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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

Bought my iMac 7 years ago with 8GB as the default memory option and a 1TB fusion drive.

And here we are, nearly a decade later. Still 8 GB in the newest models. Still 1 TB fusion drives. GPUs haven't even seemed to take a jump over last year's models.

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What seems worse to me is that the default drive for the 21.5" is a 1TB 5400 spinning rust drive, not even a fusion drive.

This is just shameful.

People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance. This is exactly what happened to an older friend of my wife. And since it is an iMac, it is next to impossible to replace the drive later (on some models, you need to unseal the LCD screen to open it).

That's just a weird decision on Apple's part - don't they want the best perceived performance? I mean they could just put some soldered storage in there for the OS at the very least.

Not even soldered, they could came up with some fancy marketing name for slowest SSD drive in their line up (lets call it eSSD) and just drop-in 2.5" SATA SSD for $20 (retail cost of 120GB SSD on Amazon) instead of spinning rust. No need of redesigning chassis, no need of changing any factory procedures, machines, robots etc. Just give a box of SSDs instead of HDDs to the person that is responsible for putting them in. Here, job done, and Apple could "brag" about having SSDs in entry level options. Standard SATA SSD would increase massively performance on those machines.

The comment below you is dead and downvoted to hell, but it's correct even though I agree with you. I can't convince the IT person at my job that SSDs are faster than HDDs. He had never heard of them until we were looking at new PCs and he refused to approve any orders with SSDs since he thinks they're a scam. I even brought in my laptop with a PCIe SSD and he said he didn't notice a difference in boot time, and if there was one it was probably just a coincidence. He genuinely thinks that a terabyte of slow rust is better than a smaller amount of insanely fast storage. And that's even before he started ranting about how SSDs will all fail in a year anyway. I wish Apple would do what you said but there really are some lost souls out there.

To me as a tech person, this would feel as talking to a flat-earther. I switched to SSDs in all my machines literally a decade ago and never looked back, the performance was just that much better. Early models for sure had reliability issues but if an IT professional would claim today that SSDs are scams, he'd lose all my respect in a second.

I would question the competency of the IT person, who had never heard about the SSDs

It's a marketing decision. They don't want you to buy the cheapest model. They want to drive people towards the middle model by making the cheap model look less attractive.

I've felt this pain too. 2 years ago I bought a Mac mini (2014 model) off eBay for $340 mainly as a build machine for iOS binaries. It was the lowest end model which had a 5400rpm HDD in it and 4GB of RAM.

It took ~3 minutes to get to a usable desktop. Opening XCode took long enough for me to go grab a coffee or scroll through Facebook. It was swapping like crazy. I honestly couldn't believe they were selling this configuration new for $500 in 2018.

I bought some iFixit tools and used their guide to fully disassemble my Mac and slot in a new SSD. Time to usable desktop dropped to like 20 seconds, things were snappier. Doing more than one thing at a time still uses swap but it's much less noticable now.

This isn't the config for Mac Mini in 2018 though? Unless you're talking about the earlier half of 2018 when the new Mac Mini hasn't been released yet.

Yeah, just that the base 2014 Mac Mini was being sold $500 new up until the point in 2018 when the new model came out. Even by 2016 and 2017 standards, 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 and 500GB 5400rpm spinning disk is abysmal.

I would expect the base model of any product (really the cheapest way to experience macOS without fiddling with VMs or hackintosh) would provide a usable experience and not one where you have to wait several minutes to open Chrome.

I could live with it mainly because I had another machine to go to while my 30m Unity build was running (and because I knew I was going to have to swap the HDD), but for a normal person who wants to browse the web and manage pictures, the $500 Mac Mini would have been an incredibly frustrating experience.

I've recycled a 2011 mac book pro with snow leopard, put in a SSD instead of the dead spinning disc and WOW it was flying!

I/O is definitely the biggest pain point.

Even worse, the upgrades are insultingly overpriced. $100 for 32GB of flash to get a Fusion drive, and $700 (again, extra) to get a 1TB when you can get a nice Samsung for $350 in that size. Ridiculous.

Wow, $700? 1TB NVMe goes for like $150 on sale sometimes.

Those are probably QLC drives at those prices, while I would think apple would be selling TLC or even MLC drives given their speeds. To properly compare against apple' storage, you have to look at the prices of things like the samsung pro series, which is about $350/TB

Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB is MLC and $150 on Amazon right now (2.5" formfactor).

That's not NVMe though.

The iMac takes 2.5 inch drives, including hard drives. Apple's website doesn't list what the SSD is, and we cannot infer much from the iMac Pro since it has different lineage.

My world has been totally SSD for the past decade. (Yes at a premium during times when I had an abundance of money and times when I had little. Priorities.)

I am A LOT rougher with computers. I don't think twice about picking up my NAS in mid operation.

