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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I know, it should be an actual crime that Apple sells brand new iMacs in 2020 for a small fortune and by default they come with a shitty 5400rpm drive. It's insane. Those machines have very decent specs but everything feels 2011-slow purely because the system is running off something that belongs in a museum.

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The drive itself is not the issue. You can run Linux on a spinning drive and it will still be quick and snappy, because your free RAM will be used for caching file data. I don't know why Windows and Mac aren't doing this properly.

MacOS has virtual memory and caching/buffering (and compression)

The drive is the issue, linux just happens to a better job of using other resources to improve HDD performance. Said linux installation would still be much faster/more responsive on an SSD. For the prices that Apple charges for their computers they should include a low-tier SSD at the very least.

macOS also uses all your free memory for disk cache, and will even start swapping out idle processes if it thinks that more disk cache makes sense

I'm not sure that's accurate. I don't think it has much to do with caching strategies and everything to do with all developers now having SSDs and so never testing their software against slower media.

APFS is “optimized for SSD”, so performance is miserable on hard disks. For awhile Apple held off upgrading the system disk if it was an HDD, but that’s no longer an option if you want to run the latest OS.

(They're for education users who couldn't care less.)

Maybe, but at the moment if you just go to Apple.com and select shop for iMac, you are presented with 3 choices at different price points, and all of them come with this 5400rpm drive(the most expensive one gets a fusion drive, but still). To get an SSD you need to manually edit the configuration. That's not just education users who place an order for a 1000 of these and don't care - that's part of configurations offered to your regular customer.

That’s purely for the benefit of marketing, so that they can say “starting from <low price that nobody actually pays>”. You should expect some anchoring from the company that elevated arbitrary pricing to an art form.

I'll assume you're in US market. FWIW Its also true in several others.

UK actually.

The iMac is well overdue a significant update.

Apple must have a warehouse full of this old inventory they need to clear first.

Apple doesn’t “need” to do anything, they have more money than god. What they do is price-anchoring arbitrarily low in the segments where they expect to have the most price-conscious customers. They entice people with “starting from <low price>” then sting further down the road.

It’s just good pricing technique, nothing to do with logistics.

5400rpm drives are old tech hence the comment. Your inability to grasp this fact is noted.

Your comment reads as some kind of deadly notice full of hatred and thinly veiled sadistic glee at correction.

So you're essentially wrong.

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