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I'm sitting here on a 2012 imac with a fusion drive. This drive never seemed to give much performance but it absolutely tanked once it converted to APFS. The co

I'm sitting here on a 2012 imac with a fusion drive. This drive never seemed to give much performance but it absolutely tanked once it converted to APFS. The computer became unusable to the point that I had to buy an external SSD and use that as my main disk. Now i'm very disappointed that it doesn't support Big Sur despite being only 8 years old. I will wait for the apple silicon because i don't anticipate that intel will be supported for too long. Apple will make "core features" of their OS depend on something that isn't shipping in intel silicon sooner than later.

donatj 6y ago
How much RAM do you have? I recently upgraded my 2012 iMac from 8gb to 32gb and the performance is like night and day, I suspect because it has more memory to use for disk cache. It's a fully usable machine again.
- goalieca 6y ago
  Upgraded to 24GB. It helps restarting applications because it caches.
api 6y ago
APFS is as far as I know designed for flash and performs really badly on spinning disk. They still provide HFS+ and ExFAT as the options if you format an external spinning disk.
- easton 6y ago
  Will macOS install on a non APFS volume though?
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > Will macOS install on a non APFS volume though? It depends on the macOS. Only Catalina and higher (macOS 10.15) require APFS. macOS 10.14 and Mac OS X 10.x may use HFS+. That is, though High Sierra and Mojave both "want" APFS, they may be coaxed (cloned) into booting on HFS+. [0] [0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/327051/can-you-update-to-macos-10-14-mojave-without-converting-to-apfs https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/327051/can-you-upd...
prepend 6y ago
You could just replace the drive in the iMac. It’s fairly easy to buy a new drive, clone your current onto it, and install it. I had a tech come to the house and do it for under $100.
kasperni 6y ago
> Now i'm very disappointed that it doesn't support Big Sur despite being only 8 years old. This can hardly come as a big surprise given that a maximum of 7-8 years of support for latest MacOS has been the norm for pretty much forever.
uptown 6y ago
I'm also on a 27" 2012 iMac. Have 32gb inside. I've had the internal drive fail a few times, once under warranty - another time due to age. I'm about to transition to an external SSD as my boot drive since the SSD part of the fusion drive is on its last legs, and keep the internal 6tb HDD for storage. When Apple silicon rolls around, I'm planning to update. Apart from the drives, the machine has been a total rock. No performance issues, apart from when the drives had their issues, but hard to complain this deep into its lifespan.

donatj 6y ago

How much RAM do you have? I recently upgraded my 2012 iMac from 8gb to 32gb and the performance is like night and day, I suspect because it has more memory to use for disk cache. It's a fully usable machine again.

goalieca 6y ago
Upgraded to 24GB. It helps restarting applications because it caches.

api 6y ago

APFS is as far as I know designed for flash and performs really badly on spinning disk. They still provide HFS+ and ExFAT as the options if you format an external spinning disk.

easton 6y ago
Will macOS install on a non APFS volume though?
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > Will macOS install on a non APFS volume though? It depends on the macOS. Only Catalina and higher (macOS 10.15) require APFS. macOS 10.14 and Mac OS X 10.x may use HFS+. That is, though High Sierra and Mojave both "want" APFS, they may be coaxed (cloned) into booting on HFS+. [0] [0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/327051/can-you-update-to-macos-10-14-mojave-without-converting-to-apfs https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/327051/can-you-upd...

prepend 6y ago

You could just replace the drive in the iMac. It’s fairly easy to buy a new drive, clone your current onto it, and install it. I had a tech come to the house and do it for under $100.

kasperni 6y ago

> Now i'm very disappointed that it doesn't support Big Sur despite being only 8 years old. This can hardly come as a big surprise given that a maximum of 7-8 years of support for latest MacOS has been the norm for pretty much forever.

uptown 6y ago

I'm also on a 27" 2012 iMac. Have 32gb inside. I've had the internal drive fail a few times, once under warranty - another time due to age. I'm about to transition to an external SSD as my boot drive since the SSD part of the fusion drive is on its last legs, and keep the internal 6tb HDD for storage. When Apple silicon rolls around, I'm planning to update. Apart from the drives, the machine has been a total rock. No performance issues, apart from when the drives had their issues, but hard to complain this deep into its lifespan.