Well I still haven’t replaced the dead iMac but I did buy a Apple MacBook Air base model with the $100 CPU upgrade from dual core to quad core for my daugheter for TAFE course (which is currently all online) from the Apple Education store.
It arrives in… a week or two.
So much for ‘not buying any more Macs’ haha
Apple should standardise SATA SSDs to replace HDDs at the low end, or standardise fusion drives with SATA SSD for space + a fast Apple SSD.
The moment you stop thinking “what’s best for the customer” and move that to “how can I extract more money” then the line up and upgrades start to make more sense…
It’s like they have built the base models (at least in the iMac range) to ensure they are barely good enough for any sucker that does buy them but then strongly encourages upgrades. The real shame is that none of the off the shelf OEM builds include an SSD. If they pre-configured the top of the range model with a 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM plenty of people would opt for that (significantly higher priced) option just to be able to buy off the shelf.
I bought an iMac for my Wife about 18 months ago. I picked it up at JBHiFi because of a sweet interest free deal, which sadly also meant fusion only. Turns out that is so terrible that I ended up attaching a Samsung T5 to the USB-C port and booting off that (which is much better than the Fusion drive). I’d love to install a 128/256/512GB drive internally, but it’s just too damn hard (or expensive to get someone else to do it).
That’s called a conspiracy theory.
Anyone charging you more than an hour of labour to do that job is ripping you off. I’d get an NVMe drive in there ASAP. The Fusion drive means it has the SSD blade slot, and you can get an adapter etc.
There is no way to view the continuation of HDDs in the iMac as anything other than “How can I extract more money”
In your view, sure.
What’s the alternative?
There are some decisions being made in Apple that make no sense. The $10,000 display is clearly designed for such a small portion of the market that one has to question what they were thinking. It will die a dismal death like the Mac Pro trash can. Whilst it may be an impressive feat, it’s like designing a Ferrari for creatives. Someone needs to tell Apple creatives are some of the worse paid people on the planet.
They have removed any option of upgrading ram and HDD on all their laptops now. That has to be a commercial decision to force people to upgrade. It can’t be in the consumers interests.
The Mac Pro costs $10,000 and comes with 256GB of HDD. 256GB?? For $10,000 machine? A 1TB Aorus M.2 4.0 costs AUD$450 for 5000MB/s. How hard could it have been to include that in the design instead of a $3000 case?
These kinds of decisions seem so out of touch with reality that its not an Apple tax, it’s an insanity tax. I’m in the top 1% of income earners in Australia and if I won’t buy it, I’m looking wondering what Apple management are smoking at their meetings. I think someone has been putting drugs in their incense candles.
From what I have seen, they are progressively pushing the limits of overpricing trying to see how far they can push the consumer.
I’m sorry but there is no definition of where in 2020, a HDD provides a good experience on MacOS.
There is no way that selling A$1,999.00 iMacs which are slower than equivalent machines from 10 years ago in real world performance is good for customers.
If Apple was about the ‘best experience’ then HDD only Macs would have disappeared about 6-7 years ago.
I’ve had multiple examples of clients who have bought brand new iMacs to replace their 2010 era Mac Mini/iMac running Snow Leopard, to find that the replacement HDD iMac with Mojave/Catalina is slower than what they had before. Unfortunately by the time I’m involved the return period is over. The external SSD as a boot drive is a lifesaver.
To be clear, I don’t disagree. Offering machines with spinning rust hard-drives in 2020 is a travesty, plain and simple, especially to those of us that know better.
But I hesitate to attribute it — at least in its entirety — to capitalist greed. That’s a little far-fetched, even for me.
And yes, the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR are incredibly expensive. But I can’t say I’m the target market for those machines, made explicitly clear by both their exorbitant price tags (which I’ll remind you are competitive with machines of their ilk, even if that comparison becomes less favourable when performance-per-dollar is taken into consideration in the case of the Mac Pro), and all of the marketing I’ve seen, so I have no valuable opinion on the matter; if you’ve weighed your options and decided that they’re no good for you either, good on you. I’m glad that Apple has provided you with enough information to make this informed decision for yourself. But again, writing off decisions about their hardware and software to “how can we make the most money off these fools” seems like an interesting train of thought.
I don’t pretend to understand what Apple do what they do, but I am continually surprised that there are those on the outside that think they do.
I see you’ve kept this take fresh, all the way at the bottom of your chest freezer! 
Actually not. $15,000 Mac Pro matched in performance by a $5000 PC so performance per dollar is not very good.
True, but it’s been pretty hard to see value in the recent lineup. You used to be able to make at least a passing argument for why it was worth the premium, these days… well…
Now I do understand there is a huge gap between need and want, especially when it comes to the Mac Pro. The vast majority of people don’t need a Mac Pro let alone the higher end options nor could they justify one at up to $80k.
While I’m sure it’s a masterpiece of technology, I don’t understand the design and specification decisions that put it out of reach of the vast majority of their users. Similarly, the rest of the range with the lack of ports and questionable options list means a world of compromise for everyone.
To continue down the conspiracy theory route, it’s almost like they have sat around a room pitching the lowest possible specs they could say out loud while keeping a straight face then going with that.
In recent times the re-introduction of the iPad Air (2019) should have been just the next iPad, but instead, they have kept the old model (with very slight updates and larger screen) around keeping a lower entry-level price point, (conspiracy) seemingly to hide the new higher price for the next generation of iPads and push up the average selling price (/conspiracy).
Now the 7th gen iPad is a great device, I just bought one for one of my kids and it’s a huuuuuge steup up from the iPad mini 2 that came before it. I was torn on the value of the base vs the Air and ended up going with the cheaper option… which means I now have a brand new device that is running two year old tech that potentially means future OS updates could be limited (and I didn’t feel it was worth the 47% premium today).
Personally, I miss my 17" MBP, but could get on board with the move to 15" rather than keep a “niche” product in the line up… (ahem Mac Pro).
I presume you know that Apple discontinued the 15”. I’m sure you would like the 2019 16” MBP (or even a 2020 refresh).
I poorly worded that comment, I was referring to 2012 when the 17" was discontinued. I got my first 15" in 2013 which could at least run the same resolution (scaled of course) as the 17" which to my eyes looked fine on the retina screen.
How is it far fetched?
The only reason to continue underspeccing a machine for basic duties in 2020 has got to be to save money.
Having HDDs in the base and midrange iMacs benefits no one except for Apple’s bottom line.
This has been my thinking for some time. This consumer has been pushed out of the market. I’m already having issues with things being incompatible with my hardware or OS version, and theres nothing I can do about that. Its really disappointing because I prefer MacOS and iOS to anything else, but, being a pensioner, I am unable to upgrade and so I, like others of my ilk, am being pushed out of the Apple market, entirely. Even second hand is now beyond me.
And worse, even if you could afford to buy a reasonably current second hand machine that lack of upgradability has reduced the usable life time from close to 10 years to 5 or less (unless the original buyer maxes out the RAM and storage which is uncommon and would bump the second hand price anyway).
My daughters old MacBook Air 11 inch which is being replaced is not that old but it’s specced with 64Gb of SSD and 4Gb of RAM, a combination that is unusable these days for anything except the most basic of use. It’s easy to say that I should have upgraded the specs at purchase but the upgrades were expensive then (and are even more expensive now).
I’m not even looking at machines that cannot be user upgraded in some way, so thats leaving me to look at only 2012 or older.