I just ordered a 16/1TB Yellow (nifty color !!!) iMac to replace my perfectly capable 2019 21.5 16GB Intel i9. Hobbyist purely. In reality 8/256 is all one NEEDS if using the beast for eMail and Internet cruising. I get a Veterans Discount (Thank you Apple...) and used that 10% for my upgrades. I wish I had opted for the "base", but it is not available in Yellow. I have ordered, and already received, a color matched USB hub that sports "C" ports, "A" ports and card ports as well as having a base that will accommodate a 2TB NvME drive.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
M3 iMac Rant
- Thread starter TrenttonY
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I actually tested an iMac Pro for about a week. It was IMO an incredibly misguided product. The thermals were better than the standard iMac due to there being two fans instead of one, but it still heated up when sustained workloads were going on. And the real-world performance seemed rather meh for audio production and video editing (it lacked the integrated Intel GPU of the standard iMac making certain video encoding tasks much *slower* than on the standard iMac). And the price premium was considerable. Much much happier with the Mac Studio/Studio Display combo, and I’m doing my best to weigh “2017 vs 2023” into that equation.
My 2011 27" iMac is still working flawlessly....
My friend bought a yellow M1 iMac with 16GB/512GB - gorgeous machine and fast...
iMac are great computers... so are the Mac Minis.... Can't go wrong when purchasing either machine
My friend bought a yellow M1 iMac with 16GB/512GB - gorgeous machine and fast...
iMac are great computers... so are the Mac Minis.... Can't go wrong when purchasing either machine
Actually, if you listened to the criticisms, it's wasn't that Apple didn't offer a headless Mac. It was that Apple didn't offer one where you could upgrade the internals yourself. The 5k iMac was frankly good enough for "serious" work and the display wasn't all that bad. What they hated was that it was a sealed box, similar to the Mac Studio today.
It's not that Apple isn't offering them what they wanted. It's that they don't want to pay more than the absolute bare minimum for it.
I was around here in 2017, and I bought the iMac Pro. The 'sealed box' situation was already a given, at that point in time. We had already made the transition to the 2016/2017 MacBook Pros with 'soldered everything', so anyone expecting upgradeability got a slight reprieve with the RAM in the 2018 Mac mini, but anything beyond was false hope.
The 2020 iMac 27" had upgradable RAM. (and it's easy to do, there's a trap door). I went from 4G at purchase to 128G for less than $400.
Not really. Samsung makes 6GB and 12GB LPDDR5 memory chips just like Apple uses in on the Apple Silicon SoCs. In fact, I am sure they do use them and that it is par of the reason we have the dizzying array of RAM options on the Pro and Max chips.
Also, 320 GB SSDs do exist, but they are typically either older or enterprise oriented devices that are over-provisioned/spread their writes out over more memory to prolong their usable life.
Dude relax... Macs are about the user experience, not the specs. You're freaking out about only 4GB of RAM. You've got 8GB and you're upset demanding 4GB more. It's no big deal. The iMac will work just fine with 8GB. You can either choose to enjoy your new purchase or choose to hate it. And BTW it's not like Apple doesn't let you pay for more. You can change a dozen different things on the iMac including the RAM, SSD, colour, keyboard, mouse, trackpad. I plan to buy a "base" 8GB iMac in the spring and I plan to thoroughly enjoy every minute I spend using it.
If you're going the M2 Pro Mac Mini route I would save the $200 on the 512 to 1TB storage upgrade and put that towards a quality Thunderbolt SSD enclosure. That way when you upgrade your machine again you can take the added storage with you.
No don't. This kind of wastage is rife. A friend went in to audit a small charity, and found that a previous employer (who'd been sacked for something unrelated) had used charity funds to buy himself a £2700 MacBook Pro. For basically emails and small database/Excel/Word type stuff. Wow. So at least £2000 more than was absolutely necessary (a £200 tablet would have done the job tbh). Fortunately he'd been sacked before he'd had the chance to grab the MacBook (they strongly suspect he'd intended to have it as his own personal machine), but they managed to recoup only £500 or so from selling it. This is a charity that only gets a few thousand a year after expenses, for funds for such things as new computers, so incredibly selfish and wasteful.
