Thank you for watching! Emails take a longer time to go through than you’d expect sometimes. Make sure you’re prepared with an all-in-one writing tool like Grammarly! It’s FREE, why not? Sign up for a FREE account and get 20% off Grammarly Premium: grammarly.com/MacAddress
Just throw in a SSD for some extra speed. But yes, $800-900 for a 4 year old 2nd-hand computer is dumb... Still, if that's what you want, just replace the drive and max out the memory.
I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY!
Tip: Look for these offline. Many university comms/ed departments and creative firms that bought these for interns have been so angry with their performance that they recycle or fire sale them on the regular ( free to well under $500). Just buy an external SSD like a Samsung T5 and boot macOS off it, and it runs just fine.
for only a few dollars more, get the screen glue kit and a wheel tool to pop the screen out, and install the ssd directly inside. just load it with the OS before hand, and install it. a good time to toss in a little extra ram too
@@ghomerhust on these modern Macs you don’t even have to load the OS before you install the SSD, just hold R/command-R on boot and it’ll download it from the internet for you
@@kfj6709 IT and tech are using windows or linux, and don't know for sure how the specs match up to usability on MacOS, outside synthetic payloads. If the input to them is "we need macs, doesn't matter which, as many and as cheap as possible", then they get macs, as many and cheap as possible. GIGO.
Fun fact: the hard drives in these iMacs are slower than the drives that were shipped in 2003-2012. There's absolutely no reason why they can't ship a 7200 rpm drive in them.
Throwback to when you could get 10k or 15k RPM SAS drives in Macs. Kinda want to buy one now just for the experience. Never could afford them when they were relevant lol.
I’m both a PC and Apple user and I have to say that this channel is one of the best. I love that they also address (pun intended) the bad/cons in Apple products. Happy subscriber here.
Completely agree, too many Apple/Mac channels treat the product as worth it weight in myrrh, and that if you disagree that you just need to bask in your wrongness. Love that Jonathan is objective and able to provide that viewpoint and be an apple user without being fanatic. I personally dislike apple products, mostly because of how apple treats their customers or can belittle people who disagree, but Jonathan sometimes makes me go "you have a point there, that thing is actually a good thing"
@@biotechben "I personally dislike apple products, mostly because of how apple treats their customers or can belittle people who disagree" What the hell is this sentence? You dislike the prices? The design? The leadership team? The lack of games? (Of course it's the lack of games) What the ever loving fuck is this reason you gave?
I worked at the Genius Bar for over 5 years and these things were the bane of my existence. I felt so bad for anyone that bought it. It was genuinely offensive that they sold these things into 2020. Anyway, the reason there are so many iMac Pro and these iMacs on the refurbished store is that when all the stores closed due to the pandemic, the vast majority of the staff converted to work from home and were given these. Initially my we got 27 inch iMacs, but then they ran out. So they started giving iMac Pro. Then they finally had to give these once they ran out of all the others. It’s also why they’re in good shape all things considered. They were used by one Apple employee for a few months.
I"m so glad that Apple has taken hard drives completely out of their line up. Way too many well-meaning customers bought the entry-level iMac and ended up very frustrated with how slow the drive makes the computer. I honestly wish they would have just had 128 gig SSDs and then allowed people to get external HDDs it would have been much easier on everyone.
Even the Fusion drives are way faster in my experience. I used them for several months at my school with sub-30 second boot times and reasonable speed.
Would be nice if we could add a HDD as a second drive, though, especially in the iMac and Mini. SSD is great and all, but I'd rather not spend $800 for a 2TB SSD to store my photos and videos on, when a HDD will do just fine. Internal HDD beats external storage.
@@DistrosProjects Thats because a "fusion drive" is 2 separate drives, the NVMe for boot, and the HDD for applications. According to Wikipedia, the 2017 iMac with the 1TB Fusion drive comes with a 32GB NVMe SSD, 2TB and 3TB fusion drives come with a 128GB NVMe SSD. Search Google for "fusion drive" and click on the Wikipedia link, it shows what years came with what space.
@@the_wiki9408 Are you buying the SSD from apple? Where the hell would a 2TB SSD cost $800 at current pricing. Maybe in 2015. I guess you can be thinking with install cost to switch it out. But even that would not be $800
That’s certainly been true with the iPad Mini for a long time, but with the new refresh, they seem like they’re gonna refresh it on a regular basis at this point. Even the base level iPad is refreshed annually.
If by old iPads you mean, older than 5 years... If you were going to rip Apple for anything this is not it. Apple hardware gets software support for years and years and years.
@@_sparrowhawk hey genius. They’re talking about how apple devices don’t lose value over time. Not how apple products get support for a long time. Two different concepts.
It's clear to me that modern versions of macOS aren't designed to run on HDDs. I sold a 2012 Mac mini a while back and added an SSD to it because Catalina took over 6 minutes to boot and several more to "warm up" after logging in on the old 5400rpm HDD it came with. Booting off the SSD took only about 5-10 seconds. It's no wonder why not a single modern Mac has HDDs as an option. macOS is literally unusable on anything but an SSD.
How did you get the ssd going? I have a 21.5 2014 model, but with an ssd replacement, it's extremely slow. I understand that you need to enable trim, but I couldn't get it to work
It's also a simiar story on Windows land. I ran Win10 RTM on a hard drive just fine, and also ran it on an old PC with HDD & only 2GB of RAM just fine for a month or so. But I tried it last year, and it was _pain_ even on a new system with an enterprise 14TB hard drive, no debloat script saved it.
Microsoft made a big deal about requiring TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to run Windows 11 (officially) but never made it a requirement to have an SSD (or even eMMC flash) boot drive. Windows 10 is already *just* tolerable on a mechanical drive, but with Windows 11 it's unresponsive more than half the time.
I bought a mid-tier iMac in 2014, and said “naaaahhh” on the fusion drive, despite technically understanding the underpinnings. What I had not realized is that OSX all but presumed an SSD at that point and was absolutely unbelievably slow. Worst tech mistake of my life.
My company had gotten me an iMac 27" 2019, upgraded one, with 8-core i7 and 16GB of RAM if memory serves (pun intended), but it had a Fusion Drive. Due to the corporate nature of the device, and the large number of logins and software booting at startup, the device booted as if it had a hard drive (since the SSD part of a Fusion Drive is just 32GB, which is barely enough for the base MacOS). In general very poor experience, I couldn't believe how Apple is ok with someone spending over $3k for a professional device and getting such poor performance.
Until a few weeks ago, I used to have this computer at my workplace. I’m a graphic designer that usually has 3-4 adobe apps open at all times, plus Spotify and safari. This computer was the worst thing I’ve ever used, don’t know why the still sell this (even as refurbished)
That table was so wobbly it was actually distracting :) Never understood how the same company that pushed SSD only laptops was selling macs with spinning rust in them. It always bothered me they actually sell those. Cost cutting in worst place possible.
@@brianmiller1077 Having slow computers at school made me and my family purchase my own to bring in or use at home, three times until I was finished k-highschool, just because it's "for kids" doesn't mean it should be useless, and if we want them to have the tools necessary to succeed, we should actually be doing the opposite.
When I worked for Applecare, someone called with one of these asking why her brand new computer was so slow. I recommended she return the computer and get one with an SSD.
Worst part about it by far is the mechanical HDD. Crack it open and put in an SSD, or even put MacOS on an external USB or TB3 drive and it becomes so much more usable 🤷♂️
@@groszak1 Get Sensei from Cindori, it's a useful app and includes an Apple-certified TRIM enabler for your external SSD. Helps keep it healthy for much longer.
