Is Mid-2017 5K iMac still worth it?

[Jrshelby]

I’m with you 100%. I’m waiting it out. If I could have gotten free apple care (with the apple gift card reward) out of it with EDU pricing I was set to order. If I’m not getting a great deal this time of year I can’t justify spending the extra cash. So the wait is on even though I know it will cost me a little more.

 

[netnothing]

I was in a similar buying decision; I just pulled the trigger on a 2017 27 inch iMac; went with the maxed out spec (except for memory, which I maxed on my own; I got 5+ years out of my old iMac, and expect to do the same with this one; you will only ever be at the top of the curve with a new machine for a short while in any circumstance; the key thing is to be happy with what you have - and know how long you are willing to truly live with it; a new 2017 will not let you down in any situation for the first 3 years of your purchase;

Same here. Just bought the 27" i7 with 512GB. Bought 32GB of Crucial RAM. Can't wait. Yes it's year old tech.....but I was debating whether to go iMac or Mac mini + 5K display. The T2 chip scares me right now (don't need a bunch of crashes). The GPU on the mini is a joke. And at the end of the day, my iMac config still came up a few hundred less than the mini setup. This iMac still tops the single thread charts for speed and most of my work is web dev, so no need for huge multi-thread performance (although it's still no slouch). This iMac is kind of a tried and true design. It's had most of the kinks worked out - and it does make me nervous with Apple's relentless desire to make things thinner that the next iMac, while it will look great, it may have new design growing pains. Who knows?!

I'm coming from a 2010 Mac Pro which has been the best machine I've ever had even at 8 years old. I can't wait to see what they do with the new Mac Pro and Display.....but I also know, I'll never afford that

 

[tomscott1988]

Those read/write speeds of course only apply to the SSD part. The HDD portion will be slow and it will be much more noticable than any CPU, GPU or RAM limitations. The SSD/HDD is what makes your machine feel snappy or slow even in day to day tasks.
Ultimately it's up to OP, but I think it's absurd buy a premium computer with a price tag upwards of $2k with such an obvious bottleneck. If it's a budget issue, OP should save a little longer instead of rushing to such a significant compromise in my opinion.

Its all relative to what you are doing. The OPs use case is word processing, browsing, e-mails, Spotify and some light AV editing. These things will not see significant increases in performance with the fusion over a PCI SSD.

At the end of the day only the cache and program files need the speed. A 500mb/s SSD vs PCI express SSDs make very little difference in day to day. Boot is pretty much the same so is launching programs.

Once files are cached the difference is very slight. Its when you are working with large amounts of data that needs to be read quickly which is not what the OP is doing.

My dads machine flys along just fine on the fusion drive. Its the base model and the specs are similar to my 2010 Mac pro but the imac is quicker single core. It has a raid 0 PCI SSD set up and day to day feels the same which is exactly what the usage of the OP is.

 

[Tigerman82]

Its all relative to what you are doing. The OPs use case is word processing, browsing, e-mails, Spotify and some light AV editing. These things will not see significant increases in performance with the fusion over a PCI SSD.

I know Fusion Drives are a different beast to those old iMac 5400rpm HDDs. However, I do have to say that when I upgraded my Mid-2010 iMac's HDD to a Samsung 850 SSD, I saw a huge improvement in speed in every basic task I did. The thing is that while I don't do hardcore video or photo editing etc., I do multitask a lot. It's very important to me that apps and the whole system opens up quickly. So I would argue that even in basic use a multitasker who needs to do a million things a day values the extra speed. Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous post, things like the current APFS file system that favours SSDs (there are threads about people with Fusion Drives having issues with it) and the mere fact that it's only these iMacs out of all the Macs in Apple's computer line-up that use Fusion Drives would make me hesitant to buy a Mac with one inside. For me, the whole point of paying these premium Apple prices is that I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a working computer for at least 6-8 years if not more without any software or hardware hiccups. In order to maximise this (that Apple will provide OS X updates and will not drop features out of them because of old hardware), I guess it makes sense not to buy old tech or tech that has some components (like the Fusion Drive) that are not the standard anymore.

 

[tomscott1988]

I know Fusion Drives are a different beast to those old iMac 5400rpm HDDs. However, I do have to say that when I upgraded my Mid-2010 iMac's HDD to a Samsung 850 SSD, I saw a huge improvement in speed in every basic task I did. The thing is that while I don't do hardcore video or photo editing etc., I do multitask a lot. It's very important to me that apps and the whole system opens up quickly. So I would argue that even in basic use a multitasker who needs to do a million things a day values the extra speed. Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous post, things like the current APFS file system that favours SSDs (there are threads about people with Fusion Drives having issues with it) and the mere fact that it's only these iMacs out of all the Macs in Apple's computer line-up that use Fusion Drives would make me hesitant to buy a Mac with one inside. For me, the whole point of paying these premium Apple prices is that I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a working computer for at least 6-8 years if not more without any software or hardware hiccups. In order to maximise this (that Apple will provide OS X updates and will not drop features out of them because of old hardware), I guess it makes sense not to buy old tech or tech that has some components (like the Fusion Drive) that are not the standard anymore.

Well obviously upgrading to as SSD from a standard HDD thats around 30-50mb/s is quicker the 850 evo will hit 500/500 on sata III which is like 1100% quicker than a standard 5400 drive. The fusion has a PCI-E attached drive that are combined through software to ensure frequently used items like the OS, program files etc have access to the faster storage.

Mojave now supports APFS on Fusion.

I understand the reasons but really I doubt if you used two back to back you would see a difference. I edited a wedding on my dads to test it out and I couldnt really tell a difference between my mac pro and the base model. The wedding was around 100gbs of 50mp, 30mp and 26mp raw files. The main downside for me with the iMac is the graphics card when your shifting that many pixels at 60fps the UI can get pretty laggy.

The fusion drive being the end of the world has been so over exaggerated. For the majority of people they are a good solution to expensive flash storage which has been half the argument of this thread.

Now the base line 21" with a HDD is a disgrace because Mojave just isnt geared up to HDDs. I have my SSD incrementally backed up to an internal 2.5" HDD and accidentally booted to it the other day and I literally waited 10 mins for mojave to boot and the UI to be usable.

At 700mb/s and 1600mb/s the 128gb in the fusion drive is pretty speedy.

 

[Jrshelby]

I’m with you 100%. I’m waiting it out. If I could have gotten free apple care (with the apple gift card reward) out of it with EDU pricing I was set to order. If I’m not getting a great deal this time of year I can’t justify spending the extra cash. So the wait is on even though I know it will cost me a little more.

Well I did it. Mid level with 3.5 and 256 SSD. Bought some memory on its way.

 

[LaloG]

Well I did it. Mid level with 3.5 and 256 SSD. Bought some memory on its way.

Me too. Got a base 27” iMac with 512 SSD through Apple. Will be using the $200 GC to get the Apple TV 4K for the new tv