Base model 2019 iMac 4K from work

[JustinRP37]

My work (I should say IT department) just purchased the base model iMac 4k for many of our employees, including myself. I use my MacBook Pro 2016 near fully loaded on the specs primarily and have been using Macs for many year. This iMac still has a 5200RPM spinner and only 8GB and it is legit SLOW. Beachballs for everything. It is slower than my MacBook Pro 2008. I know that spinners are much slower than SSDs, but is this normal or could something else be going on? Spotlight was definitely done indexing as it had been on continuously for over a week. I restarted it etc. Looking through Apple discussions it seems many people have the same complaints. If so, how could Apple even release such an unusable machine? An iPad is more productive than this thing. Switch between Mail and Word... beachball. Type fast? Please wait. I think I'll push it to the corner of my desk and just leave it off and continue to use my own computer.

Specs are 3.6GHz i3, 8GB RAM, Radeon Pro 555X 2GB

 

[ruslan120]

Trade in the IT department.

 

[MandiMac]

Did you ever restart it? I had that problem with a Mac that wasn't rebooted for 180 days, and a restart worked wonders...

 

[azentropy]

Why Apple still sells any machine with just a 5400RPM drive is beyond nuts. Apple by saving maybe $20 per machine (if they added a decent size module for fusion or just scrap it all together and offer a 256gb ssd by default instead) has turned a bunch customers off Macs since for many people their first Mac purchase is probably a base model iMac. 8gb of RAM is fine for most people though, but that they made the 21" iMac not upgradeable is problematic.

Still even with those specs it shouldn't be as slow as you are saying. You have something else going on with that machine. You say 4gb of ram in your email which isn't correct (but your specs at the bottom say 8gb) - so are you only seeing 4gb? Is there other software running on the machine installed by the company (such as backup, or keystroke logging etc.)?

 

[JustinRP37]

Did you ever restart it? I had that problem with a Mac that wasn't rebooted for 180 days, and a restart worked wonders...

Yes restarted it and everything. It is just slow because of the slow spinner inside.
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Why Apple still sells any machine with just a 5400RPM drive is beyond nuts. Apple by saving maybe $20 per machine (if they added a decent size module for fusion or just scrap it all together and offer a 256gb ssd by default instead) has turned a bunch customers off Macs since for many people their first Mac purchase is probably a base model iMac. 8gb of RAM is fine for most people though, but that they made the 21" iMac not upgradeable is problematic.

Still even with those specs it shouldn't be as slow as you are saying. You have something else going on with that machine. You say 4gb of ram in your email which isn't correct (but your specs at the bottom say 8gb) - so are you only seeing 4gb? Is there other software running on the machine installed by the company (such as backup, or keystroke logging etc.)?

Yeah I corrected the 4GB of RAM. It is 8. That should be enough and that was my thought at first. They did install some things like BitDefender (I already removed that), but they give us total control over the machine, so I will try wiping it and setting it up as new and see if that is fast. However, there were a bunch of threads on Apple's discussion boards about how slow the hard drive is and that causes the slow down.

 

[hobowankenobi]

Not sure which is worse:

• IT dept buys any work station with a hard drive
• Apple sells any work station with a hard drive

I work in IT...and I swapped out every iMac hard drive for SSD in my area 2 years ago. Hard drives are unacceptable, essentially from OS 10.13 and newer, and especially with APFS.

While it is open...8GB is not enough. 16 is the new 8. 32 is the new 16.

 

[MandiMac]

Yes restarted it and everything. It is just slow because of the slow spinner inside.

You know, my MBP from 2009 isn't as slow after a restart. Let's hope that re-installing everything solves things

 

[hampus]

Buy a 512 GB SSD (like Samsung T5) with USB-C and use carbon copy cloner to make a bootable copy on the SSD of your har drive. Then use the SSD as the main drive with OS X (boot from it) and - TADA - you have a iMac with an SSD!

 

[Fishrrman]

The problem is the slow platter-based internal drive.

There is NO WAY to "overcome" this other than by "by-passing" it by booting from another (faster) drive.

The quickest, easiest, cheapest way to "speed it up" would be to get an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD, then plug it in and make it the boot drive. That would give you read speeds of around 430MBps and writes in the 330-350MBps range.

It would make the iMac much more usable. No more beachballs.

The only problem I see is that the drive could be easily "steal-able" in an office environment (since it's mounted externally). You could unplug it and lock it up each night.

Talk to the IT dept. and see what they say.
Also -- advise them not to buy any more iMacs UNLESS they have an SSD inside.
Even 256gb would do.

 

[hobowankenobi]

If you open Activity Monitor, you can watch and see if you are running out of RAM.

Keep an eye on the Swap Used at the bottom. Ideally, it would be 0 if you have enough RAM. The bigger the number, the more the boot drive is being used for short term storage (instead of RAM)...which is a primary cause of SBBOD.