It's crazy!! I tried to buy an iPhone 11 Pro last month (wanted a decent 5.8" phone) and it still costs almost the same price as when it was released!!!
@PERLINNOISE Not when it is the same price as a 13 Pro. Often you can get it for $100 off but that is SOMETIMES. Unless you prefer buying 2 year old tech at the same price vs brand new stuff??
My school used these for our photography/photoshop class. Used it to get my adobe certification and I didn’t notice any issues for intensive photo manipulation. Of course the personal computer I had at the time was a lot worse so anything was much better
6:48 Do *NOT* sell the ram it comes with. If you ever do need a warranty claim, they will deny it, if the original OEM ram has been swapped out for 3rd party RAM.
Idk where you’re from but for users in the US, we have a law where it’s illegal to void a warranty for broken warranty stickers or modifications to the hardware Apple would have to prove that your modification is what’s causing the issue.
@@zoruaboy This is Apple we’re talking about here. You know that right? This is the company that told CBC that it would cost over $1000 to fix their MacBook Pro when all it needed was a new internal DisplayPort cable, or the pins unbent on the current cable, which could’ve been repaired in five minutes. They’ll use any excuse to sell you a new machine. And what are you going to do if they try to pull something? Hire a lawyer?
my biggest fuck up was getting a 2017 27" iMac with the fusion drive. It's basically been relegated to a $1800 Netflix box since I picked up an M1 Pro MBP... but even 5 years later, that screen is still so pretty...
My old job bought one of the 5k iMacs with a 1TB HDD. They had this idea that just buying a new iMac meant it would be fast and didn't believe me when I complained of how unbearably slow it was. A big thing driving me out of that job was the glacially slow iMac for just doing simple things like opening Excel.
I put a two and a half inch SATA SSD in my 2012 Mac Mini and it's boot time went from 5 minutes to 30 seconds. It's crazy how slow mechanical drives were and that we put up with them for so long
My current 2015 model 15" MacBook Pro came from the Apple Refurbished store. What I like about the store is that the items look brand new. Zero scratches or anything. I am still using that same MacBook today and it still performs extremely well.
Many years ago, I ordered an i5 8 GB 2013 iMac from the refurb store and I got an i7 16 GB ram instead. I still use it everyday, but I really want the next iMac variant (even the low end M1 Pro will do). hopefully they will announce it at the March event.
0:24 Well, that's all of their products isn't it? ... Hey, don't hit me, I'm just kidding, I have an Apple device... I own a sister who owns an iPhone!
I think I have an historic example of an amazing buy from the refurb store. In 2008 I bought a refurbished gen 1 iPod touch, which was used for work purposes so was able to claim it as a tax deduction. That iPod was used for 18 months for app testing, then "retired" to be used as a bedroom music player. It has been used almost every night and is still going strong.
Funnily enough, at my local Costco the 21.5 inch imac with the 4k display and 8th gen i3-8100 ( 4c/4t) is 889$ while the one youre reviewing is (7th gen dual core hyper thread i5) is 600$ is good ole USA
My Dad has one of these. It wasn’t a bad computer when he bought it but a few years ago it got dog slow. Probably the slowest computer I’d ever used. So I wiped it and it was all fine. Long story short, whenever the file system gets switched to APFS, the system slows to a crawl. I ended up cracking it open and replacing the Hard Drive with a cheap Crucial SSD. It was like a brand new computer again. After a lot of testing I was able to pretty much confirm that the combination of APFS and a spinning hard drive is the problem. I can’t explain it in any more detail but, as long as you avoid that combination, it’s a perfectly serviceable computer for email, web, office, etc.
I spent $1600ish on a 24inch iMac years ago (right before they launched the 27” iMac). I was so happy when I got it. Then later on I realized it’s horrible for gaming, couldn’t upgrade hardly anything but the ram. Can’t use it as an external display. It’s just a paper weight now, but it’s too pretty for me to just throw away.
On my College they had a lot of these iMacs, I remember to use verbose mode to delete the config file to create a new administrator user account to install anything that I like, and to bring a external SSD to run Win10 sometimes..
60-80 megabytes per second would be great. These drives run ideally at 60-80 megabits per second in the best case scenario, sequential reads. That’s 1/8 the speed of 60-80 megabytes per second, and it gets worse. In random data access, SSDs are 100+ times quicker to retrieve small bits of data, such as what is required to boot the machine and launch a program. In random data reads, though it is a flawed metric, you can expect hard drives to operate in the range of 1-2 megabits per second, and access latency doing one thing can be a couple of seconds. Access latency doing several things at once can be 30 seconds or more. Disgusting. You’d literally be better off installing the operating system to an SD card and putting it in the slot on the back.
Ehhh, presuming that's SATA III (6.0gbps, or 6000mbps) in question, that's a max theoretical throughput of 600MB/sec (using 8/10 encoding, 2 bits of parity for every 8 bits of data meaning 10b of throughput = 1B actually sent), and even high-end SATA SSD's have problems cracking the 550MB/sec mark. So 60-80MB/sec isn't too far-fetched for old spinning rust at 5400RPM made to go in a laptop, to cap out at. Now if we were talking PATA/IDE 5400RPM hard drives, they're even WORSE, as the IDE bus for drives capped out at 133MB/sec (just below the theoretical max throughput of 150MB/sec on a SATA I 1.5gbps/1500mbps bus) and the spinning rust couldn't fully saturate THAT at the time!
I have this computer at work and I barely ever use it cos it's so bad. I know they would never pay to replace or improve it, so I have actually bought a SD card which I plan to put the OS on.
@@andyrharris That’s what SSD enclosures are for. Why pay for the storage in an SD card when a real SSD is so much faster again? Running an OS from an SD card is rough. You’re right - it’s better than a hard drive, but again, an external SSD in an enclosure is a way better choice for that application, and would be a similar price per GB.
@@ElNeroDiablo You’re right. It was I, not Jonathan, who had megabits and megabytes confused. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is that hard drives perform way worse than 60-80 MB/s most of the time - SSDs excel in access latency. I’m sure you know that, but for anyone else reading who wonders why SSDs are touted as being so much quicker when they don’t look that much faster, looking at sequential performance alone.
I’m still running an iMac from late 09, 27” 2k screen, 32gb ram, 3.3ghz i7, Radeon 6970 2gb vid card, 2tb hybrid drive. Yes, I upgraded out of warranty with many creative parts. A lot of them. Still runs like a champ.
Just to repeat, the problem is APFS. An iMac with a hard drive will never be fast but, for some reason, combining an HDD with APFS is an absolute killer. Run the same HDD on HFS+ and it’s much, much more responsive. See my other comment for how I discovered this.
An SSD upgrade was the best thing I ever did for the family 2013, 21.5 inch iMac. Sped things up 10-fold and is still used pretty much daily to this day.
This is why you boot from an external SSD with any Mac with an internal platter drive. It is insanely slow to boot up. I got in the habit of booting from external drives as I went cheap and the internal HD were _slow_ .
I had to use an (I think exactly) identical mac configuration for communications tech. Absolute hot garbage, took minutes to boot up applications and was just a horrible experience. Thankfully we were allowed to use our own computers, and my 2015 MacBook Pro with a new NVMe ssd absolutely creamed that thing.
