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Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019. It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinnin
by tambourine_man 8y ago
Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs. In 2019.
It undermines the brand. Any Mac a customer buys should have good enough performance. 5400 spinning disk hasn’t been fast enough for a decade.
- justjash 8y agoYeah, I bought my wife an iMac 4-5 years ago with the standard HD config and it feels almost useless being so slow. My even older MBA with half the RAM and an SSD is much more usable.
- Angostura 8y agoWorth popping an aftermarker SSD (or Fusion Drive) in there.
- systemtest 8y agoI did it once and removing the big glass plate assembly with magnets is nerve-wracking.
- sudhirj 8y agoAnd no longer possible, think the newer models have fused glass.
- rudiv 8y agoReplacement is still possible (I used to work in a shop that did the same) but definitely way out of the reach of users. If I recall correctly, you have to order replacement adhesive from Apple, and when I was working there third-parties hasn't come out with their own replacement adhesive yet (Apple will not sell any sort of parts to users).
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoYou can buy self adhesive strips on eBay, I upgraded a 21.5" machine last year.
- scarface74 8y agoOr just buy an external drive....
- blueberry_47 8y agoMy similar aged, non-HD iMac became unusable until I wiped and reinstalled the OS. (I had been upgrading it in place for years). The process was surprisingly fun, too.
- bluedino 8y agoWith current SSD prices being at rock bottom, can a 128GB SSD cost more than a 5400RPM 2.5" drive?
- SteveNuts 8y agoIt'll cost the same but your 5400RPM drive will have about 30x more storage.
- dessant 8y agoI think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market. https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sata-ssd.html#WDS100T2B0A https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat... https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desktop-hard-drive.html#WD10EZEX https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...
- SteveNuts 8y agoI was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available". A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ukyrgf 8y ago120GB SSDs are $20 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077ZK1FJF/
- dessant 8y agoBoth storage types will have comparable prices at 128GB, and their cost per GB will decrese at different rates as you increase storage capacity. It's not fair to compare pricing between different storage capacities across different storage types, that is why I have shared 1TB drives from the same vendor. Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20. https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp/B01N6JQS8C/ https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp...
- pixl97 8y ago"But we cant compromise profits of our high end line"
- _red 8y agoSometime around 2013-2014 it began to be visible that Apple stopped trying to make "the best hardware in its class" and migrated to "how does this fit in a marketing matrix". Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.
- huffmsa 8y agoCook is doing exactly what he's best at, which is what you said. Optimizing every last cent out of a process. Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.
- scarface74 8y agoSo you don’t remember back in the first Apple heyday of the 80s when Jean-Louis Gassée was leading the charge (no he wasn’t the CEO) to sell overpriced Macs with 40% profit margins?
- huffmsa 8y agoThere's nothing wrong with a high profit margin. I'm all for it. I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc. But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.
- scarface74 8y ago
- nathanaldensr 8y agoI have an ancient Dell Precision M6600 with a Core i7... and an ancient 5400 RPM hard drive. The machine is unusable. It's worse than nearly any other machine with an SSD--even one with a much weaker processor.
- dijit 8y agoit's SATA so you can replace it with anything you like; if you're not fond of paying the extra $200 for 25% of the storage capacity. A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.
- xavieralexandre 8y agoGetting max performance is not that obvious. You'll want to go through the the PCIe port and find a M2 NVME/PCIe Mac adapter.
- dijit 8y agoSure. But the drive that is inside is listed as being SATA. I haven’t seen a tear down but it’s not soldered or proprietary at least.
- xavieralexandre 8y agoThe spinning disc drive is SATA and non proprietary (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Blade+SSD+Replacement/15758#s49773 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). The SSD is not and use a proprietary PCI-e connector (https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Blade+SSD+Replacement/15758#s49827 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...). You can find adapters though (https://www.amazon.de/Sintech-M-2-PCIe-2280-SSD-Karte-MZ-JPU128T-SD6PQ4M-128G/dp/B01CWWAENG/ https://www.amazon.de/Sintech-M-2-PCIe-2280-SSD-Karte-MZ-JPU...).