 

[yuvster]

It's terribly slow machine due to the slow HDD, I have no idea why apple is even selling it. I had the same machine and I upgraded to an SSD and it's super quick now. I got the upgrade kit at Amazon.. comes with the drive and all the parts that are needed to pry the screen open.

 

[ruslan120]

Buy a 512 GB SSD (like Samsung T5) with USB-C and use carbon copy cloner to make a bootable copy on the SSD of your har drive. Then use the SSD as the main drive with OS X (boot from it) and - TADA - you have a iMac with an SSD!

That's a terrific idea. See if you can get a Thunderbolt 3 SSD (even a small one) expensed by the company.

I would try and clear any security concerns with IT first - since the drive is external they might want you to encrypt your boot drive.

Buying (and not expensing) things for work has always put a slightly bad taste in my mouth. Not to say that I haven't done it to make things easier.

Examples:
- Company only provides 24" 1080p monitors. Snagged a $180, 32" 2560x1440 Dell monitor to be more productive
- Personal pencil sharpener to avoid running to the stockroom
- (Planning on, trying to get expensed) a USB C hub to avoid the plethora of cables running into the work provided laptop to make office -> conference room -> office runs easier

 

[JustinRP37]

The problem is the slow platter-based internal drive.

There is NO WAY to "overcome" this other than by "by-passing" it by booting from another (faster) drive.

The quickest, easiest, cheapest way to "speed it up" would be to get an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD, then plug it in and make it the boot drive. That would give you read speeds of around 430MBps and writes in the 330-350MBps range.

It would make the iMac much more usable. No more beachballs.

The only problem I see is that the drive could be easily "steal-able" in an office environment (since it's mounted externally). You could unplug it and lock it up each night.

Talk to the IT dept. and see what they say.
Also -- advise them not to buy any more iMacs UNLESS they have an SSD inside.
Even 256gb would do.

This is an awesome suggestion! And I do have a spare small SSD! I don't mind encrypting the disk. I do have a private office, so I don't think anyone would want to steal it. This would definitely be the best way to speed the thing up. I don't have to use it as I have always used my 2016 MacBook Pro, which is still amazingly fast.

 

[hobowankenobi]

This is an awesome suggestion! And I do have a spare small SSD! I don't mind encrypting the disk. I do have a private office, so I don't think anyone would want to steal it. This would definitely be the best way to speed the thing up. I don't have to use it as I have always used my 2016 MacBook Pro, which is still amazingly fast.

If nothing else, using an external SSD should prove if the HD is the primary bottleneck.

 

[JustinRP37]

The idea of the external SSD was a great one. The machine is more than usable now. Just mind boggling that a 5200RPM hard drive would still be used by Apple on any of their machines now given that macOS is optimized for SSDs. Thanks to all that helped and hopefully those that do buy this base model can see this thread and simply install an external SSD with macOS and have that as the default hard drive.

 

[||\||]

My work (I should say IT department) just purchased the base model iMac 4k for many of our employees, including myself.

Don't blame Apple, blame your incompetent IT manger. Some home users might be OK with paying less and having the old SATA HDD. That is why the model exists. The systems managers where you work should know better. They are paid to know better.

 

[JustinRP37]

Don't blame Apple, blame your incompetent IT manger. Some home users might be OK with paying less and having the old SATA HDD. That is why the model exists. The systems managers where you work should know better. They are paid to know better.

I 100% blame the IT department for sure. But I do blame some of Apple too. Many consumers look solely at price. If I were to buy the iMac without knowing what a spinner was, I would never buy another Mac again given how slow it truly is nowadays. There is no reason Apple cannot put at least a 256GB SSD in the base iMac.

 

[3SQ Machine]

Wow I thought my IT department was cheap by only giving us the 2019 Macbook AIRs and not the PROs.

If they instead handed me a full-on platter-based iMac (they couldn't even spring for a fusion c'mon?) I would need to polish my resume because I surely would be getting fired by not finishing any actual WORK by expected deadlines.

With that said, I just finally sold my 2013 HDD iMac and the spinning beachball I had on that 7200 drive was due to egregiously long indexing/finder other background processes that just took FOREVER to finish. You may get that from time-to-time on the SSD too but the process is so much faster to finish these tasks on SSD. Last time on the 2013 the beachball went on and on for days while it finished whatever the heck it was doing. Recent iterations of macOS are really not optimized for HDDs anymore.