Of all the LMG channels, I love the production quality of this one the most. (This is not just because I'm an Apple fan, which I may be). I especially love the videos set outside, like the iPad one or the airtag one. Most creative imo
My Mam and Dad both have an iMac from 2013 that both had hard drives. They were incredibly slow at doing any tasks and from my perspective weren’t usable. It kept on saying there wasn’t enough ram but what the problem was is that the hard drive was so incredibly slow it pretty much bricked the whole system. After a fresh ssd was installed they both now run much better, still slow, but now they’re at least usable.
@6:31 that is the most late 80s/early 90s computer I've seen that's basically new. Half as much RAM as it has Storage, and costs more than my first car.
My oldest laptop that's currently working in my posession is an 11 year old Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, and I upgraded the spinning hard drive to an SSD. I only have hard drives for storage on my desktop computer, but I'm thinking of replacing them with SSDs, so the only spinning things in my desktop computer would be the fans on the CPU cooler, case fans, and video card fans.
I helped a family friend with a Late 2015 27” iMac running macOS 12 today. It had a 1TB spinner and ran like absolute garbage. The CPU or RAM wasn’t being taxed, and I don’t believe any program was hammering the disk. Disk Utility didn’t say there were SMART issues. But loading any program took minutes.
I remember working with these at my old high school. When you are replacing the ancient eMacs in the spED department with these, it doesn’t seems as bad.
I added a external samsung t1 ssd to my 2017 imac, and it makes a world of difference. And since you can choose to boot from this device our imac is now up and running within half a minute or so. Only downfall, you loose a usb port, and have to be careful not to disconnect the drive. I printed a free to download bracket that slides onto the imac foot that holds the drive on the back.
Booting macOS on an external SSD and leaving the internal drive for storage is the way to go on these old iMacs. I've been doing it for years on my 2015 5k iMac. It's a great way to avoid having to take the screen off and the speed improvement is insane.
I had someone I worked with who got a 2018 Mac with an i3 8GB of ram and the 5.4k rpm driven... You can polish things so much before you realized you polished a paper weight
i got a 2018 ipad pro from their refurb store and felt basically new. And since it's basically the same as the 2020 pro with a GPU core disabled, i saved myself a ton of money while still getting Apple Pencil 2 support, 120Hz, and a usb c port. Shame there isn't a 3.5 mm jack tho
I was also browsing the refurbished section a while ago. I don’t know why anyone would spend nearly ~$1000 on a 2015 macbook when they can get a used M1 pro
@@dustojnikhummer Yeah the guy ran out, but a few months ago I guess he refurbished a bunch and just wanted to get rid of em. The laptops themselves were 2017 refreshes of the same 2016 model.
I have a base model mid 2011 iMac running High Sierra, that I upgraded to 12gb. It's never been opened fully and is almost definitely filled to the brim with dust, as I could see when upgrading the RAM, but it still boots faster than this Mac. In all my experience with old computers with HDDs, it's never been this slow to boot. In fact, those computers were actually usable.
I have a similar setup for my M1 Mini....except I purchased a Cheapie Walmart ONN 4k 43 inch HDTV to use a Monitor....with a little tweaking of the color settings in both the TV and the Mac, I have an awesome budget setup.....my Mini...now 424 days old, is the fastest Mac I have ever owned (going all the way back to my first Performa in 1995). I fully intend to get the next-gen Mini and simply plunk it down in place of my current Mac. I will pass that one down to my niece.
I got 2017 27inch with 1tb fusion drive , it was to slow ... so what I end up doing was buying an external thunderbolt drive from tekq and now it's around 1.4gb/s and it takes around 20sec to boot it :) also bought a corsair ram and now it's 48gb from base 8gb that is unusable for photoshop with A7RIV. Now I don't fell a big difference between this and my m1 macbook pro base model.
My dad has the 4K model, and it was painfully slow. He thought it was from ram, so he got someone to upgrade it, nope! It was barely noticeably faster, but he upgraded the hard drive to an ssd and now it’s really fast!
I bought my iMac around 2018 and it feels exactly the same. A “fusion” drive that’s terribly slow, a startup time that reminds me of Windows XP after years of use and it only got worse. Waiting for a 2nd gen Mac Mini with M1 to finally get rid of it.
@@the_retag who says I don’t also have a pc running for my gaming needs? I even have a raspberry pi for my Linux needs 😛 But a Mac is an amazing environment for web development and design. Their new stuff (and older stuff also) is great, it’s just this in-between line of garbage (the razor blade around the edges iMacs) they brought out that ruined iMacs for me. They were overpriced pieces of junk that Apple sold as gold.
Yep. Same here with the 2019. Apple shrank the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive in 2015 or thereabouts. My 2012 iMac boots much faster than my 2019 and both have 1TB Fusion Drives. I now use a TB3 SSD as my system drive instead. Much faster.
I purchased this system in 2017 and loved it for a short minute due to the horrible 5400 mechinal drive. Did some research and purchased a 500Gb external SSD with USB-C connectivity. Installed MacOS on the external and never looked back. I do still use the 5400 drive for data storage.
3:48 not quite true, its not M.2 - its a proprietary Apple connector. For $10 you can buy an adapter to convert it to M.2. Not all M2 drives work properly though, some take minutes to boot as Apples SSDs + drivers dont really follow spec to the letter.
There was trash can ! On apples Uk website !!!! ON the 3 Nov 2021 there was listed a 12 core 2.7 refurbished 6.1 mac pro still But for £5,149 (about $6,900usd) you have to be mad !!!
I am not sure it is fair to measure tiem for first boot since there is likely some process to complete installation and then get you to initial configuration. Would be intertesting to measure time for subsequent boots. With Apple pulling support for many things in recent years (such as older 32 bit apps), there are some people who may need an older computer to boot the last version of OS-X that supports the software they need. Another aspect is that production quantities for these models have have been committed before the date of announcement of moving to ARM was set so Apple may have found itself with surplus of older Intel Macs since people were now waiting for the new ARM ones.
The store is actually “Refurbished and Clearance”. There is a clearance section on the page but I haven’t soon anything there in a long time. I imagine they just sell those clearance products as refurbished either to make more money (clearance usually implies a bigger sale price) or to not have the “embarrassment” of having a product in clearance to prevent the _____ was a huge flop videos from being more prominent that they already are.
My grandma bought me the iMac 21.5" i3 3.6GHz 4k 2019 1TB HDD, and it was my first mac... The same slow HDD with 5400rpm. It even had been a demo product, so the HDD had also been used. I just thought it being a demo was the reason it was slow, but later found out that the model was just crap in general. I was supposed to use it for Logic, but every time I tried to open it, it would take up to 2 minutes. Now I have bought a Macbook air M1 from my own money. Such difference!
I bought an old 2010 iMac with a dead hard drive off my Grandma a few years back for like $20 and put a SATA SSD in it for maybe $40. The speed increase was insane and the only reason I don't use it now is because it's stuck on MacOS High Sierra. Otherwise it still runs better than it would've if it was brand new!
I have a 2013 21" mac and I hate how they have put a sensor on the hard drive, you if you replace the h/d with an ssd, the cooler fans ramp up to 100% all the time... almost like Apple had planned that...
I did that with my 2012 Mini. It made an amazing difference. My main Mac is now a 2019 iMac running off an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD and the old Mini still boots faster. Not as capable otherwise, but boy does it startup quick.
I'm a PC guy, but I was thinking of buying an Mac mini that is referbished. I'm just waiting for a 16gb M1 referb to show up. I want to play around with it for some light audio and random photo editing so I don't want to buy brand new as it'll probably sit unused most of the time. I don't hate apple products, I just think they have a specific use case and not daily drivable for the average person. But Great video as always Jonathan. Perhaps a video on features new Mac users should know and the history of how they came about or how to easily transition?