A fusion drive wouldn't work for me.

I like your style. I also try to be rough with my computers, but on purpose because I want to live in a world where that's typical and designed for. I specifically pull USB drives out without ejecting, because we shouldn't have to do that.

I have to say that I agree with you - this makes no sense.

>People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance.

That's an unintended side-effect that is overshadowed by volume sales. All bulk orders for domains non related to performance (think libraries, hotels, basic desktops in enterprise), happen with a budget constraint without particular regard for price/performance ratio. So the lowest end model for all computers may have poor price/performance ratio but lower absolute price. That's also why thinkpads have poor screens, spinning rust drives, 4 GB memory, etc in the cheapest config. So that the procurement dept. can say in the spreadsheet that we replaced our inventory of n computers from 2012 to macs from 2019.

It’s very likely that the high DRAM prices from 2017 to now have been due to market collusion, similar to what happened in 2010.

Like your example shows, they’ve basically set the entire industry back years for a modest profit. It’s heinous.

There were multiple lawsuits brought by regulatory and classes last year against the DRAM cartel. I think the current downward spiral in DRAM prices may be related to that, although supposedly that's the result of a production glut (I thought the point of a cartel was you wouldn't have production gluts )

Yes. However we forget that 8GB was an ungodly amount of memory in the late 90's; it required industrial gear like an SGI Origin to get that much. That a browser would fill it is another abomination.

Late 90's is almost 20 years ago. OP mentions 10 years ago

Yes, and browsers worked fine back then. Their improvement has been quite inefficient memory-wise compared to native apps.

Is $11/GB a high DRAM price? That's the cost of a standalone stick. Apple DRAM costs 2x, and any other PC vendor's DRAM costs 1.5x-2x but that's vendor lock-in, not collusion.

I used to get more life out of my MBP by spending about $400 on max memory and a faster hard drive. Even with inflation $350 for memory seems a bit high (assuming there comes a day when you can put 32G in one of these things :/ )

> assuming there comes a day when you can put 32G in one of these things

That day came last October, assuming you are ok with a 15” MBP (not available for 13”) and slightly less battery life.

It's the lowest option, you can upgrade to 32GB or 64GB on the 27-inch version. You can upgrade the drive to an 2TB SSD, or a 3TB fusion drive.

If you only buy an iMac for the basic things like browsing, emailing and watching youtube, 8GB is more than enough, especially on macOS. I don't get the hate for having a lower-budget option.

i don't think the ram is as much of an issue as the drive speed these days. it's not "lower budget", it's just a "low budget" option, but it damages the brand experience to have such a poor performing option available (speaking of drive speed specifically).

I find interesting that you say "especially on macOS", personally I feel that macOS has the highest memory requirements of the major OSs, but I haven't used macOS in a while, so that may have changed...

The day they take out the entry-level option people on here will be complaining about how they just want a decent desktop for their parents to browse on, or for them to upgrade themselves. I have 8gb and keep big music projects in Ableton open, a ton of Chrome tabs and several Electron apps open all the time, and I haven't had any issues yet.

Plenty of folks use an iMac as the primary family machine - email, homework, some Netflix, kids' basic games. 8 GB is entirely sufficient for that. Hell, four probably is.

If you're doing Photoshop plus a half dozen VMs, you buy it with more RAM.

Given the improvement in technology, you would expect a decreased price in that case.

Not if the cost savings went into other stuff, like the 4k/5k displays.

Or the CPU. But we're talking an $1800 machine with a 5400rpm disc and 8gb of Ram. That's one hell of a screen and CPU.

It's probably no longer true, but when the 5K iMac came out it was the cheapest way to get a 5K screen. You got the computer for free, essentially.

I think the high quality 5k screen is still the bulk of the cost. There's nothing else like it on the market except for LG's, and that's ~$1300USD.

The high DPI monitor market is practically dead (for now) so there's no pressure forcing prices down.

It's still pretty much true. 5K screens unfortuantely barely exist at this point.

For the 5k model, an additional 8GB in DDR4 RAM for a total of 16GB model costs +$200 [1]. This is beyond unreasonable compared to market [2].

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MRR12LL/A&st...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Sure, but with a user-accessible RAM bay built into the back of the machine, I can't work up the energy to be too mad about that one.

I most definitely give you that point.

In 2019 how many apple products have user (or technician for that matter) upgrade-able anything? honest question. I'm not a Mac person and all I see is anecdotal reports of "soldered in RAM here" "fully bonded case there" etc.

Both new Mac mini and 27" iMac have upgradeable RAM.

The 27" iMac used to have upgradable RAM, but the text for the new version says "configurable to 64 GB", not "upgradable" like it used to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, I'm considering getting an iMac.

Unless something changed with today's update, it should be upgradeable via a hatch on the back of the machine. I upgraded my 2018 model to 40GB less than a year ago.

