iMac rotating ball

[BIRMA]

Thanks everyone I've ordered two 8 GB's. My wife said why don't you just buy a new one? thought about and looked £4K starting price, call me tight but I'll just upgrade for the moment.

 

[GeeJayW]

I think a newer/current iMac 27 is less than £2k, it's the Mac Pro that is more like £4K.

 

[rockits]

I bought a nice GTi-6 for 1350 quid! Can't remember the last time I spent more than 500 quid for a laptop or desktop. A little unfair I guess as half of what I do is buying & selling IT/tech kit!

Amazing what you can buy & at what price if you put your mind to it. Also if you aren't so fussed about it being brand new sealed & boxed.

Good luck with the Ram upgrade OP & hope it does what you need. You should always wear an anti static wrist band or de-static yourself first if possible before handling pcb's or ram. At least don't wear a polyester jumper or do a dance on the carpet first

A hard floor without carpet is best with a hard service such as a desk or table. Silicone stuff doesn't like static.

 

[MancMike]

Yeah, the iMac Pro is one of the most powerful desktop computers available to consumers.

The iMac 5k 27 inch is around 2 grand as said and is worth it for the glorious display alone IMO.

A local computer shop will be able to change the HDD out for a SSD which’ll be the final major speed upgrade available for it realistically.

 

[GeeJayW]

I saw some discussion on another forum about running the OS from an SSD via Thunderbolt or USB3, using the internal HDD for local storage. This apparently speeds things up somewhat. Not tried it myself, but might be preferable to cracking it open. I'll dig out a link.

The are a few videos on swapping out the HDD for SSD, which on the Late 2012 on models looks like a bit of a pain. Certainly not something I would want to do with mine (also a late 2012 with 8GB RAM, running MacOS Sierra). I mostly use mine for photography and listening to music. Only see the rolling ball occasionally and have contemplated bunging some more RAM in it.

 

[GeeJayW]

Sorry, can't find the link I had in mind, but there seems to be quite a few out there.

This one might be a start if you do consider bottling from an external SSD...
Resolved - 2017 iMac 27" external SSD as boot drive?

 

[BIRMA]

According to the readout I still have 829 GB of space left on my drive, I doubt I'll ever use anything near it's capacity as it has about 30 years of surveys mainly Word documents with photos that I like to keep on record. Plus my main iMac is really only used for compiling photo reports of surveys anyhow. But I guess the boost in RAM will see me through for another ten years.

 

[MancMike]

We're not referring to capacity.

Hard drives are hideously slow compared to solid state drives in both throughput and access times, and especially when you end up in low memory situations, a hard drive can really grind the system to a halt.

As you said you'll never use that storage, so a 250GB SSD will be an excellent, and cheap upgrade.

 

[brucemillar]

Dear BIRMA

Not to be condescending here (I hope). The rules are simple:

The more space you have? The less data you will delete, and the more data you will require to save.
The more memory/CPU that is available to you? The more you will consume and the faster you will consume it.
SSD/ Solid State Disc, is expensive but unlike it's poorer cousin, is less open to failure and irrational demands for a divorce, when you lose all the family photographs that you have, of-course never 'backed up'

In short. Buy what you can afford and then get some more for good measure.

When you have bought all these bits, commit their TLA's to memory. This can be used to belittle others in pub conversations at a later date. People will not question your knowledge or mastery of the compootah, for fear of exposing their own lack of knowledge and being laughed at. Invent some TLA's to throw into the conversation. If cornered? Ask if they have upgraded to a OBO, of installed a BBY yet? They will nod in agreement terrified that you will ask for more detail but never admitting that they have absolutely no idea what your talking about.

 

[BIRMA]

We're not referring to capacity.

Hard drives are hideously slow compared to solid state drives in both throughput and access times, and especially when you end up in low memory situations, a hard drive can really grind the system to a halt.

As you said you'll never use that storage, so a 250GB SSD will be an excellent, and cheap upgrade.

Got it. I'll see how things are after the RAM installation.

 

[MancMike]

I know your post is tongue in cheek but;

The more space you have? The less data you will delete, and the more data you will require to save.

This is true, but he's burnt through little space (100GB, including the OS and applications) in all the time the machine has been in operation.

The more memory/CPU that is available to you? The more you will consume and the faster you will consume it.

With more memory you will consume more, but that's fine. Having more resources available is never a bad thing, even if you use more of it. It's like having a more powerful engine, of course you'll make use of more bhp, but it's not a bad thing!

Buy what you can afford and then get some more for good measure.

Dude's got a V12 AMG, A V10 and a brand new Harley, jus' sayin'...

 

[John]

I will touch on things already mentioned here but:

I've just had our internal Mac guy update all of our 21.5 and 27 Macs to SSD where they don't have hybrid or full SSD currently.

I've not rolled out anything without an SSD for nearly 3 years now as it's a false economy.

SSD will transform the performance of the machine.

Memory is only necessary if you are running more applications at once than you can fit in memory.

I would argue these days that 8GB is an absolute minimum and ideally, you want 16GB or 32GB.

I also know that El Capitan onwards (so includes Sierra and High Sierra) is a much faster operating system than earlier versions.

We are currently upgrading all our machines to High Sierra. So if you fit an SSD, you can benefit from the new AFS+ which is optimised for flash-based storage.

I would also consider upgrading to High Sierra, wiping and re-installing everything from scratch if you are able. Gives you the most reliable platform.

We will run our older Macs we just upgraded (mostly 2014) for a good while yet!

I certainly won't be forking out thousands on new ones as I bet a 2014 Mac, running enough memory and an SSD with High Sierra will be very similar in performance in the real world to a new iMac running a slightly newer gen CPU.

 

[clk320x]

Dude's got a V12 AMG, A V10 and a brand new Harley, jus' sayin'...

This is exactly what I was thinking I’m sure that CL drinks the equivalent of 16GB of Ram to do 100 miles

 

[BIRMA]

Big thanks to MancMike for all his help, today I installed the extra RAM and the new operating system. So that's me sorted for another 10 years as far as computers go as long as I remember to take notice of the updates.
I may at a later date replace the other RAM with 2 bigger ones but for what I use it for i.e. one survey report a week (if I can be bothered) on Word using a couple of photographs it suits me fine.