Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogou | Hacker News Reader

Places that have a need for work stations, like offices and academic environments. Creative workers that have dedicated work areas and favor an uncluttered environment. It might not make as much sense for individual consumers, but I still see offices full of iMacs out in the world. Not every company wants to issue personal laptops for workers.

View on HN

But the iMac is not a workstation. It's even less of a workstation that the Mac Mini, which is available with a faster processor, more RAM, bigger SSD and faster networking.

It's basically the lower-tier Mac Mini that's permanently attached to a (relatively small) monitor that cannot be repurposed, and you'd probably be better off getting a separate monitor for a Mini to allow upgrading those separately.

This.

Especially true with the Mac Studio being available too.

Both you and the person you’re replying to are thinking of workstations in the colloquial sense of “powerful computer to work on” instead of a literal station where someone works.

For 90% of people , an iMac is less fuss than other devices.

This thread reminds me of the Microsoft cloud 365 PC they just launched where everyone was confused by the market for it and really just cemented the fact that a lot of engineers aren’t very in touch with the actual workforce out there.

It's not your definition of a workstation, but for many businesses/locations, it is.

They're deployed by the hundreds, in one or two configurations, then are replaced after 3/5/7 years. They never get repurposed, they just get recycled/refurbished when they reach end of life or the value has been depreciated to zero.

It feels strange to say this though, because a setup where external monitors can be hooked up into laptops is a better UX for everyone involved for a typical workstation. The company can amortize and maintain the the display’s lifecycle separately from the machines, the employees get dynamic mobility and can take their laptop into meetings and home. About the only use case outside of the already-mentioned reception desk is the one where you don’t want employees taking their laptop home AND everyone is on a Mac which is… a kind of niche market. It’s not like companies want these for their computing power - there are other, more cost effective form factors and designs for that.

I think the iMac is kind of a relic from a bygone age where it was more difficult to fit desktop computing power into a laptop form factor. Now that laptops have gotten pretty beefy, the difference in compute between them and something like this is small enough that it probably makes more sense to opt for the mobility most of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com