The MacOS machine I use to edit was a busted up 2019 MacBook Pro 6 core i7, 16gb ram, and 500gb SSD I rescued from the damaged chassis and transplanted into a custom case I built that includes integrated thunderbolt dock and access to the rest of the ports as well. It gets a lot better airflow and works extremely well for what I need (a machine to run Pixelmator and basic tasks, I have my Ryzen machine with Linux/Win10 that can handle heavy lifting). TBH I'm waiting to find an M1 MacBook air running with no lock but with a dead display/case damage to do the same thing to. I'm fairly certain with enough work I could machine a much more streamline case, possibly even integrating it into a keyboard like an old micro, with the passive cooling. Comes down to wrestling the battery and ports. If you could get full 100% performance sans batteries but plugged into power I'd go that route, but I doubt that's the case between not enough power or the security cheap hating the lack of a battery.
I don't have a link, but my last (late 2018) Macbook Pro with a 6-core I-7 was hands-down the worst Mac I've ever owned... It was always hot, always noisy (due to fans trying to tame that heat), and after upgrading from High Sierra it was terribly unstable. Apple support finally bricked it for me and I switched to an M1 mini (1TB/16Gb) and it's better in every way. I really don't know if I'll ever buy a MacBook again.
I've been booting my late 2012 iMac from an external SSD via USB for the last couple years as it too has a 5400 spinner inside it that I don't trust to not crap the bed without warning... And I live in fear that my Magic Mouse that runs on AA batteries will die one day and I'll have to get one with the charging port on the bottom
Same here 2012 model installed an SSD, used the HDD as a time machine backup drive. This thing runs like a champ! Magic Trackpad or regular mouse is a lot better than the Magic Mouse though.
This machine is very similar to my old Mac, except I had a slightly better CPU, 16GB RAM, a 4K display and decent graphics. It had a spinning hard drive like these.
Having a 2014 27-inch iMac the Fusion Drive is the biggest bottle-neck. It is okay as it starts up with SSD speed but becomes a pain as it rattles throughout the workday. That iMac is still a good computer - with an external SSD attached to it and a label attached "do not pull while running".
You complained about needing to use a SATA SSD if you upgraded, but testing on the LTT channel revealed that in real world tests the difference between NVMe and SATA was not noticeable. Granted that was gaming load times, but I'd expect OS loads to be similar.
The worst part of these machines is the awful integrated graphics trying to populate the screen. We had some designers stuck on these once, and while Photoshop or apps with rasterized images were usable, Illustrator or anything vector was the messiest most awful experience.
My Mid-2011 iMac 27" has a 1TB hard drive in it too, and has been in constant use for over 10 years. I got it for free as the hard drive was suspected to be failing, but all it needed was a fresh install of macOS as it was stuffed with bloated programs (and probably malware!). I've been using it since about July of 2021, and I just did a SMART test on it. Apparently the drive has been operating for 18,993 hours and has had 0 sector failures or SMART issues at all! That's not bad!
Oh wow! I'm using iMac 21.5 inch late 2009 right now it's still awesome WORKING and I had upgraded to 16GB of RAM with 4TB SSD in it with macOS Catalina Patcher! I'm planning to get iMac 27 inch 2021 High-End Machine this summer!
@@CajunJR00 It’s the HD6770M 512MB. Any from the 2011 series are incredibly slow. We’re talking about 10-30 seconds to minimise a window. Something to do with drivers? Not sure. High Sierra is fine for me at the mo.
Important! Never ever recommend or choose the fusion drive. It´s one of Apple´s worst idea. I have repaired a billion of these. (I´m a former Apple technician). Otherwise, many good points.
I remember getting the base iMac when they redesigned in 2012. It was great for what I needed it for - basic use. But today I would definitely go mid tier and no way I’m going back to HDD for my everyday use.
There is still an i3 variant out there from 2019 too for around $750. I'm surprised that isn't in this video instead cause I can't imagine it being half as fast as this i5 variant.
Thank you for watching! Emails take a longer time to go through than you’d expect sometimes. Make sure you’re prepared with an all-in-one writing tool like Grammarly! It’s FREE, why not? Sign up for a FREE account and get 20% off Grammarly Premium: grammarly.com/MacAddress
Just throw in a SSD for some extra speed. But yes, $800-900 for a 4 year old 2nd-hand computer is dumb... Still, if that's what you want, just replace the drive and max out the memory.
Call out the WhatsApp scam in the comment section
I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY! I HATE GRAMARLY!
Hey horst if you see this i wanna know if i could contact you via email or any non social media
Tip: Look for these offline. Many university comms/ed departments and creative firms that bought these for interns have been so angry with their performance that they recycle or fire sale them on the regular ( free to well under $500). Just buy an external SSD like a Samsung T5 and boot macOS off it, and it runs just fine.
for only a few dollars more, get the screen glue kit and a wheel tool to pop the screen out, and install the ssd directly inside. just load it with the OS before hand, and install it. a good time to toss in a little extra ram too
@@ghomerhust on these modern Macs you don’t even have to load the OS before you install the SSD, just hold R/command-R on boot and it’ll download it from the internet for you
Even in academia there are dumb sheep who buy products without knowing the specs? What's the IT dept or procurement and purchasing dept doing?
A lot of times big IT places will net boot or use them as thin clients; in these cases the onboard drive and speed don’t matter at all.
@@kfj6709 IT and tech are using windows or linux, and don't know for sure how the specs match up to usability on MacOS, outside synthetic payloads. If the input to them is "we need macs, doesn't matter which, as many and as cheap as possible", then they get macs, as many and cheap as possible. GIGO.
Fun fact: the hard drives in these iMacs are slower than the drives that were shipped in 2003-2012. There's absolutely no reason why they can't ship a 7200 rpm drive in them.
Sata 1 port .like PS3 and 4 .
@@vamwolf . Those consoles have Sata 2.
I think those macs used a 3.5" drive, not a 2.5". The entire chassis of an iMac changed in 2012. I still agree with your sentiment though.
@@wellzi2546 7200RPM drives exist in 2.5 inch sizes, although they are likely slightly slower and more expensive.
Throwback to when you could get 10k or 15k RPM SAS drives in Macs. Kinda want to buy one now just for the experience. Never could afford them when they were relevant lol.
I’m both a PC and Apple user and I have to say that this channel is one of the best. I love that they also address (pun intended) the bad/cons in Apple products. Happy subscriber here.
Completely agree, too many Apple/Mac channels treat the product as worth it weight in myrrh, and that if you disagree that you just need to bask in your wrongness. Love that Jonathan is objective and able to provide that viewpoint and be an apple user without being fanatic. I personally dislike apple products, mostly because of how apple treats their customers or can belittle people who disagree, but Jonathan sometimes makes me go "you have a point there, that thing is actually a good thing"
@@biotechben "I personally dislike apple products, mostly because of how apple treats their customers or can belittle people who disagree" What the hell is this sentence? You dislike the prices? The design? The leadership team? The lack of games? (Of course it's the lack of games)
What the ever loving fuck is this reason you gave?
@@_sparrowhawk You are literally the people he's complaining about. The worst kind of people: Company Fanboys
I worked at the Genius Bar for over 5 years and these things were the bane of my existence.
I felt so bad for anyone that bought it. It was genuinely offensive that they sold these things into 2020.
Anyway, the reason there are so many iMac Pro and these iMacs on the refurbished store is that when all the stores closed due to the pandemic, the vast majority of the staff converted to work from home and were given these.
