Apple has released a new iMac and the 21.5in model has a fantastic 4k screen, but the main topic of conversation is the disk drive. Apple has downgraded it, perhaps to prevent the screen upgrade from increasing the price too much.
The 1TB disk drive in previous Macs was a fusion drive and this is actually two drives in one. There is a 128GB SSD and the rest is a traditional mechanical disk drive. It looks like one disk to us, the user, and OS X combines them and treats them as one.
The idea of a fusion drive is that the operating system and your most used applications and data can be stored on the SSD and seldom used files, apps and data can reside on the slower mechanical disk drive. Anything you don;t use much can be stored on slower storage.
What's got everyone annoyed is that now the 1TB fusion drive in the new 4k iMac has just 24GB of solid state storage. That is barely enough to hold OS X and a few extra files. In fact, if you have 32GB of memory in your Mac, it isn't even enough to save the system when it is put to sleep.
A smaller amount of flash storage on the 1TB drive means that the Mac could run more slowly because nearly all your applications will be on the mechanical disk rather than in the fast flash of the SSD portion of the storage.
No doubt people will get around to benchmarking the new iMac and a clean system with very little on it could run as fast as the old iMac with the bigger SSD. However, in the real world people do not have clean systems. They have hundreds of gigabytes of apps, photos, videos, documents, and so on.
In this situation very little of the disk contents will reside in the flash storage and nearly all of it will be on the disk, which is slower. Beware of benchmarking a clean 4k iMac. Put a couple of hundred gigabytes on it first.
Apple frequently makes its bottom of the range hardware unappealing to anyone that knows how to read specifications and how they affect you. You must pay extra for the 2TB fusion drive to get the full 128GB flash storage and extra performance that comes with it.
What's odd is that technology gets cheaper over time, which is why we are seeing a 4k screen in a 21.5in iMac, so why is the specification of the disk drive worse? Shouldn't it be cheaper than when the technology was first introduced?
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