Apple updates its iMac line

Bought my iMac 7 years ago with 8GB as the default memory option and a 1TB fusion drive.<p>And here we are, nearly a decade later. Still 8 GB in the newest models. Still 1 TB fusion drives. GPUs haven&#x27;t even seemed to take a jump over last year&#x27;s models.

It&#x27;s just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren&#x27;t any systems from Apple that look interesting to me.<p>I&#x27;ve been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I&#x27;m comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and integrate well with my development machines. Furthermore, the family does well with MacOS, and they don&#x27;t need IT help with their email, iPhone, music, homework, printing, etc. like they used to under Windows.<p>I&#x27;d love to see Apple make a system that supported <i>upgradeable</i> memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors, but that doesn&#x27;t look like that will ever happen. By locking down the hardware to just certain configurations, the very successful stores can handle problems (hardware, software, and user related) at locations all over the world.<p>Even if Apple can&#x27;t make the machines more upgradeable because of customer support issues, the new machines don&#x27;t seem to be well designed for me. They have become too thin and too sleek and overpriced because of features I don&#x27;t want (over sharp display, touchbar) and issues caused by the pursuit of sleekness and style (crap keyboards, thermal limits).<p>Lenovo (Thinkpads) offers thin, light, somewhat upgradeable, good looking laptops that are light to carry and easier to grip with great keyboards. I wish Apple could start with something like one of those and equip it with an Apple touchpad and MacOS.<p>I&#x27;ve been waiting and waiting for Apple to improve its line up (I&#x27;m writing this on a Mac Pro from 2013 with a nice 34 inch ultra-wide monitor). It looks like I&#x27;ll never replace it. I know there are alternatives, my home&#x2F;office are littered with computers, Thinkpads running Linux, Microsoft laptops, Dell Servers running FreeBSD, and homemade PCs running Windows (for gaming); but I&#x27;m going to miss using MacOS as my daily-driver.

The iMac is a great machine. I have a late 2014 iMac 5K 27&quot; and it&#x27;s still going strong with 32 gigs of RAM and 512G SSD. It had the max CPU for the time (4.0 ghz i7.) Apple Care expired end of 2017, so unless the thing dies or OS upgrades become unsupported, I don&#x27;t have a reason to upgrade it.

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019.<p>It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.

Huh... The title of their press release seems to me somewhat clickbait-y... Why not &#x27;iMac got a hardware refresh; now with 2x performance&#x27;? When I read this, I thought, &#x27;oh wow, Apple really outdid itself with their SW optimisations&#x27;.<p>Overall, I&#x27;m kinda disappointed that the 21&#x27; and 27&#x27; macs get different CPU gens. Why? Why not just have the latest gen in both of them? Is it price, or is it more about artificial performance impediment?

I hope this is indicative of Apple starting to get it, no one wants to buy a machine that is 3-4 years behind the curve. I could live with having a fast hardware refresh cycle and a slower design one.

re: RAM, I bought a 2015 iMac with a 1TB drive on Craiglist last month, thinking it might be the perfect machine to edit and store&#x2F;serve family photos (mac --&gt; Google Photos and mac --&gt; BackBlaze).<p>It never in a million years would have occurred to me that 1) 8GB on a 2015 machine would be utterly, pathetically underpowered for even browsing the web, or 2) that an iMac would be sold in 2015 that would not let you upgrade the RAM.<p>I quickly re-sold it to another person who I bet also hadn&#x27;t imagined these things.

I’ve always had a fondness for the iMac which I’ve been using as my main Desktop since the last PowerPC version, IMO they’ve always been a mark of the best all-in-one of the day, lots of people like to focus on the internals but it ignores the noise and clutter free desktop and top build quality I’ve enjoyed for over a decade.<p>I’ve upgraded 4 times since and am currently enjoying the iMac 5k, this floating screen is beautiful on the inside and out, the 5k is gorgeous and its form factor is near perfect, still just a single power cord disappearing out from behind it and wireless for everything else.<p>I’ve got the high-end version with Max CPU and SSD so I’ll skip this version but will in all likelihood get the next unless someone ships a better all-in-one, which never happens.

Did you guys see this?<p>&quot;iMac Pro now available with 256 GB RAM option … for an extra $5200&quot;<p>sort of pricey.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;19&#x2F;256-gb-ram-imac-pro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;19&#x2F;256-gb-ram-imac-pro&#x2F;</a>

It seems to me this product is on life support and Apple is simply doing performance bumps to avoid big capex expenses on designing&#x2F;tooling for something new? It ships with a 5,400 RPM disk, an outdated display technology, omits T2 chipset, doesn&#x27;t include Face ID, nor any of their other innovations over the last year. It&#x27;s actually egregious to stuff old hardware in a workable form factor and hock it, while ignoring that they&#x27;re not backporting _any_ of their other innovations back to these devices.<p>And that&#x27;s not to mention: buying a $3500 screen glued to a computer is massively risky.

I find it curious that Apple is starting to communicate major product updates decoupled from an event. Just good old press releases.<p>Maybe they already have too many announcements to fit into the narrative of the handful of events per year.

I just wish there was a way to run OSX on a high-performance server, or a cloud virtual machine, for continuous-integration purposes. The iMac Pro doesn&#x27;t cut it, and is a pain to host anywhere. I&#x27;d like to test-build applications for OSX alongside CI builds for Linux and Windows, and there&#x27;s no sensible, legal, scalable solution for that.

