I could never justify getting an iMac. All the downsides of a laptop & desktop in one; not upgradeable and not portable. Leaves me wondering how many of these Apple actually sell. A Mac Mini with a separate screen feels like it makes far more sense.
* Families with a shared computer in a common room. Super simple to setup, no fiddling, low price. In the video Apple showcased this use case. My parents have an M3 imac and it works great. They had their last iMac for ten years.
* Businesses buy these for reception areas and customers see the Apple logo on the back. Easy solution for a business with no IT department, great marketing for Apple.
Apple will probably always sell an iMac option as long as businesses buy and display them.
iMac is perfect for that. it looks pretty, it's small enough that it can be put in a corner, and it's powerful enough that you can buy it, leave it there, and not think about having to upgrade it for a decade.
Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.
The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.
Not having to manage windows and its bullshit, most likely.
Macs usually require way less maintenance than windows machines. Just install all the upgrades and you're 99% fine.
In my personal experience, my parents (not super tech savvy) always had a windows laptop and never had a specific windows issue due to updates and whatever. If they did, it's more app specific, not necessarily os specific.
In general, I (personally) disagree with the statement that macs require less maintenance than windows or Linux, I use a mac for work, and I have a fair share of app related issues just like I would on a Windows or Linux machine. It's just my opinion.
* We want a dedicated space in the house for a family computer, so portability is no concern
* It has a very small footprint
* It looks the most like "furniture" out of all the options I've seen; pretty color & form factor, and no mess of cables. If you're male, think "wife approval factor".
* It does everything the family needs from it; runs Steam, documents, spreadsheet, browser, school, photos/videos, etc
* High interoperability with our family iPhones/iPads
Even if you use wireless input devices you'll need to charge them occasionally
HN honestly is a terrible source of information for
1) What sells
2) What might sell
I wouldn't apply this observation to judge if the product makes sense
HN is disillusioned, but so are a lot of the west coast product designers that expect businesses to buy these on day 1. The majority of businesses are going to buy whatever is cheap and effective - their realistic choice is between a Chromebox and a Mac Mini.
Windows 11 (literally) will not work out-of-the-box if you don’t have internet access.
Linux isn’t cheap unless your time is free.
I say we should just bring back IRIX.
???
He's very happy with it.
I think we can check since they're public. Looks like 5-8 million per quarter [0]. Approx 10% of their computer sales [1].
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/macbooks-make-up-a-whopping-7...
So these are their most popular desktop, but by a slim margin and far behind the laptop sales
By the time I’ve ever wanted to upgrade a Windows or Linux PC, a new CPU probably isn’t going to fit into the same socket as the one I had so now I need a new motherboard too. I probably want a new GPU if it was a gaming PC and if it wasn’t I would be using an integrated GPU anyway.
I think the only thing I’ve ever kept from an “upgrade” was my case and some memory sticks. But I probably would have been better off—both in time and money—just selling the damn thing as a whole and buying an entirely new set of components.
TL;DR, year-over-year bumps just aren’t worth the price of upgrades, but by the time it is worth doing you probably want to upgrade so many parts there’s little left to keep. YMMV.
Time of purchase upgrade ability, if we’re talking about getting to 128 or 256 GB of RAM. Time of purchase to upgrade to multiple high res screens that match. Dedicated GPUs… I bet there is a top of the line home hobbiest LLM oriented GPU from Nvidia or AMD in the next 3 years that will cleanly connect to recent chip architectures. I doubt it will run optimally tied to a Mac. It’ll be something that you could also rack in a server.
For other components it mostly works. You can smoothly upgrade from 8GB RAM all the way to 128GB, get a new GPU, whatever the current WiFi standard is, more silent cooling, more, bigger or faster drives, etc. If you replace something every 2-3 years you can ship-of-theseus the same computer for a surprisingly long time at pretty low cost
I’m not going to say it doesn’t make sense to do so for anyone, but it certainly wasn’t in my experience.
A person in college on a tight budget might choose a budget-conscious PC, with an average amount of RAM and a modest hard drive. A few years later, component prices will have fallen and the PC will be showing its age thanks to its modest components. Adding a larger hard drive and more RAM will get a few more years out of it.
On the other hand, a mid-career professional programmer has plenty of disposable income, so if they're buying a PC today they can chuck in 128GB of RAM and not need to upgrade for the next 10 years.
