As a follow-up to this post from a month ago, I have sold my iMac. It was my 5th iMac and it was most certainly my favorite. The warranty expires in 5 days so I had to sell it so the next owner could take on the burden of possibly having to service an out of warranty machine but I really think the failure cost is low at this point. The hard drive will eventually go but that is really the only moving part if you discount the fans.
On 3/21/2013, I paid $2599 for the computer I just sold for $1500.
• 3.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz
• 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x4GB
• 1TB Fusion Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB GDDR5
• Magic Trackpad
• Apple Wireless Keyboard (English) & User’s Guide
• Accessory Kit
It’s still a very capable machine with a lot of years left. I added an additional 16 gigabytes of memory ($127 at the time) for a total of 24 total GB of RAM. The initial eBay sale went great with the final value being $2,050 but the top bidders had no eBay feedback history at all and most were brand new eBay users having me partially regretting posting here that I was selling my computer. Did a few of you screw around with the sale? The auction winner never replied to my emails and never sent payment. After a week, the top 2 bidders didn’t have any interest in buying the machine so I was forced to open a case w/ eBay and get my Final Value Fee and other fees reversed. I re-listed the iMac and it sold for $1500 to a guy that lives only 2 hours away. He paid within minutes and I had to immediately replace the machine that I was shipping off. Here’s what I picked up:
• 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
• 8GB 1867MHz DDR3 SDRAM – two 4GB
• 3TB Fusion Drive
• AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB video memory
• Magic Mouse 2
• Magic Keyboard (English) & User’s Guide
• Accessory Kit
Like last time, I immediately went to Crucial.com and ordered more memory, this time it was much cheaper to order 4 sticks of 8GB of RAM for 32GB of total memory than the buy two 16GB sticks to go alongside the 8GB already included for a total of 40GB of RAM. 32 is an 8GB increase in RAM from the last model and I rarely hit the maximum. The order cost me $146 for the additional RAM.
How do these two machines compare? What has happened in the world of Apple since 2013? Technically, my old machine was a “late-2012” iMac and the current is “late-2015”. The resolution is now 5K, the Core i7 is now Skylake and uses much less energy and is considerably faster in a lot of things except overall clock speed. The RAM is only clocked slightly faster and the Fusion drive is bigger with a faster transfer rate than the old one but the SSD on the Fusion drive is still only 128GB. There’s a new Magic Mouse & Magic Trackpad and I’ve doubled my video RAM.
At the core, the machine is not revolutionary but I am glad I waited for the 2nd revision to the 5K iMac. Last year’s 5K iMac had a huge resolution with huge performance gains on the machine I already had and therefore customers reported slow UI, flickering and re-draw issues when running at native resolution. Waiting also allowed me to get into the world of Skylake and it’s the lack of Skylake at the MacBook Pro level that has me holding off at least until next year.
If you look at the EveryMac benchmark page, there are enough differences but not a lot for a 3-year gap:
I do think this machine will help in a few ways.
- First, the transition from iPad Air 2, iPhone 6S, MacBook Pro to a non-retina iMac has been challenging. Apple did a great job of making their non-retina machines look poor in comparison to their retina machines and therefore I’m going to enjoy being on a retina screen at home when I’m writing this blog and creating media
- The move to 4K is coming quickly and this machine will allow me to encode video at a much faster rate than I do today…now if only Handbrake for Mac would start supporting GPU Optimization
- Final Cut Pro, I’m already editing 4K video. Seeing 4K video at its full resolution with real-time background rendering is going to rock
- Speaking of Final Cut, I use the internal drive as my scratch disk and I’m constantly running out of space with the 1TB Fusion drive I have today. 3TB will give me a lot more breathing room
- I bought a Canon 5D Mark III this year and shooting in RAW has put a real strain on the iMac. I think that the new machine will make life much easier
- The new iMac will have support for 802.11ac but that’s less of a selling point since I’ve been using Ethernet for the past 2 years and already wired the new house with a few ethernet connections for my AppleTV, Synology NAS and iMac.
- Thunderbolt 2 support does open me up to using an external drive for Final Cut Pro projects but the possibility of upgrading to a 5-bay synology this year might make this a moot point.
At the end of the day, this is more about paying a bit every 3 years to stay up to date on the technology curve and not lose all resale value completely.
Once the iMac arrives, I’ll share some additional thoughts here with you all. Thanks for reading!