Initially my we got 27 inch iMacs, but then they ran out. So they started giving iMac Pro. Then they finally had to give these once they ran out of all the others.
It’s also why they’re in good shape all things considered. They were used by one Apple employee for a few months.
they gave you imac pros? that's crazy
I"m so glad that Apple has taken hard drives completely out of their line up. Way too many well-meaning customers bought the entry-level iMac and ended up very frustrated with how slow the drive makes the computer. I honestly wish they would have just had 128 gig SSDs and then allowed people to get external HDDs it would have been much easier on everyone.
Even the Fusion drives are way faster in my experience. I used them for several months at my school with sub-30 second boot times and reasonable speed.
The amount of money I've made upgrading peoples iMacs to SSDs. Thank you Apple lol.
Would be nice if we could add a HDD as a second drive, though, especially in the iMac and Mini. SSD is great and all, but I'd rather not spend $800 for a 2TB SSD to store my photos and videos on, when a HDD will do just fine. Internal HDD beats external storage.
@@DistrosProjects Thats because a "fusion drive" is 2 separate drives, the NVMe for boot, and the HDD for applications. According to Wikipedia, the 2017 iMac with the 1TB Fusion drive comes with a 32GB NVMe SSD, 2TB and 3TB fusion drives come with a 128GB NVMe SSD.
Search Google for "fusion drive" and click on the Wikipedia link, it shows what years came with what space.
@@the_wiki9408 Are you buying the SSD from apple? Where the hell would a 2TB SSD cost $800 at current pricing. Maybe in 2015.
I guess you can be thinking with install cost to switch it out. But even that would not be $800
I'd say it's still a nice deal, since you got a stand for free.
If you see it from the stands point of view it got a free computer, mouse and keyboard attached to him.
You’ve got a computer for a price of a stand xD
Omg😂😂😂😂
Exactly! Will definitely pick this any day over the $999 stand, such a bargain!
@@blackhatson13 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
"Apple doesn't believe in depreciation" no truer words have been spoken. Even their old iPads that don't get updates are still absurdly expensive.
That’s certainly been true with the iPad Mini for a long time, but with the new refresh, they seem like they’re gonna refresh it on a regular basis at this point. Even the base level iPad is refreshed annually.
They believe in depreciation if you do a trade in with them!
Yet on the software side they deprecate everything (I’m talking about OpenGL)
If by old iPads you mean, older than 5 years... If you were going to rip Apple for anything this is not it. Apple hardware gets software support for years and years and years.
@@_sparrowhawk hey genius. They’re talking about how apple devices don’t lose value over time. Not how apple products get support for a long time. Two different concepts.
It's clear to me that modern versions of macOS aren't designed to run on HDDs. I sold a 2012 Mac mini a while back and added an SSD to it because Catalina took over 6 minutes to boot and several more to "warm up" after logging in on the old 5400rpm HDD it came with. Booting off the SSD took only about 5-10 seconds. It's no wonder why not a single modern Mac has HDDs as an option. macOS is literally unusable on anything but an SSD.
How did you get the ssd going? I have a 21.5 2014 model, but with an ssd replacement, it's extremely slow. I understand that you need to enable trim, but I couldn't get it to work
Really? Monterey takes ~1-2 minutes to boot up and “warm up”, and open up all of the previous apps. Using an m.2 NVME SSD
the keyword here is APFS. It's literally designed to run well on SSDs. Hence newer versions of macOS use APFS by default and run much better that way.
It's also a simiar story on Windows land. I ran Win10 RTM on a hard drive just fine, and also ran it on an old PC with HDD & only 2GB of RAM just fine for a month or so. But I tried it last year, and it was _pain_ even on a new system with an enterprise 14TB hard drive, no debloat script saved it.
Microsoft made a big deal about requiring TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to run Windows 11 (officially) but never made it a requirement to have an SSD (or even eMMC flash) boot drive. Windows 10 is already *just* tolerable on a mechanical drive, but with Windows 11 it's unresponsive more than half the time.
“You might think that this 890 dollars iMac is a great deal, but I don’t think it is. Which is why bought it”
Lol
Best reasoning ever.
Came down here for this lol
They bought it so we dont have to hahaha salute to the dedication
@@TR-qf2gt no shit sherlok :/
I bought a mid-tier iMac in 2014, and said “naaaahhh” on the fusion drive, despite technically understanding the underpinnings. What I had not realized is that OSX all but presumed an SSD at that point and was absolutely unbelievably slow. Worst tech mistake of my life.
Same here, looking forward to a M1/2 27” when it comes out.
@@Starach have an M1 13”, it’s literally hard to believe how fast it is
My company had gotten me an iMac 27" 2019, upgraded one, with 8-core i7 and 16GB of RAM if memory serves (pun intended), but it had a Fusion Drive. Due to the corporate nature of the device, and the large number of logins and software booting at startup, the device booted as if it had a hard drive (since the SSD part of a Fusion Drive is just 32GB, which is barely enough for the base MacOS). In general very poor experience, I couldn't believe how Apple is ok with someone spending over $3k for a professional device and getting such poor performance.
Until a few weeks ago, I used to have this computer at my workplace. I’m a graphic designer that usually has 3-4 adobe apps open at all times, plus Spotify and safari. This computer was the worst thing I’ve ever used, don’t know why the still sell this (even as refurbished)
That table was so wobbly it was actually distracting :)
Never understood how the same company that pushed SSD only laptops was selling macs with spinning rust in them.
It always bothered me they actually sell those. Cost cutting in worst place possible.
It was for the K-12 market where they're basically always on.
@@brianmiller1077 Having slow computers at school made me and my family purchase my own to bring in or use at home, three times until I was finished k-highschool, just because it's "for kids" doesn't mean it should be useless, and if we want them to have the tools necessary to succeed, we should actually be doing the opposite.
@@brianmiller1077 we had two of these in the GT room in my freshman year, easily the slowest computers. somehow the windows machines were faster
@@meair what do you mean "somehow"? MacOS takes forever to boot from an HDD, Windows has always taken slightly less than forever.
When I worked for Applecare, someone called with one of these asking why her brand new computer was so slow. I recommended she return the computer and get one with an SSD.
Worst part about it by far is the mechanical HDD. Crack it open and put in an SSD, or even put MacOS on an external USB or TB3 drive and it becomes so much more usable 🤷♂️
Crack is an an apt word here. That adhesive is so much fun!
@@FungleFunTime i hate how this adhesive glues to the frame, man, I spend more time cleaning the adhesive residue than servicing the machine.
No so usable anymore onece you write too much because SSD can't handle too many writes.
@@groszak1 Get Sensei from Cindori, it's a useful app and includes an Apple-certified TRIM enabler for your external SSD. Helps keep it healthy for much longer.
It's crazy!! I tried to buy an iPhone 11 Pro last month (wanted a decent 5.8" phone) and it still costs almost the same price as when it was released!!!
@PERLINNOISE Not when it is the same price as a 13 Pro. Often you can get it for $100 off but that is SOMETIMES. Unless you prefer buying 2 year old tech at the same price vs brand new stuff??
I went from an iPhone 11 Pro to and iPhone 13 (normal) and it's a massive improvement. Same physical size too
My school used these for our photography/photoshop class. Used it to get my adobe certification and I didn’t notice any issues for intensive photo manipulation. Of course the personal computer I had at the time was a lot worse so anything was much better
How the hell does a computer from 2017 boot slower than a base model iMac G3 slot loader and still have a value in 3 digits?
software inefficiency
@@the2323guy it’s the same reason why the iPad Air gen 2 lasted as long as it did
6:48 Do *NOT* sell the ram it comes with. If you ever do need a warranty claim, they will deny it, if the original OEM ram has been swapped out for 3rd party RAM.