A college I went to in the early 90s had an administrator who nabbed a brand new Mac for his office, when those were meant for Graphic Design etc type courses. Admin staff were allocated basic PCs for their own use. So he had a £5000+ set up (at early 90s prices too!) for emails etc. How he didn't get sacked I don't know, probably because he managed to claim it was a 'mistake' or something. Shyster. Again, the college didn't have much money, so that machine was one of very few the college could actually afford anyway, and had come out of the Art Dept budget, not the admin one.
Loads of other similar stories over the years. People claim they 'need' a top spec machine, when in reality they only need something quite basic. Hey; gotta have the latest top spec MBP to surf the web in Starbucks though, right?
That's part of it - and probably what the loudest noises from the peanut gallery were yelling (even if they had no interest in buying one) - but its not just that - the whole all-in-one thing is questionable from a "pro"/serious enthusiast perspective.
That Apple 5k@27" panel is certainly a great display - if you want a 5k 27" display permanently welded to your computer. If you wanted some other size/shape/technology/configuration - tough.
Want a pair/trio of displays with the same size/height/resolution/colour profile? Tough - closest thing would have been the LG Ultrafine - not necessarily an exact match.
Want a 32"+ display? Tough.
Want a display on an articulated arm... well, you could get the VESA option and put the whole Mac (with all the extra bulk and sockets for your network & external devices) on an arm. Kludge.
Want a 4k/1440p/1080p display (maybe with a particular colour profile) because its actually a better fit for your workflow? Tough.
...OK you can always have those things as a secondary screen, but then you've got that big 27" black mirror that you don't really need.
Then there's the whole thing of having to trash the screen along with the computer (whichever you upgrade first).
I bought a high-spec 5k iMac i7 in 2017 only because there was no "headless" Mac with comparable CPU/GPU power - I can't say that I hated the screen - its pretty good - but it isn't what I'd have chosen if a suitable headless machine was available - I wanted a matching pair of 4k displays. The headless options at the time were the Trashcan (by then, obsolete tech that even Apple had admitted was a dead end) or the 2014 Mini (Apple ditched all the more powerful Mini options in 2014). I did seriously consider the Trashcan or waiting for the already-announced iMac Pro, but the former was just too old, while the iMac Pro was more that I wanted to pay for a compromise.
I've now moved to a Mac Studio and a matched pair of 4k+ 28.5" 3:2 displays*. Sure, they'd lose in a side-by-side "quality" comparison with my old iMac screen - but they're pretty good. Not being a YouTube influencer, I didn't buy them to do A/B comparisons with Apple displays, I bought them to use - and the combination of resolution, size and having a matched pair gives them far greater utility value to me than a 27" 5k.
(* which the world could use more of - plan B would be regular 27" 4ks).
What a lot of people wanted at the time was a tower system with PCIe slots and space for internal drives, to replace the "classic" Mac Pro (2006-2012 RIP) for around $2000-$3000. Apple didn't offer anything like that after 2012 - and even after they acknowledged that in their spring 2017 "apology" their response was the grotesquely over-engineered 2019 Mac Pro which started at double that price and didn't start to make price/performance sense until you spent $12k+ on it.
Post Apple Silicon, a regular "tower" Mac for a sensible price isn't going to happen. The new Mac Pro is even more niche than the 2019 and only those who absolutely need huge internal SSDs and/or specialist interface cards for which TB4 just doesn't cut the mustard need bother with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the current Mac Pro is the last of its ilk.
That was an existing design. After the 2018 Mac mini/2019 Mac Pro, there were no new designs with upgradeable RAM and no 'real' upgradeable SSD since about 2012.
True - although I believe the iMac Pro RAM was upgradeable by licensed Apple engineers (and there were plenty of DIY guides if you fancied taking a pizza cutter to the glue holding on the screen...) and the 2018 Mini was unofficially DIY upgradeable.