Interestingly this article says it's upgradable, but the quote they pulled from the spec sheet isn't mentioned on Apple's website (any longer): https://www.imore.com/can-you-upgrade-ram-27-inch-imac

Only a matter of time before they solder the RAM in the imac like they did in the macbook.

Has there ever been an investigation in how the average consumer app - email, browsers, word processing, etc - has changed over the years in terms of memory usage? I mean browsers are memory hungry (but that's because they use as much as is available, doesn't mean they reserve it from other applications), but a lot of modern-day apps are Electron ones, which easily cost a few hundred MB. Office has also moved from a set of native apps to heavier webapps.

OTOH, Apple is still all about native apps, mostly their own software packages, as well as an app store that up until recently didn't allow anything but native apps (not even sure about that). They also introduced memory compression, and IIRC Safari does some smart stuff with memory as well.

You'd think so, right? See my comment elsewhere on this thread - I had to re-sell an iMac b/c 8GB (combined with the latest OS) was a disaster for simple tasks.

Chrome + Slack alone took up ~3 GB of RAM on my 4 GB machine and forced me to upgrade.

So what did you replace Chrome and Slack with…? </snark>

I use Slack in the browser instead. No more Electron crap.

I turned slack into a chrome “shortcut” (which seems to be a PWA minus the service worker), which lets it run in chrome instead of a separate electron instance, but also have a separate app window.

Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice

On an older iMac running 10.11, going from 4gb to 6gb was a big improvement.

Or if you allow all family members to stay logged on with their apps running like we do, you can upgrade to 16GB or 32GB. :)

I bought an iMac a couple years ago because at the time it was the only consumer level Mac being sold new where you could upgrade the RAM yourself.

8 GB of RAM are fine for basic tasks. However offering a spinning drive (and I include the Fusion drives in that category) is not. For any use case.

The 5400 RPM HDD in the abse 21.5" iMac will be unbearably slow, pretty much unusable from the first day and people not interested in technology won't have any idea why their new, shiny iMac performs that slow.

It's baffling to me that Apple seems to be fine with offering such abysmal performance. Reaching that price point certainly isn't worth compromising the user experience in such a significant way.

True. The only thing to replace 7yr old iMac is iMac Pro. I splurged, got myself one and expect to get another 7 yrs from it.

That's strange. If you can keep an iMac Pro for 7 years, then you don't need the power of the iMac Pro, or your needs are extremely high now yet won't grow over time.

Why not get a 27" iMac for half price, and another one in 4 years with whatever new thing is invented then?

Honestly I think you are overthinking this. At the time of purchase iMac had dinky video card and I wanted extra powerful processor and memory. This thing was perfect just pricy.

I bought an iMac Pro (base model) last year. I see it as investing up front in an already upgraded machine, that I can now use for the next 10 years.

But Apple does not support macOS for most Macs that long. E.g. last year's Mojave does not support iMacs from before 2012. You may be lucky and they might support the iMac Pro a bit longer, but it is unlikely that you'll get an up-to-date secure OS for ten years.

If they transition to ARM at some point, the lifetimes of Intel Macs may even be shorter.

Yeah, my "main" personal machine is a 2011 Air that no longer can run the latest OS. My 2006 Mac Pro got replaced on its 10th birthday with a new iMac as it was an OS or two behind. I'd say 8 years is sorta the outer limit.

I did a quick check on Macbook Pros:

* 10.8 (2012) dropped support for original Core 2 Duo (2006) — 6 years

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2009 MacBook Pro — 7 years

* 10.14 (2018) dropped support for 2011 MacBook Pro — 7 years

The releases in between didn't drop support for any (mbp) hardware.

The longest support I found with a spot-check was:

* 10.12 (2016) dropped support for 2007 MacBook Pro — 9 years

Apple tends to release updates for about 3 years for each OS. 10.11 (2015) got its last patch in 2018. 10.12 (2016) got an update in January and is expected to receive updates through September.

I should have looked up desktops, since that's what most of the discussion is in this thread, but I don't have much firsthand experience with them. So assuming you buy the hardware the day its released, you can expect to have the newest software support for 6-9 years and have security updates for 9-12 years.

I'm happily using Mojave on two MBP's - 2009 (4Gb) and 2010 (8Gb) with SSD's. Freedom to upgrade internals and the smarts and generosity of dosdude1 (google that) turned them into the best tech purchases Ive made (after previous years of throwing money at premium end PC's that didn't last)

To be fair, they support their computers for a long time and seemingly provide update as long as possible. My Late 2009 iMac still received 2017's High Sierra update.

and the reason it won't run Mohave is not caprice but rather a desire to simplify system graphics by moving it to the Metal API along with Metal's using hardware features not yet introduced in late 2009.

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