Idk where you’re from but for users in the US, we have a law where it’s illegal to void a warranty for broken warranty stickers or modifications to the hardware
Apple would have to prove that your modification is what’s causing the issue.
@@zoruaboy This is Apple we’re talking about here. You know that right? This is the company that told CBC that it would cost over $1000 to fix their MacBook Pro when all it needed was a new internal DisplayPort cable, or the pins unbent on the current cable, which could’ve been repaired in five minutes. They’ll use any excuse to sell you a new machine. And what are you going to do if they try to pull something? Hire a lawyer?
my biggest fuck up was getting a 2017 27" iMac with the fusion drive. It's basically been relegated to a $1800 Netflix box since I picked up an M1 Pro MBP... but even 5 years later, that screen is still so pretty...
My old job bought one of the 5k iMacs with a 1TB HDD. They had this idea that just buying a new iMac meant it would be fast and didn't believe me when I complained of how unbearably slow it was. A big thing driving me out of that job was the glacially slow iMac for just doing simple things like opening Excel.
I put a two and a half inch SATA SSD in my 2012 Mac Mini and it's boot time went from 5 minutes to 30 seconds. It's crazy how slow mechanical drives were and that we put up with them for so long
My current 2015 model 15" MacBook Pro came from the Apple Refurbished store. What I like about the store is that the items look brand new. Zero scratches or anything. I am still using that same MacBook today and it still performs extremely well.
You could get an entry level gaming laptop for less than you would pay for that slow iMac.
5:32 "Now, to confirm my hypothesis..."
Jonathan, you used hypothesis instead of theory. Thank you!!!
Many years ago, I ordered an i5 8 GB 2013 iMac from the refurb store and I got an i7 16 GB ram instead. I still use it everyday, but I really want the next iMac variant (even the low end M1 Pro will do). hopefully they will announce it at the March event.
0:24 Well, that's all of their products isn't it?
...
Hey, don't hit me, I'm just kidding, I have an Apple device... I own a sister who owns an iPhone!
I think I have an historic example of an amazing buy from the refurb store. In 2008 I bought a refurbished gen 1 iPod touch, which was used for work purposes so was able to claim it as a tax deduction. That iPod was used for 18 months for app testing, then "retired" to be used as a bedroom music player. It has been used almost every night and is still going strong.
Funnily enough, at my local Costco the 21.5 inch imac with the 4k display and 8th gen i3-8100 ( 4c/4t) is 889$ while the one youre reviewing is
(7th gen dual core hyper thread i5) is 600$ is good ole USA
My Dad has one of these. It wasn’t a bad computer when he bought it but a few years ago it got dog slow. Probably the slowest computer I’d ever used. So I wiped it and it was all fine.
Long story short, whenever the file system gets switched to APFS, the system slows to a crawl. I ended up cracking it open and replacing the Hard Drive with a cheap Crucial SSD. It was like a brand new computer again.
After a lot of testing I was able to pretty much confirm that the combination of APFS and a spinning hard drive is the problem. I can’t explain it in any more detail but, as long as you avoid that combination, it’s a perfectly serviceable computer for email, web, office, etc.
I spent $1600ish on a 24inch iMac years ago (right before they launched the 27” iMac). I was so happy when I got it. Then later on I realized it’s horrible for gaming, couldn’t upgrade hardly anything but the ram. Can’t use it as an external display. It’s just a paper weight now, but it’s too pretty for me to just throw away.
you can stream cooking tutorials on it
Linux time
Football manager runs smoothly so I don’t need to upgrade anything
On my College they had a lot of these iMacs, I remember to use verbose mode to delete the config file to create a new administrator user account to install anything that I like, and to bring a external SSD to run Win10 sometimes..
LTT: See, we’re not biased against Apple, we created Mac Address!
Mac Address: “We bought the WORST Apple product!”
I absolutely love this channel. As a tech enthusiast, I love how your coverage is both critical and fair.
60-80 megabytes per second would be great.
These drives run ideally at 60-80 megabits per second in the best case scenario, sequential reads. That’s 1/8 the speed of 60-80 megabytes per second, and it gets worse. In random data access, SSDs are 100+ times quicker to retrieve small bits of data, such as what is required to boot the machine and launch a program. In random data reads, though it is a flawed metric, you can expect hard drives to operate in the range of 1-2 megabits per second, and access latency doing one thing can be a couple of seconds. Access latency doing several things at once can be 30 seconds or more. Disgusting. You’d literally be better off installing the operating system to an SD card and putting it in the slot on the back.
Ehhh, presuming that's SATA III (6.0gbps, or 6000mbps) in question, that's a max theoretical throughput of 600MB/sec (using 8/10 encoding, 2 bits of parity for every 8 bits of data meaning 10b of throughput = 1B actually sent), and even high-end SATA SSD's have problems cracking the 550MB/sec mark.
So 60-80MB/sec isn't too far-fetched for old spinning rust at 5400RPM made to go in a laptop, to cap out at.
Now if we were talking PATA/IDE 5400RPM hard drives, they're even WORSE, as the IDE bus for drives capped out at 133MB/sec (just below the theoretical max throughput of 150MB/sec on a SATA I 1.5gbps/1500mbps bus) and the spinning rust couldn't fully saturate THAT at the time!
I have this computer at work and I barely ever use it cos it's so bad. I know they would never pay to replace or improve it, so I have actually bought a SD card which I plan to put the OS on.
@@andyrharris That’s what SSD enclosures are for. Why pay for the storage in an SD card when a real SSD is so much faster again? Running an OS from an SD card is rough. You’re right - it’s better than a hard drive, but again, an external SSD in an enclosure is a way better choice for that application, and would be a similar price per GB.
@@ElNeroDiablo You’re right. It was I, not Jonathan, who had megabits and megabytes confused. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is that hard drives perform way worse than 60-80 MB/s most of the time - SSDs excel in access latency. I’m sure you know that, but for anyone else reading who wonders why SSDs are touted as being so much quicker when they don’t look that much faster, looking at sequential performance alone.
What is that 1080p screen for 170 bucks??? You can get 1440p ones for 60 bucks!
My first mac was a refurbed core 2 duo macbook from 2007... it's still running today... not as my daily driver though
The biggest problem that computer had was a 32mb shared video memory
I’m still running an iMac from late 09, 27” 2k screen, 32gb ram, 3.3ghz i7, Radeon 6970 2gb vid card, 2tb hybrid drive. Yes, I upgraded out of warranty with many creative parts. A lot of them. Still runs like a champ.
Costco is selling this for $599 with an SSD right now.
i bought one of these and couldnt stand the slowness so i used more money and bought an m1 iMac
0:02 What music is that? It’s so relaxing and nice that I just want to fall asleep while listening to it.
Just to repeat, the problem is APFS. An iMac with a hard drive will never be fast but, for some reason, combining an HDD with APFS is an absolute killer. Run the same HDD on HFS+ and it’s much, much more responsive. See my other comment for how I discovered this.
An SSD upgrade was the best thing I ever did for the family 2013, 21.5 inch iMac. Sped things up 10-fold and is still used pretty much daily to this day.
This is why you boot from an external SSD with any Mac with an internal platter drive. It is insanely slow to boot up. I got in the habit of booting from external drives as I went cheap and the internal HD were _slow_ .
