Buy entry-level iMac, yes/no?

May 5, 2022 8:56 AM

Should I get an iMac(M1)? I'm looking at buying the cheapest iMac, with eight CPUs, seven GPUs, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. I will use it mainly for web dev, some music-making, and writing. Will it make me happy?

I currently have a MacBook Air Retina 13-inch 2018 .with 1.6Hz intel core i5, 8 GB RAM, and 128 GB SSD. It has 3 main pain-points. First, the keyboard SUCKS. This is a big deal because my job is writing code and my love is writing fiction, so I suffer in both worlds. The hard drive is ridiculously small, and it gets pretty slow with a few programs open, especially if one of them is PyCharm, which I use for my day-to-day dev work.

I don't care about games, high-end graphics, or encryption. I don't have an iPhone or iPad and don't intend to. I don't use any of Apple's online services. I use PyCharm, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, MS Office when I have to, Photoshop, Illustrator, Logic, and Scrivener.

I could get a MacBook Air for the same price and specs, but since my current MacBook still works and I work from home and don't go to physical meetings anymore, I think I'd rather switch to a desktop with a larger screen and a better keyboard.

I've considered switching to Linux, but I haven't found anything that much cheaper with good specs, and I'd miss photoshop and logic. Aesthetics and UX matter a lot to me, and I don't think any Linux distros would satisfy me. Windows is just no.

I've also thought of getting a Mac min(M1), I could get similar specs but with 8 GPUs and 512 GB SSD, for cheaper. I already have a good monitor, though FullHD, not 4k (which I'd connect to the iMac as a second monitor if I get it). I could buy a non-Apple keyboard, maybe a mechanical one, and an Apple mouse and still have some money left over.

I almost bought the iMac today but figured I should ask yall first.

posted by signal to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

The M1 chip is years ahead of anything else out there. If you need to buy a computer now, then you can't do much better than an M1 Mac. Is a lower end Mac Studio and option?
posted by Hey, Zeus! at 9:07 AM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: It would cost twice as much without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. And I think it would be way overpowered for what I actually use it for.
posted by signal at 9:09 AM on May 5, 2022

Have you checked out the refurbished options (https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac)?

I bought a refurb M1 iMac a few weeks ago and have been very happy with it so far. If the box didn't say "Refurbished" on it, I would be hard pressed to tell - the presentation and packaging is superb, and I have faith in Apple's refurbishment process as well as their warranty. It chops a good chunk of money off the price, which (for me) meant I could jump to the 16GB of RAM for some future-proofing.

I also traded in my "Early 2015" MacBook, which didn't get me a ton of money or anything but allowed me to buy an external SSD instead of pay the insane OEM price for the upgrade. It's easy to go through the process and find out what Apple would give you for your laptop.

I also considered the Mac Mini, but since I didn't have a monitor it meant the price difference is not as substantial, really. Also, the camera on the iMac is bananas.

The downside to the refurb option was the lack of color choice. Only a few of the colors were available with the 16 gigs of RAM. C'est la vie.
posted by papayaninja at 9:11 AM on May 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I forgot to mention, I'm in Chile, so the refurbished, etc., options aren't available.
posted by signal at 9:16 AM on May 5, 2022

Can you go to an Apple Store and try out the iMac keyboard to see if you’d even like it? Based on your situation (keyboard very important, not enamored with Apple hardware or ecosystem, already have a monitor), I’d recommend the Mini. does anything specifically draw you to the iMac over the Mini?
posted by ejs at 9:28 AM on May 5, 2022

Your possessions won't make you happy. Only what you do with them will. Haha, sorry, had to get that out of the way.

All of your current pain points could be solved by external accessories. I'm typing this on a laptop, but the laptop itself is closed and out of the way while I've got two monitors and a wireless keyboard/mouse. The only difference between my setup and something like a Mac Mini is that I also have the ability, if I feel like it, to unhook that stuff and take my laptop somewhere else. It's a nice day here, and I told a co-worker I might go work on my porch this afternoon. Can't do that with a desktop. I just don't see many use cases for a desktop anymore, and you've specifically excluded several of them in your post.

I typed all of the above under the impression that you currently had a MacBook Pro instead of a MacBook Air. That does change the calculation a little bit, but not much. You'd just need a USB splitter for your output. If I were you, I'd do your last scenario about the Mac Mini plus accessories, but keeping your laptop instead of buying the Mac Mini.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:39 AM on May 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

The hard drive is ridiculously small, and it gets pretty slow with a few programs open, especially if one of them is PyCharm, which I use for my day-to-day dev work.

Personally I don't think the jump from 128 GB to 256 GB is significant enough for the situation you describe. 256 GB isn't going to buy you very long before you have the same problem all over again. And 8 GB isn't enough RAM for the multitasking you describe. If you can swing a model with 512 GB storage and 16 GB RAM, I see no reason the base processor would be inadequate.

The displays in iMacs are very nice. I'm still running a 2017 5K iMac and while the world has moved on from its CPU for what I do regularly it's been great — with the caveat that the 5K iMac had user-upgradeable RAM and an SSD that wasn't soldered on the board, so I could (and did) solve the two problems you'd have with the specs you list. With the current iMac you only get one chance to get those specs right, so buying the upgrades up front is the smart choice if you can afford it.
posted by fedward at 9:40 AM on May 5, 2022

In my office we got the first Mini M1, and my boss has whatever the first M1 laptop was. The rest of us are waiting on the soon to be released M2s before we upgrade from our Intel MacBook Pros. They're an amazing leap forward speed-wise, but we do run into the lack of RAM occasionally.

I wouldn't buy anything with just 8G of RAM today, and if I were doing a lot of Logic stuff I wouldn't buy less than half a TB of SSD.

