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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019.

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.

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It’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library.

My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now.

Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system.

I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.

The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.

Get a thunderbolt drive caddy and boot from external Thunderbolt disk. Refreshed an old iMac this wayz

I did the same. OS and apps on a cheap 240GB Thunderbolt SSD. Everything else on the internal 1TB spinning disk. Now it’s fantastic.

I pulled the screen off and installed an SSD. Easy to do

Any links to a tutorial on how to do this? I'd love to do that but also don't want to crack the screen in the process.

ifixit.com has _extremely_ well done step-by-step upgrade guides: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel

Something sounds wrong. I have an older 21.5 with the first generation 1 TB fusion and it is not at all slow.

First generation 1TB fusion drives had 128GB of SSD storage. 2017 and 2019 1TB fusion drives have 32GB of SSD storage [1], which is basically just enough for the OS and a couple of apps if you are lucky. People are not exaggerating when they say Apple hardware are regressing, not progressing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

Putting/letting Jony Ive on designing the new campus is one of the dumbest things Apple has done. Effectively dereliction of duty.

Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.

That explains it. I hadn't actually used one before purchasing it but had used the previous generation model a few times.

The size need only be proportional to the amount of hot data. And realistically, it need only be proportional to the amount of hot data that's randomly accessed in small chunks, because that's where the bulk of the improvements will come from.

I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.

That's quite the opposite of my experience where only very cold data is not SSD-level performance. Do you have anything like anti-virus software which might be interfering with the HSM mechanism?

In my experience most of what I end up needing ends up cold. Even XCode builds take forever on it due to the slow storage.

Now I’m wondering how to get visibility into it. I work with a ton of repos and never see this - it’s usually just things like old VMs.

I have the 5k iMac with slow hard drive. I ended up getting a USB3 SSD and booting the system from that drive. Works great. much faster.

If it's less than a year old, it's under warranty. Take it in (or send it in) and make Apple look at it. It should not be that slow.

So you couldn’t just by an SSD external drive and boot off of that?

A $3k desktop for which you need to buy an external drive. At some point slavishness to the Apple brand must have a breaking point.

Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.

If you’re buying a “$3000” iMac you’re not buying one with a fusion drive....

Canadian price for a top-end 27" Retina iMac is $3079, and has a 2TB Fusion drive standard. The 512GB SSD option is $120 more than the Fusion drive.

A quarter of the storage at a premium price isn't exactly appealing to a lot of people, regardless of how much faster it may be.

You know there is a way that you can configure what you want for your budget....

I maxed out the CPU and got a lot of RAM, I assumed the drive would have enough cache that I wouldn't notice the spindle aspect.

And now that you see it isn’t the case after that you couldn’t just say “my bad” and spend the < $200 for an SSD drive?

I think the SSD would have been $500 more, which I would have happily paid if I had realized how poorly the fusion drive would perform.

So you would have been willing to spend $500 morethen but not spend much less and buy an external drive now?

I’m not unwilling to buy an external drive, but I’d rather have a better internal drive.

Isn't the point of an iMac the fact that it's a clean, uncluttered device?

If you are willing to accept separate components, you can buy much cheaper hardware.

Seeing that hardly any reputable company sells 5K displays anymore besides LG, the monitor itself is worth $1300. The cheapest 5K iMac is $1800. You’re not going to find computers “much cheaper” than $500 that match the iMacs specs.

So now you have to carry an external HDD around with you and plug it in every time you want it to boot up?

We're talking about iMacs. In case it's not clear, that's a desktop system not a portable one.

Ah. I got mixed up. Thanks.

They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.

Are you carrying around an iMac with you? If you are, the drive is the least of your issues.

You mean you dont? https://i.imgur.com/RUN11Hb.jpg

I mean... they will notice that their computer sucks, but they might not know why. 5400 rpm is a joke considering you can buy a 7200 rpm drive with belly button lint and a serviceable SSD for $100 or less. There are budget laptops at Best Buy you can get with 7200 rpm drives standard, and even that is borderline unacceptable with how cheap SSDs are now.

You can buy 2TB M.2 SSD drives for $220 retail now.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...

QLC drives are not equivalent to TLC or MLC drives in performance or durability, which is what apple is using.

They will sell you a brand new macbook air with 128gb of storage that you can't upgrade. I can't even back up my phone with that. They literally don't care at all.

> lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

Because 90% don't need computing power; they just browse Facebook and Spotify.

The Fusion Drive is available for $100 more, if you actually need to access local storage.

Yeah, I bought my wife an iMac 4-5 years ago with the standard HD config and it feels almost useless being so slow. My even older MBA with half the RAM and an SSD is much more usable.

Worth popping an aftermarker SSD (or Fusion Drive) in there.

I did it once and removing the big glass plate assembly with magnets is nerve-wracking.

