I’m looking back at my personal experience with the iMac. I had a Flower Power iMac second-hand as well as a 1.25 Ghz G4 iMac with the moving arm supporting a 17” screen. I’ve used the iMac G5 extensively back when it had that magnetic side that held the Front Row (pre-AppleTV) remote. I’ve owned a Core2Quad iMacs and replaced that one in 2013 with a Core i7 iMac with a 1 terabyte Fusion Drive. I did own a PowerMac G5 but the Mac Pro is just out of my price range. The iMac’s price compared to the Mac Pro is just too good.
Last year, I wasn’t alone in wanting the 5K 27” iMac upon release. I remember considering an order and then hearing some of the reports that the screen flickered under heavy load and the performance of the GUI was strained while running in native 5K mode. Even though I noticed the huge difference between my 15” MacBook Pro Retina and iMac 27” (non-retina) day to day, I eventually got over the resolution / PPI difference and continued to love the ‘low-res’ iMac.
Over the last year, my needs have changed drastically in what a machine should do for me. In a typical week, this is what the iMac does for me:
- Run iTunes constantly and drives content to the AppleTV which is used daily (will be replaced w/ new AppleTV & Plex)
- It’s a writing machine where I use MarsEdit and author this blog
- Lightroom and Photoshop CC help me edit RAW 22.5 megapixel images from my Canon 5D Mark III
- Final Cut Pro X edits 4K videos from my GoPro Hero 4
- I use Safari to research
- I play games (Civ 5, Civ Beyond Earth, Counter Strike G:O, Sims 4, Sim City and Tropico)
- I load photos into Photos for Mac (un-watermarked full-resolution JPEGs as a 2nd copy from Lightroom’s DB)
- I do some after-hour work on our VPN
The iMac’s 1TB hard drive is only 30% occupied because the majority of my content lives on my Synology NAS downstairs. The iMac is plugged into a gigabit Cisco switch. The Synology has two 6 terabyte drives that are mirrored. Plugged into that is three USB 3 drives. Two of these are 4 TB and another is 1TB. I should have gone for a 4-Bay Synology NAS because I’m nearly out of space on all of my drives and need to figure out where to go next while still having my data replicated. Ideally, having four 8 terabyte drives with mirroring would yield 16 terabytes of usable space instead of 15 I have today and I’d use a 4 terabyte drive for TimeMachine and non-critical files.
Back to the iMac, a lot of the tasks I’m running are taxing the system. Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom and video games are maxing out my system and I often have to wait for tasks to complete.
The biggest upgrade for me would be the speed of the RAM, GPU, SSD and CPU that will lead to less waiting when I am working in next-gen file sizes with huge resolutions. There’s an argument that I could shoot at a smaller megapixel and only capture 1080P on my GoPro but in the future, I’m going to regret not capturing the largest resolution that I can. Most people can’t appreciate very large resolution media but in the future, it’ll be a very good thing.
Games will benefit from faster load times and increased frame right although I’m not playing games that tax things too much. I’d still go for the 4 gigabytes of VRAM to future-proof the system.
Finally and this is purely driven by ‘want’ instead of need and that’s the retina display. I have a 4K display at work along with my Retina MBP. My iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6S have high resolution screens for a mobile and then I get home and it is very noticeable that my iMac text is huge and grainy and fuzzy. At the same time, I also recognize and can easily discern the pixels on my 1080P television but that’s another issue.
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I’m certain I want the new iMac 27” and of course, I’d get the i7 model for hyper threading and SSD for speed and will likely go with the same amount of RAM I have today which is 24 gigabytes. 64 gigabytes of RAM seems insane but if the price were lower, I’d certainly go for it. Maybe that’s an upgrade I do after a year of ownership.
I think I’ll wait to buy the iMac though once it goes on to the Apple Refurbished site which should be around February/March. Finding an i7 w/ SSD and 4 gigabytes of VRAM isn’t likely but maybe then I’ll go through eBay. Besides, I don’t use my iMac much in the Winter time. I’ll be traveling a lot so the MacBook pro will be my primary machine. A quick note that the MacBook Pro I have is the late 2013 model with a 2.6Ghz Core i7 and one terabyte SSD. I think it has another 2 years of life left before it needs to be retired especially since I don’t play games on it and only edit photos when I’m traveling.
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In summary, I think Apple hit a home run with the 2nd revision of this 5K iMac. The Skylake processors, fast SSD transfer speeds and modern video card pushing a 5K display with support for 2 4K displays connected means that it’ll have enough power to let me edit RAW Images and 4K video at full resolution. I’m very excited about the future and can’t wait to buy one.