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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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