 

[alien3dx]

My work (I should say IT department) just purchased the base model iMac 4k for many of our employees, including myself. I use my MacBook Pro 2016 near fully loaded on the specs primarily and have been using Macs for many year. This iMac still has a 5200RPM spinner and only 8GB and it is legit SLOW. Beachballs for everything. It is slower than my MacBook Pro 2008. I know that spinners are much slower than SSDs, but is this normal or could something else be going on? Spotlight was definitely done indexing as it had been on continuously for over a week. I restarted it etc. Looking through Apple discussions it seems many people have the same complaints. If so, how could Apple even release such an unusable machine? An iPad is more productive than this thing. Switch between Mail and Word... beachball. Type fast? Please wait. I think I'll push it to the corner of my desk and just leave it off and continue to use my own computer.

Specs are 3.6GHz i3, 8GB RAM, Radeon Pro 555X 2GB

the spec more good dam mine.. i use external hardisk ssd .. And my usage is pretty high, android studio, android emulator, visual studio code and web browser. The main problem for macos is the ram compressing and not releasing on time which fallback you need more memory then you suppose too and your need at least 16 gb ram first then think about the SSD. If just on the imac is slow just make it sleep and open as fast as possible but if low ram nothing you can do about it . The main culprit of slow also bound to spotlight. It indexing and indexing it changes..

 

[hobowankenobi]

Recent iterations of macOS are really not optimized for HDDs anymore.

That is an understatement. Since the commitment to APFS, HDs are basically unacceptable for boot drives.

I am fine with that. I just wish Apple stopped selling them.

Another dept with a couple of labs full of iMacs switched over to Bootcamp Win 10, until they can upgrade to SSDs or new Macs. On the same machine, Win 10 runs much better with the HD. If that does not prove that Apple has abandoned HDs to optimized for SSDs, not sure what would.

 

[mj_]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I would like to reiterate that an iMac with an HDD instead an SSD can be a perfectly fine work computer for many users. A front-desk receptionist won't answer general email inquiries or print postage labels any quicker with an SSD- instead of an HDD-based iMac, and neither will a paralegal who launches her software with Citrix or uses a web-based application for case and file management all day long or a sales person whose daily job it is to communicate with customers and/or suppliers. In return, engineers running statistical analysis software, software developers, or photo and video editing professionals will flinch at the mere thought of an HDD in their system because their output will effectively grind to a screeching halt. Generalization is utterly pointless when it comes to SSDs vs. HDDs.

The major problem in this case is not that the IT department ordered iMacs with hard disk drives but that they did so without looking at the actual requirements of each user. That's the real issue here. And it might not even be IT's fault. Maybe they did what IT departments tend to do regularly, went way overboard with what they asked for only to be stopped by procurement who did what they do regularly, namely go with the cheapest-possible solution?

And FYI, I posted this from a 27" iMac with 1TB Fusion Drive that has been my main workhorse for the past close to two years and helps me make a comfortable six-figure income each year working as an IT consultant. According to the general wisdom of the internet (an oxymoron in itself) I should have gone broke the day I purchased it because, alas, a hard disk is completely unusable and my productivity surely must have taken a giant hit.

 

[JustinRP37]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I would like to reiterate that an iMac with an HDD instead an SSD can be a perfectly fine work computer for many users. A front-desk receptionist won't answer general email inquiries or print postage labels any quicker with an SSD- instead of an HDD-based iMac, and neither will a paralegal who launches her software with Citrix or uses a web-based application for case and file management all day long or a sales person whose daily job it is to communicate with customers and/or suppliers. In return, engineers running statistical analysis software, software developers, or photo and video editing professionals will flinch at the mere thought of an HDD in their system because their output will effectively grind to a screeching halt. Generalization is utterly pointless when it comes to SSDs vs. HDDs.

The major problem in this case is not that the IT department ordered iMacs with hard disk drives but that they did so without looking at the actual requirements of each user. That's the real issue here. And it might not even be IT's fault. Maybe they did what IT departments tend to do regularly, went way overboard with what they asked for only to be stopped by procurement who did what they do regularly, namely go with the cheapest-possible solution?

And FYI, I posted this from a 27" iMac with 1TB Fusion Drive that has been my main workhorse for the past close to two years and helps me make a comfortable six-figure income each year working as an IT consultant. According to the general wisdom of the internet (an oxymoron in itself) I should have gone broke the day I purchased it because, alas, a hard disk is completely unusable and my productivity surely must have taken a giant hit.

I disagree about HDDs in Macs now, even when lightly used. First, your Fusion drive is much faster than just a regular HDD, it has a SSD component that will vastly speed up the machine once data is loaded from the spinner to the SSD. This will be even more evident when needing to swap RAM and drive space. The speed of just a regular 5200 RPM HDD will not cut it on modern macOS, it just won't, especially since Apple has been optimizing macOS for SSDs for years now. To give you perspective of how slow the HDD is in this machine, I booted the machine at 8:15AM, by 8:40 I still could not compose an email. A receptionist would need to use mail, Word, etc. These were painfully slow. A regular 5200RPM HDD has a transfer rate rate of about 49.5Mb/sec. As a comparison, Apple's base MacBook Pro's SSD has a read speed of 3.2GB/sec and a write speed of 2.2GB/sec. Fusion drives are a great mixture of affordability and usability and should be the base offering for Apple now, not HDD.