I <i>really</i> wish I could buy a headless Mac with similar performance (including a real video card) and price. The mini doesn&#x27;t quite meet my needs and the pro at $3k+ is way too expensive. These specs look good (although I would greatly prefer SSD) but I really don&#x27;t want an extra monitor on my desk.

Hey Apple! While you&#x27;re on this upgrade sprint, I wish out of the blue, an iPhone SE 2 is also announced.

Maybe the best feature:<p>&gt; 8GB (two 4GB) of 2666MHz DDR4 memory; four SO-DIMM slots, <i>user accessible</i>

Still have an old first-gen i5 powered 27&quot; iMac. I pulled it out of the closet a year ago and replaced the dead OEM hard drive with an SSD and set it up in a corner of the living room as a GP&#x2F;web machine. The optical drive is dead and a couple of the USB ports don&#x27;t work, but it&#x27;s still useful (nice screen, still). It&#x27;s the last mac in the house, though, and I&#x27;ll never buy another one.

I&#x27;m still running a 2012 iMac with fusion drive and it still feels slicker to me than a high spec Windows machine.

The Vega 48 GPU seems disappointing for a machine that expensive.

It seems that the price point of i9+32GB+1TB SSD+Vega 48 is about the same price ($5000) as the baseline iMac Pro. Imac Pro comes with Xeon processor and Vega 56 though. Is the iMac Pro better at this price point?

An interview with the iMac product manager. Mostly a fluff piece but Jason Snell did ask about the continued use of non SSD hard drives. (Link will bring up a web page if you don’t have Overcast.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;+Fcm8vPRGM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;+Fcm8vPRGM</a>

Proof that Apple has anorexia: 5mm thin on the outer edge of the all-in-one computer and monitor. Thinner than a lot of monitor-only&#x27;s everywhere else. What is the purpose? Who would not trade a thicker stationary monitor for better upgrade-ability and&#x2F;or a cheaper price? Look behind your monitor - odds are, it&#x27;s just a bunch of empty space behind it on your desk. I would love to be a little bird on the wall in the Apple strategy meetings where they decided that iMacs need to be that thin. I still have an old iMac G3 kicking around from 1999. It&#x27;s over a foot deep, just takes up the empty space behind the screen on the desk - no big deal.

My 2017 MacBook pro is definitely my last Apple laptop because it&#x27;s just too expensive and unreliable (for reasons well discussed on HN). I have definitely considered getting a Mac Mini, but the new iMacs are definitely interesting. One thing I&#x27;d be concerned about is cooling. I know the iMac Pros are not ideal from a cooling perspective - I can&#x27;t imagine an 8 core processor @ 5GHz plus a Radeon Pro GPU runs cool. I&#x27;ll wait for the user-upgradable Mac Pro before I make a decision.

The CPU increases are welcome, but I was hoping for the rumored 6K displays.<p>No space grey, no T2 chip, no Touchbar.<p>Somehow they still sell the 1080 21&quot; model for $1099.

If only they offered with a Nvidia GPU

If you’re in the market for this model, do yourself a favour and don’t buy the base configuration with the unusably slow 5400 rpm HDD. I bought the previous model with that hard drive and the startup performance is appalling

The &quot;upgrade&quot; to 512GB SSD is not so bad, but to upgrade to 32GB RAM it&#x27;s $600? Yikes...<p>Looks like Apple is starting to put a premium on OSX rather than going quality-first for its hardware.

Why can&#x27;t you upgrade to the new CPU on the 21.5&quot; models?

If you&#x27;re intending to Bootcamp your iMac, remember that Windows will only use the slow AF spinning rust portion of the fusion drive. The SSD is worth it in this case.

Disappointed we have another year of the same iMac design, especially with serious Mac Pro rumors swirling.<p>Guess I&#x27;ll wait for the laptops this year to see HOW Apple gets my money lol.

The price for upgrading remains as ridiculous as ever (especially if you&#x27;re not in the US).<p>RAM:<p>8 GB -&gt; 16 GB is 2200 SEK (239 USD)<p>8 GB -&gt; 32 GB is 6600 SEK (717 USD)<p>You can get 32GB as low as 1689 SEK (183 USD) on Newegg.

I&#x27;m curious how the thermals will be with the i7 and i9 chips.<p>The 2017 5K iMac had cooling problems with the infamous i7 7700K.

it&#x27;s easy to add an external SSD to an iMac, install the OS on it and configure it to boot off of it. I have gotten great performance out of an old iMac by doing this.

And if you buy two of these, you get a 4X performance boost!

I&#x27;m going Razer for higher-end upgradeable laptops &amp; custom builds for anything which isn&#x27;t going to be portable.

5400RPM HDD in 2019

“Apply,”.... is now making Macs wonder what “Apple,” thinks of this?

When will they produce an Ultra-wide (21:9) screen iMac?

Cool HW, however fusion drive in 2019? Apple wake up!

&quot;iMac gets a 2x performance boost&quot;<p>[Citation needed]

One word: hackintosh.

@dang typo: This has been up for 5 hours with the title &quot;Apply&quot; instead of &quot;Apple&quot;?

&gt; <i>...ideal for pros with graphics-intensive workloads...</i><p>Did a bot write this? No one uses &quot;pros&quot; in writing like this to refer to professionals.