And no longer possible, think the newer models have fused glass.

Replacement is still possible (I used to work in a shop that did the same) but definitely way out of the reach of users. If I recall correctly, you have to order replacement adhesive from Apple, and when I was working there third-parties hasn't come out with their own replacement adhesive yet (Apple will not sell any sort of parts to users).

You can buy self adhesive strips on eBay, I upgraded a 21.5" machine last year.

Or just buy an external drive....

My similar aged, non-HD iMac became unusable until I wiped and reinstalled the OS. (I had been upgrading it in place for years).

The process was surprisingly fun, too.

Horrible. I bought a 2010 iMac with a 5400 HD and a MacBook Pro with an SSD at the same time. The iMac became unusable long before the MacBook Pro because of its spinning drive.

In fact, the laptop is still usable.

It's not an easy upgrade, but you could swap it out for an SSD. Checkout OWC (macsales) and/or iFixit for guides.

Probably worth it. It's 27" with 16GB of RAM and an i7.

That 5400 rpm hard drive was a bad mistake.

”Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs.”

This doesn’t even make sense given how cheap SSDs are now. Especially with Apple’s buying power.

I’m sure some people still want high-capacity HDDs for various workloads, but that’s what Thunderbolt 3 is for, surely?

"But we cant compromise profits of our high end line"

Sometime around 2013-2014 it began to be visible that Apple stopped trying to make "the best hardware in its class" and migrated to "how does this fit in a marketing matrix".

Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.

Cook is doing exactly what he's best at, which is what you said. Optimizing every last cent out of a process.

Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.

So you don’t remember back in the first Apple heyday of the 80s when Jean-Louis Gassée was leading the charge (no he wasn’t the CEO) to sell overpriced Macs with 40% profit margins?

There's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it.

I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.

But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.

The problem in the 80s was that the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow. When Windows became good enough, no one bought Macs and it almost killed Apple.

Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.

> Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

Apple explicitly claims the iMac is for "pros" in the article this page is discussing:

"iMac is ideal for pros"

"iMac is loved by consumers and pros alike."

"the most demanding pro workloads."

"even a pro studio."

and more.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-perfor...

Not the same iMac. If all iMacs should be for consumers and Pros should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

So, yes, Apple describes some iMacs that are not iMac-Pros as "for Pros".

> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.

But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."

They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.

The difference is that you could not get a Mac as fast as the then current PC at any price until the switch to Intel.

Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.

I know what happened and I'm concerned it's going to happen again, soon

2015 to be exact. Both the iPhone 6S and MacBook Pro 2015 are the absolute pinnacle of Apple tech before they started to do absurd year-on-year price raises and introducing backgrades (no 3.5mm port, bad keyboard, touchbar, no magsafe).

I purchased a (I believe) mid or late 2014 model Macbook Air with the upgraded CPU and RAM and it's one of the best computers I've owned. Very snappy still to this day, extremely durable, and it wasn't terribly expensive compared to other laptops with similar hardware/form factor.

Hasn't Apple always been more of a 'pretty good hardware, nicely integrated and packaged, for a premium price' proposition? I personally can't remember a time when this wasn't so.

Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?

You are right, but for a while this was not true. When Apple switched to x86 the MacBook was competitively priced. I remember buying one because it was cheaper than comparable PCs.

It depends. Their SSDs are state of the art and among the fastest you can get. Their 5K display still hasn't any serious alternatives. Their own mobile (for now) CPUs are pretty much unmatched.

Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.

"pretty good hardware"

This is the part they gave up on, while keeping the other two.

The iMac has other configs and if you are a power user, you can get the specs you want. Maybe Apple does have some customers for the low end config that’s not obvious. Why should your opinions limit their choices?

Because hard drives have become "this is so slow that it harms your products reputation to use them". The bottom of the SSD pile is still many, many times faster than the fastest hard drive.

Because "ignoring your customers' opinions" isn't a particularly effective marketing strategy?

They aren’t. That’s why they offer multiple configurations.....

I have an ancient Dell Precision M6600 with a Core i7... and an ancient 5400 RPM hard drive. The machine is unusable. It's worse than nearly any other machine with an SSD--even one with a much weaker processor.

With current SSD prices being at rock bottom, can a 128GB SSD cost more than a 5400RPM 2.5" drive?

128GB fills up quickly. A 1TB 5400RPM 2.5" drive is $45-50 on pricewatch.

1TB HDDS are generally the most expensive. At such a low capacity it makes more sense to just get a 500GB SSD for $50. Alternatively if you really need the capacity of an HDD: for just $90 you can get a 3TB HDD. triple the capacity, less than double the price.

Edit: Apparently 3TB HDDs cost as low as 60€ nowadays...

Pricewatch is still around? I used it back in the early 2000s but forgot about it.

