In putting together this post, I’m losing track of how many iMacs I’ve owned. I know that I owned a Core i7 iMac in 2009 which I sold before my move to New Hampshire and in January of 2011, I bought a Core i5 iMac but sold it in July? That doesn’t seem right. I know that in March of 2013, I bought a 27” Core i7 iMac (late-2012 model) with all of the bells and whistles except the SSD but I actually never blogged about it and that iMac went on to be one of my favorite Macs ever. I bought it for sure, why didn’t I write about it? Weird. Without getting into the Apple Notebooks or pre-iMac desktops I owned, this was a difficult list to assemble.
Looking at the evolution of my iMac ownership over the years is pretty interesting in specs. Below is a bit of introspection because honestly, it’s long overdue that I assemble it:
Between 2003’s 1.25Ghz G4 iMac and the Late-2012 I owned until 2016, there are a lot of Macs in my history. The 2009, 2011 and 2012 were bought with my own money and all of the iMacs I owned were Core i7 except for some reason in 2011 when I decided that Core i5 was good-enough.
I really liked the 2009 and 2011 models for basically being a block of aluminum without the tapered edges introduced in 2012. But, the 2012 model was a full 9 pounds lighter than previous versions which is very telling in how much the reduction in aluminum helped the overall weight.
I still think that 2016’s 5K Apple iMac is the best Mac they’ve ever made. The body is gorgeous, the screen just dominates the entire experience and the footprint itself is unchanged since the 2009 introduction of the 27” model. When you compare the original 27” iMac with the one we have today, we’ve come a long way and congrats to Apple’s hardware teams for making a very lasting design that’s served 7 years with very few changes other than a tapered back:
The Weight & Dimensions are most telling on how little has changed:
- 2009: 30.5 lbs., 20.4” H x 25.6” W x 8.15″ D
- 2016: 21 lbs., 20.3” H x 25.6” W x 8″ D
Also, the GeekBench scores above of 8325 for the 2009 model to 15,375 today shows that the raw speed has doubled in 6 years which doesn’t feel like a lot but this is only a measurement of the CPU, not the speed at which data moves around the system, RAM speed, GPU performance or the I/O and especially not the fact that the screen resolution has seen an insane increase to 5K resolution (UHD).
That’s probably enough about the past so let’s talk about the new iMac 5K (late-2015).
As I said in this post in October:
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.
This was all so close to being perfect in how things actually went. My 2012 iMac sold on eBay and I was going to buy the maxed out refurbished 2016 w/ SSD in Core i7 configuration but the buyer never paid so I was stuck re-listing my iMac. When it sold a second time, the refurb site was updated and didn’t have the config I wanted so I ended up buying from the Apple Store as a new model. Oh well.
I did talk myself out of SSD though because it is very fast but as I’ve been editing more and more 4K video lately, my statement of not needing more than 1 TB of storage has changed. My Synology NAS is full and I regularly get “out of space” warnings on my startup disk when working in Final Cut. I didn’t want to add an external drive just yet so I went for the 3 terabyte Fusion Drive in this model.
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Initial Impressions, this machine is insanely fast but I wouldn’t say it’s exponentially faster than my old iMac in day to day activities but when editing in Final Cut Pro, holy crap it’s insane. Background rendering is instant and analyzing clips is twice as fast as my last computer. Apple takes advantage of the GPU and CPU so both of those upgrades were worth the extra coin. Lightroom saw a minor speed bump as well since it also offloads processing to the GPU.
Handbrake does not support GPU off-loading so the gains were in line with what you’d expect from going 8-core 3.4Ghz to 8-core 4Ghz. It’s similar to adding a 9th processor to the mix is probably the best way to break-out the math and in single-core applications 3.4 to 4 is not a huge jump.
The biggest improvement in my book….the screen. Wow. When I get home and wake up the screen, it’s like looking at a liquid-living thing. Every image, icon, menu and font looks incredible. The screen looks way better than even the Retina MacBook Pro 2013 that I have. I’ve never seen a UI look so gorgeous. Wow.
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Over the coming months, I’ll put Windows 10 on and see how FPS in H1Z1, Tropico, Sim City and Civilization benefit from the faster CPU/GPU combo. I imagine rendering distance in open-world games can be greatly increased due to the doubling of GPU RAM since the 2013 model.
I took a unique approach to setting up the new machine. I didn’t restore from Time Machine backup. I did copy over Preferences and ApplicationSupport profiles from my old profile but I treated this machine as brand new. It took a full 12 hours to set everything up but leaving behind baggage from 2009 felt great.I highly recommend everyone start fresh every 5 years instead of restoring from backup. So many legacy plug-ins, broken applications and background activities are let to finally die gracefully and your machine’s reliability, speed and performance benefit from this greatly. I had screen savers I installed with Panther that no longer worked so they didn’t load yet were taking up space. 20 different version of Flash installed in different areas of the system was also annoying and these are just 2 examples of baggage left behind by starting with a clean-install.
I think this machine and I are going to have a really good 3-4 years together.
Here are a few photos since I’m at my word-count and need to get to bed:
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