And I'm a fan of having independent upgrade cycles for monitors is useful. So I'd argue for a MacMini with at least 16G of RAM and an independent monitor. If you go for 256G of SSD, make sure you have an external SSD that's got a good interface on it.
posted by straw at 10:08 AM on May 5, 2022

Agreeing that Mac Mini is the smart play here (and I am typing this on mine). You can use the monitor you have now, and save money / get better specs, and eventually you can upgrade the monitor if you like. Storage can always be added externally if needed, but I would suggest upgrading to 16gb of RAM.
posted by kickingtheground at 10:38 AM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thinking about this a little more: if you could only afford one upgrade out of two, go for larger storage over more RAM. One advantage of the fast solid state storage in modern Macs is that there's much less of a performance penalty on swap space than there used to be. There was some alarm last year about swap causing excessive wear on the SSD but it seems in most use cases it shouldn't really present a problem. Go for 512 GB, let the OS manage which parts of the SSD it uses for swap (and storage, for that matter), and go about your business. Chances are you'll need an upgrade for other reasons well before the SSD wears out.
posted by fedward at 11:02 AM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

spend slightly more and get extra storage - while not an M1, I have a 2019 MacBook Pro that was a slightly upgraded base model (256GB vs 128GB) and that machine is very hard to deal with (and has been largely demoted to "maybe I should sell it"/occasional use duty) because the disk space is just Not There. The crap Core i5 they put in it and the low amount of RAM (8GB on that one)? Totally could deal with that but I kept filling the main storage, and that's a hard stop sort of thing. My workflow also includes JetBrains products - PHPStorm rather than PyCharm, though I do use that now, and DataGrip - and Docker (which was really what was using the storage).

regarding speed - the Core i5 in my 2019 machine is terrible, just like the keyboard in that system (and your MacBook Air). (That was easliy the worst machine I've ever bought.) The M1 Pro in my work-supplied 14" MBP is much, much, much nicer; a regular M1 wouldn't be too far off from that. But, in day to day operations (read: coding, having tons of tabs open, Slack), I can't really tell the difference between it, my Ryzen 7 5700U Lenovo laptop (Win11), or my Ryzen 9 5900X desktop (MX Linux). If your workflow involves Docker, however, do yourself a favor and double-check that there are arm64 versions of your images; even today there's stuff in my toolchain that doesn't work because there's no arm64 builds, and some stuff runs in Rosetta and there's a speed penalty for that.
posted by mrg at 11:17 AM on May 5, 2022

I already had a monitor, so I got an M1 Mac Mini and it is an incredible machine. I fully expect to get a decade out of it. Plus the cost saving I get from already having a monitor meant I could get a bigger hard drive than if I’d bought an equivalent iMac. But I heartily recommend and M1 anything. The Mac Mini is the best value though.
posted by Happy Dave at 11:56 AM on May 5, 2022

This is a golden era for Macs, the M1 (in all of its variants) is a very speedy chip, and the on-die memory combined with faster SSDs makes it even faster. The big bugaboo for the Mini is retina monitors. The only Apple monitor is US$1600 and doesn't seem to be worth it. The other options have big compromises in build quality, resolution, or both. You basically can't get a 21" monitor with a Mac-friendly resolution at all. There are technical issues that make text, especially, look crummy if you use a resolution that's too far from the Mac default. If you don't need retina it's no problem. The extra 8GB of memory will help, though. You can always add a cheap external USB-C SSD for more storage.
posted by wnissen at 2:30 PM on May 5, 2022

Response by poster: I have a non-apple Super-HD monitor as a secondary for my MacBook, and it's fine.
posted by signal at 4:30 PM on May 5, 2022

You will probably be content with the amount of RAM and hate the tiny SSD.

I bought an M1 MacBook Air a couple of months after it came out. I love it to death. I got the 8GB RAM and wish I'd gotten 16 GB, though I've gotten by. I got the 512GB SSD and have could not have been happy with 256GB, it's simply too small. Double your RAM and SSD, you won't regret it.
posted by lhauser at 6:50 PM on May 5, 2022

With 8 GB RAM? No. You can't upgrade RAM post-purchase in the cheapest iMac, and even with an M1, that's frankly too low if you're doing anything beyond web-browsing (and multitasking with Adobe software and Logic definitely counts as "beyond web-browsing"), and that's only going to become more of a problem if you're trying to make the computer last a bunch of years. It was in the pre-M1 era, but my current lab bought the equivalent iMac as a group computer a few years ago (8 GB RAM, small hard drive), and insufficient RAM is the unfixable problem that's dragging the computer down for a bunch of our use-cases now.

I don't think you'll find the 256 GB of storage to be enough, either, but that you can at least supplement with an external Thunderbolt NVME SSD, which will function about as fast as an internal SSD, or even a plain USB-C one. It's functionally equivalent to being able to upgrade your hard drive post-purchase, so you don't have the same now-or-never issue you do with RAM. (I did this with my current desktop so that I could max out RAM - I moved most of my user folder onto the external drive, with the OS on the smaller internal one - and there's really no noticeable speed issues.)
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 7:43 PM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would get at least 16GB RAM and if your current 128GB drive is “ridiculously small” then a 256GB is only going to be adequate, with not much future-proof space (everything’s getting bigger, storage needs only grow). So I’d go for 512GB drive or more.

If that means you can only get the Mac Mini, then that’s your decision made for you! Great!

Personally, as lovely as the iMacs are, I’m a fan of separate displays and computers (whether that’s a desktop or laptop). They have different replacement cycles - a display should last plenty longer than 2 or 3 or more computers - so long term it makes more financial sense to keep them separate. So I’d go for the Mac Mini for this reason as well.
posted by fabius at 4:50 AM on May 6, 2022 [1 favorite]