When to upgrade the 2020 iMac 5K?

[tothemoonsands]

I'd recommend keeping the 2020 and adding a Studio M3 + Studio next to it. It gives you plenty of time to transition your heaviest workloads over to the Studio while allowing you to run stuff on the iMac if some software doesn't run well on Apple Silicon. It will also give you a backup system.

Very interesting! My only concern is the requirement of allowing keyboard and trackpad to connect to both.

Does Luna Display adapter work well?

Or alternatively, I thought about having a 2 in/2 out USB switcher and Being able to press a button to toggle between which Mac the keyboard and trackpad are connected to. Luna would certainly be easier, although if I ever ran independently I’d still need the USB switcher too.

 

[tothemoonsands]

Reads like you are leaning on an HDD boot drive for the slow boot time. One of the great benefits of Intel Macs is the ability to evolve key hardware inside (or out). Consider replacing the (presumed) HDD with an SSD and/or shift your boot drive to an external SSD and it will boot up almost as fast as Silicon SSD (much faster than an HDD boot drive).

Bonuses:

• you can easily evolve the size of the internal boot drive if you perhaps feel you need more internal storage after 3 years... something the Silicon crowd can't do.
• competition among SSD suppliers will make your upgrade size options much cheaper than Apple's silicon options... much, MUCH cheaper if you choose to make a big leap in storage size.
• when you do replace it, that Mac could be repurposed as a full-time Windows machine, so you can have both native Silicon and native Windows. If you have any Windows exclusive needs/wants, that's a great benefit. AND
• when replaced, it will give you a way to reach back to apps that never "throw the one switch" in the compiler and thus need an Intel Mac to keep running after Apple ends Rosetta 2. I still have one, mostly-unused Mac Mini running Snow Leopard for an ability to reach back to a couple of PowerPC apps that never made that leap to Intel. There will certainly be some apps that never go Silicon.

It’s actually SSD. Not horrible boot time but definitely way slower than the M1 Mini I run as a server. Might just be all the apps I have opening at launch, I suppose.

I love the idea of running windows, but my only concern, as I started just in my response above to someone else, is having multiple keyboards and trackpads. I’d need to figure out a USB switcher to make it easy with 1 keyboard + 1 trackpad.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

If it is all of the apps opening, about the same slow would show with Silicon. It is faster but not that much faster.

In all of the years I bootcamped on Intel Macs, I did use the same keyboard + mouse (never tried trackpad). But if you mean as 2 separate computers, just use 2 keyboards and mouse/trackpad. Else, dual computer KVM switch may be the solution to share between 2 computers.

In my case, I have 2 computers (Silicon + PC) sharing the same UW monitor. It happens to have a built-in KVM, so they share a keyboard and could share a mouse.

 

[pshufd]

If I was serious about bumping it to 64GB I'd have price tracker on https://camelcamelcamel.com/ since 2015 for that SKU.

With 3 years more to go... I am unsure if it is worth the spend. May be better to buy something else at that $900 price point.

There was a 2019 iMac 27 for sale locally for $400 but I passed on it as it was an hour away. I'm sure that there will be more of them down the road.

I have 176 GB of RAM on my 2 Windows systems and 176 GB of RAM on my Mac systems so I have a lot of RAM on several systems. I just can't fit them all on my desk.

 

[pshufd]

Very interesting! My only concern is the requirement of allowing keyboard and trackpad to connect to both.

Does Luna Display adapter work well?

Or alternatively, I thought about having a 2 in/2 out USB switcher and Being able to press a button to toggle between which Mac the keyboard and trackpad are connected to. Luna would certainly be easier, although if I ever ran independently I’d still need the USB switcher too.

You can use Universal Control or Synergy to control both with one keyboard and mouse. That's my current setup, M1 Max Studio on the left with keyboard and mouse and Synergy (free) server and the 2015 iMac on the right. I just move the mouse to the edge of the rightmost monitor on the Studio and it goes into the iMac screen and the keyboard focus goes to the iMac.

I've been running multiple systems on my desk since around 2008.

Synergy works with Windows and Linux systems too.