- dijit 8y agoThat's pretty gross. Thanks for the info. :\
- javagram 8y agoReplacing the hard drive in these macs requires separating the display. Possible but a delicate operation. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Display+Hard+Drive+Replacement/30522 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di... I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.
- lesss365 8y agoDoes it still hold that SSDs are harder to recover data from than HDDs? Or is that out the window?
- Tepix 8y agoApple had a backup solution that was easy to use.
- toastking 8y agoYeah Time Machine is great. I'm not sure that was the issue. I think it's that SSD's are more expensive.
- umvi 8y agoMy wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on. I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here). At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since. But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- okmokmz 8y agoRestore form backups. Chances are if you're at the point where you're trying to do data recovery you're already hosed.
- maxxxxx 8y agoFrom my experience SSDs die hard and you will get nothing back from them. I always thought they may go into read only mode but I have never seen that.
- syn0byte 8y agoMeh, not defending Apple in any way but RPM isn't a very useful metric without other specs on the drive. Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records. This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.
- dictum 8y agoThis is Dongle Inc. we're talking about. These days, hard drives should be outside the iMac chassis, and its internal storage should be SSD only. Fusion Drive is a hack.
- huffmsa 8y agoFusion with optane would be acceptable. Or even m.2. but not SSD and HDD at the prices they want.
- bluedino 8y agoHave you used a MacBook Pro (2012 or older) or iMac with a regular hard drive? You can't even surf the web with them and they take 2 minutes to boot up.
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoI'm writing this from a 2010 Mac mini with a regular hard drive. It's fine. Not snappy, but fine.
- owenwil 8y agoHave you used the 5,400 RPM iMac? It's incredibly laggy out of the box. Even booting takes 1-3 full minutes. It crunches just opening apps. With all that other hardware, it's just a waste: you're drinking an i7 through a straw.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoIt’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library. My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now. Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.
- resters 8y agoI made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system. I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes. The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.
- scarface74 8y agoSo you couldn’t just by an SSD external drive and boot off of that?
- melling 8y agoHorrible. I bought a 2010 iMac with a 5400 HD and a MacBook Pro with an SSD at the same time. The iMac became unusable long before the MacBook Pro because of its spinning drive. In fact, the laptop is still usable.
- scarface74 8y agoApple usually reduces the price even further for educational sales. It has to be cheap when you are selling them for a lab setting. It’s good enough for those settings.
- owenwil 8y agoLab settings? What school is buying hardware these days? The majority in my area are either investing in Chromebooks and dropping purchases of their own devices, or making kids buy Chromebooks.
- scarface74 8y agoColleges aren’t buying labs full of Chromebooks...
- asdff 8y agoThey aren't buying iMacs, either. I work at one of the largest unis in the US and everything is dell optiplex from the libraries, to the lecture halls, to the research labs, and the hospitals. The only iMacs I've seen are requested specifically by faculty for their office, or are 10 years old in some windowless back room hooked up to a random microscope running snow leopard. That being said, I've never set foot near any art buildings so I don't know what happens in there regarding their machines.
- scarface74 8y agoTwo colleges instead of one don't make it less anecdotal...
- 0xffff2 8y agoAre many colleges buying computers at all? My university CS and engineering schools both just required that students supply their own computer that was sufficient for the coursework.
- 8y ago
- 0815test 8y agoThe weird thing is that slow spinning-rust is still highly usable in linux, at least in my experience. It helps that linux tends to leave a lot more RAM available as a disk cache.
- Reason077 8y ago”Still selling brand new machines with 5400 rpm HDs.” This doesn’t even make sense given how cheap SSDs are now. Especially with Apple’s buying power. I’m sure some people still want high-capacity HDDs for various workloads, but that’s what Thunderbolt 3 is for, surely?
- hinkley 8y agoWhen I still gamed, I was one of the first people in my group to get an SSD. A few days later the game glitched the graphics card and I had to reboot. Restarted the machine, the game, voice chat, logged back in and playing again in just under 30 seconds. That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.