20 years ago, a budget-conscious 1.3GHz CPU for $130 was just a binned version of a high-end 1.6GHz $339 CPU. So the budget-conscious CPU would have pretty much the same longevity as a higher-end CPU.
10 years ago, a budget-conscious user could pick up a 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPU for ~$192 (like the i5-4590). Today you'd be due for an upgrade, but it wouldn't be unusably slow. Indeed, Intel are still selling 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPUs to this day, like the i3-14100.
And of course components like sound cards and gigabit ethernet ports don't really 'hit their limits'. You'll probably want to upgrade your wifi, admittedly - but a USB dongle is what, $20?
That Wi-Fi dongle is a good example: your $20 dongle is probably a waste of money because it won’t reach the maximum for whatever wifi spec it claims to support and it tends to be the case that cheap hardware does not reach the maximum USB speeds promised so the performance impact is likely to be unnoticeable.
The most common upgrade for me has been adding more disk space. Back in 1995, a 1 Gigabyte hard drive for $250 was just the thing for your new installation of Windows 95.
The second-most-common upgrade is getting an employer-issued machine with a baseline spec and needing it to be a bit beefier. If you're running virtual machines or dealing with large datasets or analysing large heap dumps you might need some extra RAM; if you're doing machine learning you might need more disk space.
The third-most-common upgrade is a better GPU. PCI Express means modern cards will plug into 10-year-old motherboards. Maybe your PC was just short of what you needed for that 4K display, or you'd like to play some newer games.
Of course, if you're informed enough to do this, you're undoubtedly informed enough to know not to expect to upgrade these modern Macs.
Me too, but it’s increasingly uncommon. Going from a 500MB to 1GB drive back in the day was huge but since the late 2000s most normal people I know seem to have plateaued, both because they’re not generating data as fast as storage densities increased and because cloud storage has soaked up a lot of use-cases. Even the gamers I know don’t upgrade as often as they used to.
Tho the next will likely be a full upgrade as my last main build was 2018 with the mini-itx I still have. But if I want to do more ai stuff I'll probably need to hop up to m-atx or even just atx. 1080ti I'm currently on was the last before the era of sanely sized gpus came to an abrupt end
I remember buying computers in the past piece wise with an eye for what component I would want next. I... can't remember the last time I did this. And for my kids, it is not something they are interested in. At all.
I’ve owned an iMac before very happily. I just don’t own one now because they stopped making 27” versions.
I've been waiting to upgrade our 2017 model in the living room, was hoping the 27" was finally going to come now. Guess Mac Mini is the only route to go...
most likely they (apple) think that would eat into some other market segment. for a 27" station they probably want you to get a mac mini with a studio display. apple is known for "gently (but firmly) nudging" you towards the more expensive options.
The target audience for this machine is my local yoga studio (which has two), my local comic book shop (which has two), and my local spa (which has one).
They run a web browser, some kind of inventory or booking app in the browser, and Spotify. That's it.
Last year I went to Bali and the Gili Islands on vacation and both of the places I stayed checked me in on an M1 iMac. In that instance they were both also running the WhatsApp app.
They're going to sell millions.
That's the target buyer.
He could very well be using Windows with a cheaper laptop, but I consider the amount of support hours that I've saved to more than compensate for that.
Some people don’t care about a $300 price difference (just an example) if they plan to keep it for 10 years. Good for them.
Judging by the sibling comments I'm not the only one with relatives like this!
Possibly because it has a direct line right back to the original Macintosh. Such that when I showed my 11yo cousin my Macintosh SE, he called it an ‘iMac’.
I had one during the pandemic. I got it at a steep discount but it was really nice when I didn't need to go anywhere. I'm giving it to my son to put in his room.
Seems like they're useful for families and kids, and corp environments that use Macs for the folks who work in office and don't move around (admins, lab workers, etc)
I bet that iMac M4 sales meet their target, which is probably on par with the iMac M1 sales. And those were apparently good enough that they finally released an updated model.
edit: ok, others pointed out possible use cases. was thinking about the reception one, too.
your average user (aka not HN-er) doesn't upgrade their computer
an all-in-one solution is very attractive for families or situations where you don't need to tote around a laptop and you want a large screen