5400rpm?

[theluggage]

Its an odd choice IMO even if profit margins is the reason.

...so the reason is probably (as people keep pointing out and being ignored) the extra noise and heat in a confined space, not simply profit margins (although, of course, Apple are never gonna turn down the opportunity for profit if they can find a technical justification).

What is down to profit margins is Apple's decision to make everything ultra thin & light: people will pay more money for sexy thin boxes, whereas the basic mini-tower (which is what most Mac power-users really want and/or need) is something of a commodity item with poor margins.

The reason the 1TB/5200rpm iMac exists is that Apple need a mass-market box on the shelves at Best Buy with "1TB" written on the side, for the customers who "know" that 1TB is better than 256GB. Anybody with a bit more knowledge will do the research and either go for the 2/3TB Fusion Drives or realise that having spinning rust inside an iMac is silly and settle for a 256GB SSD and keep their archives on cheap external or NAS drives.

Maybe, Apple assumed when they re-designed the iMac (some years ago now) that by 2017, SSD would have fallen in price far more than it has and the hard drive would have been history. As it is, even a regular 1TB SATA drive costs several times as much as a basic 1TB HD.

So to me its odd they would use complete polar opposites between their HDDs and SSDs.

Well, the iMac straddles two roles: the entry level iMacs are amongst Apple's most affordable/best value machines - a comparable 3rd-party display would cost almost as much as the whole computer. If you're using Office, Safari and Mail all day then having a slow-ish HD isn't going to be much of a handicap. However, the top-end iMacs are Apple's most powerful computers - and those customers are going to appreciate the top-of-the-line PCIe SSDs.

Having a middle tier of "basic" SSDs would really just muddy things - and we do know that Apple like to keep their line-ups relatively simple.

Now, where Apple do come off as greedy is the miniscule SSD component in the 1TB Fusion Drive options...

 

[Clix Pix]

Back in 2015 I had been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the 21.5" iMac with retina screen, hoping to replace my 2012 iMac with it, thinking that there would be some good changes...... I looked at the tech specs and was immediately disappointed, as I'd been anticipating that the platter drive would be replaced by an SSD even in the base model. Having used SSD in my MacBook Pro I was totally spoiled by its speed and wanted the same in a desktop machine, an iMac. Well....sure, I could've gotten it but it would have been a BTO and pretty expensive.

I then ran a comparison of the specs with the 2015 15" MacBook Pro and realized that it had pretty much the specs I actually wanted and that I could walk into an Apple store at any time and pick one up. Pricing was very similar, too. Hm..... I conducted an experiment by using my older 13" rMBP and sticking it on a stand, connecting an external BT keyboard and mouse to it, and saw that this would be a very workable solution. I did this for a couple of weeks, not touching the iMac at all. I realized that if I had a need for a much larger monitor that I could purchase an external one and connect that, too. I spent some time weighing the pros and cons of one vs the other and there's a thread in here somewhere about that.....

So, with the experiment a success, I then purchased the 2015 15" rMBP and have been using it ever since as a desktop replacement. This has been so satisfactory that now I am no longer even interested in an iMac -- the rMBP is a much more flexible device and suits my purposes quite nicely. I sold my very slow 2012 iMac to a friend and that was that. He's not particularly techie and doesn't use the machine that much so that its slowness doesn't faze him. Another friend, who has a 2013 21.5" iMac, has been complaining recently of how slow her machine is.....when the time comes for replacement I am going to recommend that she either go with my strategy of getting a MacBook Pro instead or that she go with SSD-only in the new iMac.

 

[cynics]

Back in 2015 I had been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the 21.5" iMac with retina screen, hoping to replace my 2012 iMac with it, thinking that there would be some good changes...... I looked at the tech specs and was immediately disappointed, as I'd been anticipating that the platter drive would be replaced by an SSD even in the base model. Having used SSD in my MacBook Pro I was totally spoiled by its speed and wanted the same in a desktop machine, an iMac. Well....sure, I could've gotten it but it would have been a BTO and pretty expensive.

I then ran a comparison of the specs with the 2015 15" MacBook Pro and realized that it had pretty much the specs I actually wanted and that I could walk into an Apple store at any time and pick one up. Pricing was very similar, too. Hm..... I conducted an experiment by using my older 13" rMBP and sticking it on a stand, connecting an external BT keyboard and mouse to it, and saw that this would be a very workable solution. I did this for a couple of weeks, not touching the iMac at all. I realized that if I had a need for a much larger monitor that I could purchase an external one and connect that, too. I spent some time weighing the pros and cons of one vs the other and there's a thread in here somewhere about that.....

So, with the experiment a success, I then purchased the 2015 15" rMBP and have been using it ever since as a desktop replacement. This has been so satisfactory that now I am no longer even interested in an iMac -- the rMBP is a much more flexible device and suits my purposes quite nicely. I sold my very slow 2012 iMac to a friend and that was that. He's not particularly techie and doesn't use the machine that much so that its slowness doesn't faze him. Another friend, who has a 2013 21.5" iMac, has been complaining recently of how slow her machine is.....when the time comes for replacement I am going to recommend that she either go with my strategy of getting a MacBook Pro instead or that she go with SSD-only in the new iMac.

To compliment this, I walked into an Apple store in early 2014, asked for the best model they had. To my later surprise the best "in store model" had a 1tb 7200rpm HDD, even the Fusion was BTO. I didn't concern myself over it never experiencing an SSDs performance.

Now I plan on opening it up and replacing it myself. Regardless you think someone walking into an Apple Store unconcerned with price saying "give me the best" would have got better than a 7200rpm HDD even in 2014.