Calling George (or other Mac people here)

[George K]

Glad it worked out.

Somewhere I read that the Mac needs at least 10% of the hard drive space free to do its housekeeping.

Also the more RAM you have, the better - you'll get better performance by increasing RAM.

[xenon]

[George K]

Rumors are that the next iteration of the iMac will not have traditional spinning-platter hard drives, but everything will be SSD.

That'll be interesting for those of us that have tons and tons of photos, music, etc on their internal hard drives.

[Axtremus]

@George-K said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

That'll be interesting for those of us that have tons and tons of photos, music, etc on their internal hard drives.

Just buy one with a higher capacity built-in SSD. Already you can configure a 4TB SSD for a MacBook Pro, so a 4TB SSD for an iMac shouldn’t be a too challenging technically.

[xenon]

@George-K I haven’t dealt with a HDD in years now on both my work and home computes (including MacBooks).

I couldn’t imagine using an hdd now.

[Klaus]

There’s a lot of data that doesn’t benefit much from SSDs, such as movies. The same holds for data that changes very frequently. It makes a lot of sense to have a cheap HDD in addition to SSD.

Apple used to sell “hybrid” drives, which also retry to combine the advantages of both. I’m not sure why they’ve given up on them.

[xenon]

@Klaus the price of NAND keeps going down.

At some point the economics on a per byte basis will probably be in the favor of SSDs.

Or rather, for the consumer market - the price differential becomes negligible.

(There’s still a big gap for enterprise applications because of the volumes required).

With Apple’s juicy margins - it’s probably easier to just kick out hdd’s altogether.

[Klaus]

Well, let's say you want 8TB of persistent memory.

An 8TB HDD costs something like 250$.

If you configure a Mac Pro with 8TB of SSD, they want $3000 or so more for it.

It's a significant difference.

[George K]

@Klaus said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

If you configure a Mac Pro with 8TB of SSD, they want $3000 or so more for it.

A 27" iMac, upgraded from the standard 2TB fusion drive to a 2TB SSD will be $700 more (although a bare 2TB SSD is, of course cheaper). I wonder if the new iMacs will have something bigger than 2TB available.

@Axtremus said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

Just buy one with a higher capacity built-in SSD. Already you can configure a 4TB SSD for a MacBook Pro, so a 4TB SSD for an iMac shouldn’t be a too challenging technically.

Er, no.

Link to video

[Axtremus]

I meant to say that it's wouldn't be technically challenging for Apple to mass produce an iMac with built-in 4 TB SSD. I was not commenting on retrofitting old iMacs with 4 TB drive.

[xenon]

Holy moly those storage prices are high! Apple does flex it's pricing power on storage very aggressively.

iPhone is a fantastic example. The iPhone 11 pro is $999 for 64Gb base model, but $1150 for the next model up (256Gb).

They know that 128Gb is the sweet spot for most people - but unlike any other equipment maker can flex their power to completely nix that tier.