[schell]

As a PBS announcer and intensive user and editor of music files, I feel as though the elephant in the room has not exactly been missed but downplayed. After wearing out the Superdrive in my previous iMac, I quickly went through, in short order, two external Superdrives, which sacrifice practicality to style, making them dicey substitutes for the onboard drive. Fortunately, there are several non-Apple external drive/burners that are far more dependable at half the price of Apple's buggy version (which begrudges the user a tray--not even an "eject" button). Only because of these options am I willing to order a new iMac. (Fusion sounds good, though I could use more help on the i5 vs. i7 call.)

[icerabbit]

schell, on 24 January 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:

As a PBS announcer and intensive user and editor of music files, I feel as though the elephant in the room has not exactly been missed but downplayed. After wearing out the Superdrive in my previous iMac, I quickly went through, in short order, two external Superdrives, which sacrifice practicality to style, making them dicey substitutes for the onboard drive. Fortunately, there are several non-Apple external drive/burners that are far more dependable at half the price of Apple's buggy version (which begrudges the user a tray--not even an "eject" button). Only because of these options am I willing to order a new iMac. (Fusion sounds good, though I could use more help on the i5 vs. i7 call.)

For day-to-day computing needs and the average computer user, a core i5 will be plenty fast for years to come. It blows the computing power of previous systems (be they G5, core duo or core 2 duo) out the water in terms of processing power.

If you have more advanced needs like video conversion, model rendering, etc. where more cores and extra MHz help you finish those tasks faster; then a core i7 is a worthy upgrade.

The slowest components are really the human operator, hard drive and internet.

I just upgraded my new primary system (mini late 2012) with a fast solid state drive and 16GB RAM and couldn't be happier with the faster response times from startup throughout everything. The annoying and sad thing is: it even makes browsing the internet faster. It really does, because Safari up to OS X 10.6.8 has a big memory leak and soon starts paging the slowest component aka hard drive. This has been bugging me for many years and Apple never fixed it. Anyway. If you don't have the option to replace/upgrade the hard drive yourself, then a fusion drive is recommended. It is not just a minor difference in speed, it's a big step forward.

[Bialystock]

Is it harder to use? Yes. Need to rotate the entire computer just to insert common plug-ins.

No optical drive, so extra expense and unnecessary junk and cables hanging off the back, again hard to reach. Just saying I don't use them is not going to make a big fat lie believable.

Extremely expensive Fusion drive makes no sense. Just use the enormous extra Apple charge for a bigger SSD, or attach an external large HDD or both.

Some internal HDDs are reportedly slower than even the models before! Is this designed to make Fusion drives look good by comparison?

Lack of upgradeability and the extreme cost of the inevitable repairs and upgrades are the clincher.

Nothing of interest here. Pass.

[palane]

Quote

Computer builder: You are definetly an apple fandboy...

Sheesh. If somebody is going to troll, they could at least spell it correctly.

[palane]

A note to MacWorld. These two desktops just became available as refurbs, so I went to check the SpeedMark scores. They do not show up in the MacWorld comparisons (only BTO 2012 iMacs do), even though this review has them.