So I finally pulled the trigger, I purchased a brand new iMac 27″, after they’ve announced their Apple Silicon. We’re (probably) less than a week away from seeing the first models released, but I believe the Intel Macs still has their place, and these are my thoughts on purchasing one.
I’ve had a total of five Macs in my life:
- MacBook Air 2011
- MacBook Pro 2011 (Through Work)
- Mac Pro 2008
- Mac Pro 2009
- MacBook Pro 2018
The last two has been great, and working perfectly for my needs. But after getting tired of my desk having a PC for gaming and the Mac Pro 2009 besides it on the same monitor, each with their own keyboard/mouse, I wanted to try something else.
I’ve wanted an iMac for probably 10 years, but have never bothered to pull the trigger – until now.
The 2020 iMac 27″ is still an Intel Mac, and honestly (I might be wrong) I think the next one might be too. Apple Silicon is probably going to be the lower end models for now, and they’ll update the iMac, iMac Pro and Mac Pro the upcoming years. For me, even though I use Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X which now supports Apple Silicon, I also use a lot of third party software that might not support it yet. I also wanted to try selling my PC and run Windows in boot-camp on my iMac (spoiler, it works perfectly for gaming!).
The new 2020 iMac features the T2 chip, HDR, 1080p camera and True Tone. While it might not seem like it, it is a fantastic update from 2019. I’m thinking that Apple will need to keep providing updates for both Apple Silicon and Intel if they want to keep their customers, considering that the Mac Pro was recently released with Intel, and they’ve promised hardware updates (and probably software) for years to come. It would be very bad move to only support Apple Silicon. So my hope is at least that my iMac will get updates the next 7-8 years, when it might be more natural to switch over to Apple Silicon / ARM as other operating systems probably also will, like Microsoft Windows, which means that boot camp also might be available. It will also make sure that more third party software developers might have done the switch, so it makes more sense than switching before the software world is ready.
I got the top base model, as I got a 20% discount, but couldn’t upgrade it. This means 27″ with a i7 8 core up to 5GHz, 8GB RAM, AMD XT 5500 (8GB) and 512GB NVMe drive. With the now 16 logical CPU cores, I’m sure this will more than enough for my creative work, and its GPU should be similar to my old gaming PC’s GTX 1060.
The benchmarks I’ve done so far seems to shine a positive light on my investment.
I have ordered some third party RAM though, 8GB is just not enough.
But with my experiences so far – my suggestion if you’re going through the same thought process is to purchase what you know you can expect with. Apple has a long history of 1st gen issues with their products, Apple Silicon IMHO will definitely have a lot of issues, you’ll have performance degradation with third party software that will effectively be emulated as an Intel CPU on Apple Silicon. We also have no idea if it takes 2 months or 2 years before seeing an iMac with Apple Silicon, and how long does it take before we have one that’s stable after ironing out kinks, 3-5 years?
Exactly – Buy something where you know what you’re getting.
DIYglenn - Learning by doing 