I had to use an (I think exactly) identical mac configuration for communications tech. Absolute hot garbage, took minutes to boot up applications and was just a horrible experience. Thankfully we were allowed to use our own computers, and my 2015 MacBook Pro with a new NVMe ssd absolutely creamed that thing.
Trust me, this is not the worst Apple product. The worst Apple product is the 2016 15” MacBook Pro or the iPhone 7.
Of all the LMG channels, I love the production quality of this one the most. (This is not just because I'm an Apple fan, which I may be). I especially love the videos set outside, like the iPad one or the airtag one. Most creative imo
My Mam and Dad both have an iMac from 2013 that both had hard drives. They were incredibly slow at doing any tasks and from my perspective weren’t usable. It kept on saying there wasn’t enough ram but what the problem was is that the hard drive was so incredibly slow it pretty much bricked the whole system. After a fresh ssd was installed they both now run much better, still slow, but now they’re at least usable.
You could get a baseline M1 Mini from Costco for $670 and have a 90 day return policy.
That moment when you've been binging this channel again and then they upload. Great well produced content as always. 👍
@6:31 that is the most late 80s/early 90s computer I've seen that's basically new. Half as much RAM as it has Storage, and costs more than my first car.
My oldest laptop that's currently working in my posession is an 11 year old Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, and I upgraded the spinning hard drive to an SSD.
I only have hard drives for storage on my desktop computer, but I'm thinking of replacing them with SSDs, so the only spinning things in my desktop computer would be the fans on the CPU cooler, case fans, and video card fans.
I helped a family friend with a Late 2015 27” iMac running macOS 12 today. It had a 1TB spinner and ran like absolute garbage. The CPU or RAM wasn’t being taxed, and I don’t believe any program was hammering the disk. Disk Utility didn’t say there were SMART issues. But loading any program took minutes.
I remember working with these at my old high school. When you are replacing the ancient eMacs in the spED department with these, it doesn’t seems as bad.
Oh so great I just realized that my computer is a laptop with a big screen
I added a external samsung t1 ssd to my 2017 imac, and it makes a world of difference. And since you can choose to boot from this device our imac is now up and running within half a minute or so. Only downfall, you loose a usb port, and have to be careful not to disconnect the drive. I printed a free to download bracket that slides onto the imac foot that holds the drive on the back.
Booting macOS on an external SSD and leaving the internal drive for storage is the way to go on these old iMacs. I've been doing it for years on my 2015 5k iMac. It's a great way to avoid having to take the screen off and the speed improvement is insane.
Fun fact, I have an old Mac mini from 2009 which I use as a server. It's still booting from a spinning drive, into Debian. Working pretty well ! 😬
I had someone I worked with who got a 2018 Mac with an i3 8GB of ram and the 5.4k rpm driven... You can polish things so much before you realized you polished a paper weight
TBF the education iMacs sucked back in the day too. I’ve always steered potential customers away from them.
i got a 2018 ipad pro from their refurb store and felt basically new. And since it's basically the same as the 2020 pro with a GPU core disabled, i saved myself a ton of money while still getting Apple Pencil 2 support, 120Hz, and a usb c port. Shame there isn't a 3.5 mm jack tho
I was also browsing the refurbished section a while ago. I don’t know why anyone would spend nearly ~$1000 on a 2015 macbook when they can get a used M1 pro
Ports and the old design
Or the fact that the used Asus ZenBook I just snagged for under $250 has an 512GB SSD *and* a faster quad-core CPU (i5-8250U).
@@handlemonium 8250U for 250 dollars? Jeez
@@dustojnikhummer Yeah the guy ran out, but a few months ago I guess he refurbished a bunch and just wanted to get rid of em.
The laptops themselves were 2017 refreshes of the same 2016 model.
I have a base model mid 2011 iMac running High Sierra, that I upgraded to 12gb. It's never been opened fully and is almost definitely filled to the brim with dust, as I could see when upgrading the RAM, but it still boots faster than this Mac. In all my experience with old computers with HDDs, it's never been this slow to boot. In fact, those computers were actually usable.
I have a similar setup for my M1 Mini....except I purchased a Cheapie Walmart ONN 4k 43 inch HDTV to use a Monitor....with a little tweaking of the color settings in both the TV and the Mac, I have an awesome budget setup.....my Mini...now 424 days old, is the fastest Mac I have ever owned (going all the way back to my first Performa in 1995). I fully intend to get the next-gen Mini and simply plunk it down in place of my current Mac. I will pass that one down to my niece.
I had the 2015 version of this and yeah, it was not great for startup, but once it got running! Once it got running it ... still wasn't great.
I got 2017 27inch with 1tb fusion drive , it was to slow ...
so what I end up doing was buying an external thunderbolt drive from tekq and now it's around 1.4gb/s and it takes around 20sec to boot it :)
also bought a corsair ram and now it's 48gb from base 8gb that is unusable for photoshop with A7RIV.
Now I don't fell a big difference between this and my m1 macbook pro base model.
Helped a friend with their mac recently. it was slow as hell but he said it was brand new. This was the problem :(
Be a good friend and swap the HDD with an SSD. Night and day difference he will owe you big time lol
My dad has the 4K model, and it was painfully slow. He thought it was from ram, so he got someone to upgrade it, nope! It was barely noticeably faster, but he upgraded the hard drive to an ssd and now it’s really fast!
love how i just stumbled across this. My mums got this 2017 one and i always thought it was SO SLOW. Sad really for the price
I bought my iMac around 2018 and it feels exactly the same. A “fusion” drive that’s terribly slow, a startup time that reminds me of Windows XP after years of use and it only got worse.
Waiting for a 2nd gen Mac Mini with M1 to finally get rid of it.
Just leave apple
With almost any regular pc you can swap the drive and off you go
@@the_retag You can swap in an ssd on these. It is more annoying on an imac but spent $40 on a kit and buy a cheap $60 SSD - $100 cost.
@@the_retag who says I don’t also have a pc running for my gaming needs? I even have a raspberry pi for my Linux needs 😛 But a Mac is an amazing environment for web development and design. Their new stuff (and older stuff also) is great, it’s just this in-between line of garbage (the razor blade around the edges iMacs) they brought out that ruined iMacs for me. They were overpriced pieces of junk that Apple sold as gold.
Yep. Same here with the 2019. Apple shrank the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive in 2015 or thereabouts. My 2012 iMac boots much faster than my 2019 and both have 1TB Fusion Drives. I now use a TB3 SSD as my system drive instead. Much faster.
I purchased this system in 2017 and loved it for a short minute due to the horrible 5400 mechinal drive. Did some research and purchased a 500Gb external SSD with USB-C connectivity. Installed MacOS on the external and never looked back. I do still use the 5400 drive for data storage.
3:48 not quite true, its not M.2 - its a proprietary Apple connector. For $10 you can buy an adapter to convert it to M.2. Not all M2 drives work properly though, some take minutes to boot as Apples SSDs + drivers dont really follow spec to the letter.
M.2 is the form factor, not referring to its connector to the motherboard. There are M.2 SSDs that use SATA.
@@krad0s exactly. It's m.2 with a proprietary key. There are M and B keys as standard for regular m.2s, Apple just uses their own pin layout.
There was trash can ! On apples Uk website !!!! ON the 3 Nov 2021 there was listed a 12 core 2.7 refurbished 6.1 mac pro still
But for £5,149 (about $6,900usd) you have to be mad !!!