For EU prices also check https://geizhals.eu/ they got acquired by Heise Gruppe some years ago and are my goto-service for model comparison and extended filtering, also very useful outside EU. Haven't seen a comparable service yet for US with price trend and consistent feature tagging.

It'll cost the same but your 5400RPM drive will have about 30x more storage.

I think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market.

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat...

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...

I was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available".

A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.

Both storage types will have comparable prices at 128GB, and their cost per GB will decrese at different rates as you increase storage capacity. It's not fair to compare pricing between different storage capacities across different storage types, that is why I have shared 1TB drives from the same vendor.

Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp...

120GB SSDs are $20 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/

When I still gamed, I was one of the first people in my group to get an SSD. A few days later the game glitched the graphics card and I had to reboot. Restarted the machine, the game, voice chat, logged back in and playing again in just under 30 seconds.

That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.

The weird thing is that slow spinning-rust is still highly usable in linux, at least in my experience. It helps that linux tends to leave a lot more RAM available as a disk cache.

Apple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.

This can't be good for Apple's reputation amongst kids in school though! Apple is basically pulling what Chrysler and GM used to do with rental cars where they sold an even cheaper version for rental use. It gives a terrible first impression of your product.

Lab settings? What school is buying hardware these days? The majority in my area are either investing in Chromebooks and dropping purchases of their own devices, or making kids buy Chromebooks.

Colleges aren’t buying labs full of Chromebooks...

They aren't buying iMacs, either. I work at one of the largest unis in the US and everything is dell optiplex from the libraries, to the lecture halls, to the research labs, and the hospitals. The only iMacs I've seen are requested specifically by faculty for their office, or are 10 years old in some windowless back room hooked up to a random microscope running snow leopard. That being said, I've never set foot near any art buildings so I don't know what happens in there regarding their machines.

Two colleges instead of one don't make it less anecdotal...

Are many colleges buying computers at all? My university CS and engineering schools both just required that students supply their own computer that was sufficient for the coursework.

Yes. There are departments outside of the CS and engineering schools and also colleges that cater to lower income students that don't require you to purchase a computer.

The only time we use it for labs is running Adobe stuff, and given what students want to learn, you do need decent performing machines and something with a 5400 rpm drive is not it.

You know there are colleges all across the world, not just the one you go to....

> It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting.

So why buy Apple?

Does it still hold that SSDs are harder to recover data from than HDDs? Or is that out the window?

My wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on.

I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).

At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.

But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.

From my experience SSDs die hard and you will get nothing back from them. I always thought they may go into read only mode but I have never seen that.

Restore form backups. Chances are if you're at the point where you're trying to do data recovery you're already hosed.

Apple had a backup solution that was easy to use.

Yeah Time Machine is great. I'm not sure that was the issue. I think it's that SSD's are more expensive.

it's SATA so you can replace it with anything you like; if you're not fond of paying the extra $200 for 25% of the storage capacity.

A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.

Replacing the hard drive in these macs requires separating the display. Possible but a delicate operation. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...

I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.

I boot off a Nvme SSD in an usb-c (https://www.delock.com/produkte/S_42600/merkmale.html) enclosure on my 2017 27" iMac. I do manage 1000 MB/s. Popping off the screen and using the right adapter and SSD you may be able to reach 2500 MB/s.

I recently replaced the drive on mine. The most annoying part of the process is the fact that you have to purchase adhesive strips to be able to re-seat the display.

Getting max performance is not that obvious. You'll want to go through the the PCIe port and find a M2 NVME/PCIe Mac adapter.

Sure. But the drive that is inside is listed as being SATA. I haven’t seen a tear down but it’s not soldered or proprietary at least.

The spinning disc drive is SATA and non proprietary (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). The SSD is not and use a proprietary PCI-e connector (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). You can find adapters though (https://www.amazon.de/Sintech-M-2-PCIe-2280-SSD-Karte-MZ-JPU...).

That's pretty gross. Thanks for the info. :\

Meh, not defending Apple in any way but RPM isn't a very useful metric without other specs on the drive.

Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.

This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.

Have you used the 5,400 RPM iMac? It's incredibly laggy out of the box. Even booting takes 1-3 full minutes. It crunches just opening apps. With all that other hardware, it's just a waste: you're drinking an i7 through a straw.

This is Dongle Inc. we're talking about. These days, hard drives should be outside the iMac chassis, and its internal storage should be SSD only.

Fusion Drive is a hack.

Fusion with optane would be acceptable. Or even m.2. but not SSD and HDD at the prices they want.

Have you used a MacBook Pro (2012 or older) or iMac with a regular hard drive? You can't even surf the web with them and they take 2 minutes to boot up.

I'm writing this from a 2010 Mac mini with a regular hard drive. It's fine. Not snappy, but fine.

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