boot Camp or x86 VMs.)
I'm also excited about the nano-texture display. I've learned to live with reflective displays because I'm addicted to their high contrast and deep blacks, but nano-texture sounds like the best of both worlds.
Nice that they upgraded the anemic FaceTime camera and pulled the plug on the low-speed hard disk (even if it was configured as a fusion drive.)
Apple has generally had decent mics and speakers as well, so it's exciting that they are trying to make them even better. Anyone who has suffered through horrible zoom audio will appreciate the benefits of good mics (and not using zoom, which seems to make bad audio even worse.)
Not sure if the value proposition is there though for a specced out iMac.
I hope next iPad also gets this textured glass, it would be so much better as a drawing writing pad.
Also I do not like their beta product experiments they tend to run on customers since years - I will wait for years before I trust their hard- and software to be useful for work or even personal things.
If they want me to beta test they should give me money for it.
Welcome to 2010, Apple.