Its worth remembering that upgradeable RAM isn't possible with current* LPDDR (low power) tech - it has to be soldered - so there was a reason for that in the Intel MacBook models that used LPDDR (and its the same in comparable PC laptops)... and since the move to Apple Silicon everything uses LPDDR - and directly mounted on the CPU package to boot - so upgradeable RAM isn't happening in Macs again.
* Samsung have actually announced modular LPDDR RAM that could potentially allow upgrades, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that to turn up in Macs.
I think "upgradability" is a bit overrated - price/capacity isn't plummeting the way it did back in the 80s/90s and it should be straightforward to just get the RAM you need to start with. The problem is Apple's pathetic base RAM/SSD specs on the plain M1/M2/M3 and their sky-high BTO upgrade prices (that they can get away with these is likely the only reason it is even worth the logistic hassle of making 8GB M1/M2/M3 packages). People shouldn't have to agonize over whether they need 16GB RAM as if it were some sort of specialist luxury. Even though I put a third party RAM upgrade in my 2017 iMac, that went in on day one and was never changed - it was only DIY because Apple wanted 3x the money to fit it BTO.
Soldered-in SSDs however, are inexcusable on anything bigger than a tablet. SSDs wear out (in a way that other solid-state components don't) or can be bricked by software faults and shouldn't be soldered in, full stop. At least my Studio has removable/replaceable SSDs, even if Apple block upgrades.
Same here. My 2019 27-inch iMac came with 8GB of RAM. I was going to upgrade that to 32GB but OWC was having a sale and I got a 64GB set for the same price. The machine is still working well today. But I fully expect Apple to halt compatibility with new OS’s by the end of 2024.
Soldered-in RAM and SSDs exist because of corporate cynicism. They want to force you to keep buying new machines when they decide you should - not when you need it.
It's actually not the same design, its a whole different model number as well.
The processor is a gen 10, comet lake processor, not one available in 2017 and there are some other differences like faster RAM, ...
It's the same design that allows for RAM upgrades. I'm not talking about refreshed chips, I'm referring to the fact that the 2020 iMac has the same industrial design as the 2014 versions, which allowed for the RAM upgrade, i.e. the 2020 is "an existing design".
Yes, it is. They could’ve gone from 8/16 to 12/24 instead of 8/16/24. At a 2×$200 premium the new RAM option is moot. Everyone who hoped the new iMac would be a considerable improvement over the old after 2½ years are rightfully disappointed.
Good points. I certainly don't buy Apple to save money. But outstanding performance is worth it IMO. In my case, once the dust settled a bit on the M1 and there was some real-world feedback, I first bought an M1 iMac for audio production, ponied up the Apple tax to spec it out, and now have a Logic powerhouse. It takes everything I throw at it without breaking a sweat. Running in total silence is nearly worth it in itself. At the opposite extreme, there was one entrenched Intel genius on here who wrote a custom benchmark to conclude that the entire M-Series is bogus, and couldn't possibly match his Intel box for the extreme performance demands of his data entry workload (he kept going on about his "workload" in Acrobat and Excel). JFC. That said, for my usage I have no need for an M3.
Last edited:
It seems like a limitation of the all-in-one form factor in general. Thermal throttling is inevitable at a certain point, no matter how you redesign it.
My 2020 iMac never thermally throttles, it's actually does quite well even when using multiple VM's. (i7, 128G of RAM)
Any modern CPU can thermally throttle and that's a great thing, but if your workload fits the CPU/RAM/SSD well, it'll never need it.
Hmm. Maybe it's a side-effect of the xeon processors they used in the iMac Pro then? I don't really do anything intensive on my 5k iMac (bought it really for the larger screen), so I can't really attest to what sort of load it can take.
Probably not enough RAM or the workload is way out there, Xeons can do a LOT without throttling. Of course it's a higher end CPU, so you can push it even more.