New iMac

After almost a decade of rocking a mac mini for my main home machine, I finally pulled the trigger on an upgrade. I’ve upgraded the mini with a few tweaks over the years such as more ram and a larger SSD to make it a decent machine, but the time had finally come.

Last fall, when rumors of a new iMac were floating around, I had some money set aside to pull the trigger when they were finally announced. Well, history will tell you that I had to wait. No announcement in October, none in November… December… and into early 2019 when the March event was announced and it also claimed there was going to be no new hardware at the event. Well, I was getting a little itchy running this mini with all of its flaws.

Then low and behold, we finally got an announcement of new iMacs! Nothing revolutionary as far as the design goes. Speed bumps where needed and keeping the line trucking along.

So what did I get?

My final spend was on a 27inch 5K iMac with the gen 8 Intel processor. I didn’t need top of the line processor per se as ANYTHING compared to my 9 year old mac mini was going to be a huge speed improvement. I upgraded the storage to a 512GB SSD but kept the ram at the 8GB.

Why 8GB for ram?

Because Apple charges $600 for 32GB and Amazon charges $200. ;)

The nice thing about the 27inch iMac is that the ram is user accessible so I would rather pay market prices for something that I can easily upgrade.

My only real debate in the whole scheme was 512GB or 1TB for the SSD storage. I went with the 512 for cost reasons as Apple’s prices on this are also quite high. I have a drobo hanging off the network for extra storage if I should need it and the old mac mini will become a media center and serve up the local music and movies that we own there.

The new rig should arrive the first week of April. Needless to say, I’m excited the wait is over!