Very in depth information bruh, ty
I'm not an apple user anymore, but I really appreciate the channels "pros/cons" weigh in for usability value vs $$.
Wow, who would have thought. Thanks for the info. Look forward to the next installment.
I am not sure it is fair to measure tiem for first boot since there is likely some process to complete installation and then get you to initial configuration. Would be intertesting to measure time for subsequent boots.
With Apple pulling support for many things in recent years (such as older 32 bit apps), there are some people who may need an older computer to boot the last version of OS-X that supports the software they need.
Another aspect is that production quantities for these models have have been committed before the date of announcement of moving to ARM was set so Apple may have found itself with surplus of older Intel Macs since people were now waiting for the new ARM ones.
The store is actually “Refurbished and Clearance”. There is a clearance section on the page but I haven’t soon anything there in a long time. I imagine they just sell those clearance products as refurbished either to make more money (clearance usually implies a bigger sale price) or to not have the “embarrassment” of having a product in clearance to prevent the _____ was a huge flop videos from being more prominent that they already are.
My grandma bought me the iMac 21.5" i3 3.6GHz 4k 2019 1TB HDD, and it was my first mac... The same slow HDD with 5400rpm. It even had been a demo product, so the HDD had also been used. I just thought it being a demo was the reason it was slow, but later found out that the model was just crap in general. I was supposed to use it for Logic, but every time I tried to open it, it would take up to 2 minutes. Now I have bought a Macbook air M1 from my own money. Such difference!
Try the referb 2018 iPad Pro. It is still over powered till this day without the bells and whistles of the current iPad Pro.
I bought an old 2010 iMac with a dead hard drive off my Grandma a few years back for like $20 and put a SATA SSD in it for maybe $40. The speed increase was insane and the only reason I don't use it now is because it's stuck on MacOS High Sierra. Otherwise it still runs better than it would've if it was brand new!
That camera angle @ 02:06 can really be used as a 2010’s case study of Apple’s minimalist design aesthetic
I have a 2013 21" mac and I hate how they have put a sensor on the hard drive, you if you replace the h/d with an ssd, the cooler fans ramp up to 100% all the time... almost like Apple had planned that...
I am still using a Mac min from 2012 but I have replaced the HDD with a SSD now the computer is usable.
I did that with my 2012 Mini. It made an amazing difference. My main Mac is now a 2019 iMac running off an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD and the old Mini still boots faster. Not as capable otherwise, but boy does it startup quick.
I'm a PC guy, but I was thinking of buying an Mac mini that is referbished. I'm just waiting for a 16gb M1 referb to show up. I want to play around with it for some light audio and random photo editing so I don't want to buy brand new as it'll probably sit unused most of the time. I don't hate apple products, I just think they have a specific use case and not daily drivable for the average person. But Great video as always Jonathan. Perhaps a video on features new Mac users should know and the history of how they came about or how to easily transition?
The MacOS machine I use to edit was a busted up 2019 MacBook Pro 6 core i7, 16gb ram, and 500gb SSD I rescued from the damaged chassis and transplanted into a custom case I built that includes integrated thunderbolt dock and access to the rest of the ports as well. It gets a lot better airflow and works extremely well for what I need (a machine to run Pixelmator and basic tasks, I have my Ryzen machine with Linux/Win10 that can handle heavy lifting).
TBH I'm waiting to find an M1 MacBook air running with no lock but with a dead display/case damage to do the same thing to. I'm fairly certain with enough work I could machine a much more streamline case, possibly even integrating it into a keyboard like an old micro, with the passive cooling. Comes down to wrestling the battery and ports. If you could get full 100% performance sans batteries but plugged into power I'd go that route, but I doubt that's the case between not enough power or the security cheap hating the lack of a battery.
We have a slower clocked version of this in my Graphic Design class... We get **nothing** done in that class.
This iMac should've been discontinued all the way back in 2015 when the other 21.5 iMacs were updated to 4k resolution.
I don't have a link, but my last (late 2018) Macbook Pro with a 6-core I-7 was hands-down the worst Mac I've ever owned... It was always hot, always noisy (due to fans trying to tame that heat), and after upgrading from High Sierra it was terribly unstable. Apple support finally bricked it for me and I switched to an M1 mini (1TB/16Gb) and it's better in every way. I really don't know if I'll ever buy a MacBook again.
I love the old iMac design. Still feels like a Jobs & Ive product
I liked it as well but having the new one since last week, it looks really beautiful.
Buys crap so we don't have to...My man!
I've been booting my late 2012 iMac from an external SSD via USB for the last couple years as it too has a 5400 spinner inside it that I don't trust to not crap the bed without warning...
And I live in fear that my Magic Mouse that runs on AA batteries will die one day and I'll have to get one with the charging port on the bottom
Why not get something non apple for the mouse? The mx master 3 is one of the best mice out there for standard use
@@crestofhonor2349 the only "magic" about the Magic Mouse, is that it will give you Carpal Tunnel Syndrome at some point...
Same here 2012 model installed an SSD, used the HDD as a time machine backup drive. This thing runs like a champ! Magic Trackpad or regular mouse is a lot better than the Magic Mouse though.
This machine is very similar to my old Mac, except I had a slightly better CPU, 16GB RAM, a 4K display and decent graphics. It had a spinning hard drive like these.
Having a 2014 27-inch iMac the Fusion Drive is the biggest bottle-neck. It is okay as it starts up with SSD speed but becomes a pain as it rattles throughout the workday. That iMac is still a good computer - with an external SSD attached to it and a label attached "do not pull while running".
You complained about needing to use a SATA SSD if you upgraded, but testing on the LTT channel revealed that in real world tests the difference between NVMe and SATA was not noticeable. Granted that was gaming load times, but I'd expect OS loads to be similar.
The worst part of these machines is the awful integrated graphics trying to populate the screen. We had some designers stuck on these once, and while Photoshop or apps with rasterized images were usable, Illustrator or anything vector was the messiest most awful experience.
My Mid-2011 iMac 27" has a 1TB hard drive in it too, and has been in constant use for over 10 years. I got it for free as the hard drive was suspected to be failing, but all it needed was a fresh install of macOS as it was stuffed with bloated programs (and probably malware!). I've been using it since about July of 2021, and I just did a SMART test on it. Apparently the drive has been operating for 18,993 hours and has had 0 sector failures or SMART issues at all! That's not bad!
Oh wow! I'm using iMac 21.5 inch late 2009 right now it's still awesome WORKING and I had upgraded to 16GB of RAM with 4TB SSD in it with macOS Catalina Patcher! I'm planning to get iMac 27 inch 2021 High-End Machine this summer!
@@CajunJR00 I would use the Catalina patcher but with my AND graphics card, it’ll be unbearably slow on anything newer than High Sierra.
@@lukeweeks3470 I understand that. I dont have any problems with my AMD Graphics. Sorry to hear about that.
@@CajunJR00 It’s the HD6770M 512MB. Any from the 2011 series are incredibly slow. We’re talking about 10-30 seconds to minimise a window. Something to do with drivers? Not sure. High Sierra is fine for me at the mo.
Important! Never ever recommend or choose the fusion drive. It´s one of Apple´s worst idea. I have repaired a billion of these. (I´m a former Apple technician). Otherwise, many good points.
I remember getting the base iMac when they redesigned in 2012. It was great for what I needed it for - basic use. But today I would definitely go mid tier and no way I’m going back to HDD for my everyday use.
There is still an i3 variant out there from 2019 too for around $750. I'm surprised that isn't in this video instead cause I can't imagine it being half as fast as this i5 variant.