 

[mj_]

First of all, that's not how a Fusion Drive works. It doesn't load data from the HDD to the SSD but instead keeps frequently used blocks as well as some predetermined data stored on the SSD at all times.

Second, at just 24 GB the SSD part of my Fusion Drive is ridiculously small. It is barely large enough to store the operating system, one or two frequently used applications, and maybe the swap file. I agree with you though that a FD is better and faster than an HDD but depending on use case it may not make a difference at all. I also agree that it would be preferrable if the 1TB Fusion Drive was Apples baseline option for the 21" iMac as well.

Third, if you run out of RAM and need to swap even the fastest currently available SSD offers but a mere fraction of the performance of DDR4 SDRAM (Samsung PM981 random write burst: around 50 MB/s; DDR4-2400 random write burst: 19 GB/s; that's 0,2%). I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your system starts swapping you need more RAM, not a faster storage device.

Fourth, modern operating systems are not built to be shutdown every evening and booted up anew in the morning. If you would've done what both Microsoft and Apple have been adamantly advertising and optimizing for years now, namely put your Mac to sleep instead of shutting it down, you would've been ready to compose your email at 8:15AM because your mail program would have been already running and stored in RAM, and your iMac would've taken less than 5 seconds to wake up and be ready for you to start working instantaneously.

The bottom line with every computer, be it a desktop PC, a laptop or a server, is to keep your applications open and resident in RAM. You don't want them to be loaded from your abymally slow mass storage into your fast RAM every time you launch them.

 

[JustinRP37]

First of all, that's not how a Fusion Drive works. It doesn't load data from the HDD to the SSD but instead keeps frequently used blocks as well as some predetermined data stored on the SSD at all times.

Second, at just 24 GB the SSD part of my Fusion Drive is ridiculously small. It is barely large enough to store the operating system, one or two frequently used applications, and maybe the swap file. I agree with you though that a FD is better and faster than an HDD but depending on use case it may not make a difference at all. I also agree that it would be preferrable if the 1TB Fusion Drive was Apples baseline option for the 21" iMac as well.

Third, if you run out of RAM and need to swap even the fastest currently available SSD offers but a mere fraction of the performance of DDR4 SDRAM (Samsung PM981 random write burst: around 50 MB/s; DDR4-2400 random write burst: 19 GB/s; that's 0,2%). I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your system starts swapping you need more RAM, not a faster storage device.

Fourth, modern operating systems are not built to be shutdown every evening and booted up anew in the morning. If you would've done what both Microsoft and Apple have been adamantly advertising and optimizing for years now, namely put your Mac to sleep instead of shutting it down, you would've been ready to compose your email at 8:15AM because your mail program would have been already running and stored in RAM, and your iMac would've taken less than 5 seconds to wake up and be ready for you to start working instantaneously.

The bottom line with every computer, be it a desktop PC, a laptop or a server, is to keep your applications open and resident in RAM. You don't want them to be loaded from your abymally slow mass storage into your fast RAM every time you launch them.

Your first point will cause for a much smoother usage scenario for an average user. It does load commonly run data from from the HDD and keeps it in the SSD, thus faster load times for your commonly used items. I agree with your third point. Time for Apple to make them shine over the competition. I agree with your third point, but it is a massive difference between SSD swap and HDD swap, which will cause the infamous long beach balling times. But at 8GB of RAM and large files, swapping will be done on these base machines (again blame IT for buying them). I never turn my computers off, however, there is construction being done in the building overnight with power being turned off, so yes we have to power down devices plugged into the wall. However, I will agree with everyone here that these should not have been purchased for our use case scenario. It is a poorly run acquisition department. Using a spare 512GB USB-C SSD I was able to turn this into a solid computer. Sure the RAM can be improved, but the general functioning of the iMac is much improved now just simply using the external SSD as the main drive. It is a very cheap fix that helps even the most basic of use. At the bottom line Apple should not have used 5200RPM but rather 7200RPM or the fusion drive as standard.

 

[hobowankenobi]

FD at the very least....and even that adds complexity for manufacturing as well as longevity questions (any HD does) to save a few bucks.

As to the argument that light users don't need an SSD: I would counter that light users don't' need a lot of space, so a small SSD is fine. 512 is more than enough, and at enterprise scale with Apple's buying power, it would not cost-prohibitive.

If they wanted to use low-cost HDs...they should have not standardized on a file system that is not low-cost HD compatible. FD is a reasonable workaround, at least to minimize boot, swap, and common app launch delays, along with cached everything performance. Heck, they could even spec and use a hybrid drive to simplify assembly and still get decent "light user" performance.

At least we can all agree this is an IT/Procurement fail. 🙂