About 3 months ago I had a great setup for my computer needs, namely an early 2011 i7 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro with a Apple Cinema display for my desktop requirements.
As my requirements changed I decided it was time for a change in the computer. Now as any Apple user knows, ‘when you go Mac, you don’t go back,’ so it was time to upgrade. The rumour mill was going mad online of a new iMac coming at the end of August. I seen it is a good time to change. So towards the end of July I sold my MBP and Cinema Display set up and squirrel’d the money away to patiently wait on the imminent product refresh from Apple.
The end of August came, and no iMac refresh came. Then along came the iPhone announcement and its subsequent release on 20th September 2013. No new iMac. During this time life without a computer was pretty tough. I did get myself a Netbook to cope with the emergencies and the iPad was worked hard until 24th September 2013 when Apple announced the iMac refresh : http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/09/24Apple-Updates-iMac.html
Finally time to get my hands on this beast. I decided to bit of maxing out of the specs in order to get a long life out of it. As it was a custom build it had to be ordered online, the delivery time was given to me as some stage on 11th October 2013.
It was this date that it arrived. Delivered by UPS, whom I found to be bound down by red tape in relation to their deliveries but that is an entirely different story!
Anyway the iMac was here and specc’d as follows :
Specifications
- 3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz
- 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2X4GB
- 1TB Fusion Drive
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5
- Magic Trackpad
- Apple Wireless Keyboard (English) & User’s Guide
- Accessory Kit
So with this spec I decided to max out the processor, the graphics and take on a Fusion Drive (some nifty technology that combines a standard spinning hard drive and some flash memory – the storage capacity of a HDD, with the speed of an SSD). I stuck with 8Gb of RAM as this is user upgradable, and much cheaper to do yourself than having it done in the factory.
Having only been using the machine for a week I am already hugely impressed, the Fusion Drive seems as capable as the SSD I had in my MBP, the speed of regular tasks is supreme, I have done a little video editing (for the FAKE Otterbox video posted 2 posts earlier) and the speed of conversion was breath taking in comparison to what I was used too. I have a couple of USB 3.0 external drives connected and they are super sharp in relation to the USB 2 speeds I had been working with. The 27″ screen needs no comment other than ‘STUNNING!’
As yet I haven’t really pushed any aspect of this machine, I am looking forward to playing about with some GoPro footage to see how the graphics card handles some HD editing. It was this sort of tasking that my old machine had started to splutter.
So in what is ultimately a very quick initial thoughts posting I am massively impressed with this machine, it was expensive, but I can see this being an investment that I will continue to enjoy for many years.
Oh and of course I got AppleCare, something I have never had to use thankfully, but anyone who I know that has can not sing its praises highly enough.
