Sigh. iMac then…

Mrs K is determined – we are getting the 27″ on Black Friday assuming the discount is lower than the 3% I get at work*.

She’s happy with the basic 8MB Ram 1Tb internal drive. It’ll be used for typical family stuff, homework, googling and photo storage on an external 1TB external drive.

But I’m not up to speed with the peripherals. Is their anything we need to buy – any of Apple cables , airports or what not?

*dont bother with the alternatives, she who rules has put her foot down.

Amazing picture though

No peripherals required. Whatever you have now will work. Printers, WiFi, external HDD etc.

Apple are dropping Airport routers, just get a decent external HDD, a 4-6Tb won’t break the bank, and set it up with Timemachine to do regular backups.
I would suggest the Magic Trackpad alongside the regular keyboard, there are a lot of gestures that work in OSX like those in iOS, although it doesn’t hurt to have the mouse alongside.
Other than those two things, AFAIAA, all the main ports are USB, so it’s all golden.

Black polo neck jumper and designer glasses?

Good news then, as she’s doing enough damage to the new car budget as it is. 😀

Refurbished?

Good choice, welcome.

Really lovely machines, stunning screen. The basic 27″ model has plenty of horsepower and unless you are doing lots of say video editing / decoding 8gb is ample. You can still add you own ram to these imacs cheaply later (MBP’s etc are soldered now)

As above only extra needed is perhaps a trackpad for all the gestures. I have a magic mouse (standard with iMac) which has a few gestures and is enough for me. My view would be to buy the fusion drive model as it will boot up much faster (although I usually sleep my Mini so wake up is pretty much instant)

I would say just get a £50 1tb external drive for Time Machine Backups, I can’t imagine you’ll use up 1tb (unless say you have lots of RAW camera images or a big movie library in say Blue Ray definition).

I would skip Apple Care, I have never had an issue with variois Macs I have owned

I would seriously consider ditching the standard drive and having a hybrid or SSD. If nothing else it improves application loading times a lot, it’s not an upgrade you would want to do afterwards and you mention already having an external drive.

You can specify at time of purchase if you want the smaller wireless keyboard or bigger wired keyboard, I opted for the wired one as it has an alpha numeric pad and I hate changing the batteries in the keyboard all the time.

It will come with an apple mouse which makes it much simple to navigate around with the gestures.

You might want to consider changing your external drive to a thunderbolt one at some point to take advantage of the quicker speeds. You might also want to consider a backup medium to use with time machine.

Other than that you should be good to go. I love mine, work on it every single day for hours and hours on end with no problems at all.

I’d second the Trackpad option over a mouse. macOS is very, very quick to navigate when you get tuned into the trackpad. Swipes with one, two, three or four fingers; taps with one, two or three. No physical click required, just a gentle tap – like a phone screen. Gestures are all clearly demonstrated and some are customisable in system preferences.

Owned our 27″ iMac for 4 years. We opted for fusion drive (1TB). Was 8Gb RAM though I’ve added a bit more now (we’re at 24Gb now). We also bought a Time Capsule and use that for backups (using Time Machine). I also back up the a USB drive and store offsite.

We bought a SuperDrive, mainly so I could rip all our CDs to iTunes. It’s still used (I still buy CDs).

We’re using El Capitan OS, mainly because upgrading is a faff due to useless broadband speeds (we take it to my BIL’s to update).

It’s used for lots of stuff (incl work by Dr North) though nothing too heavy going. It’s been excellent, integrates seamlessly with our iPads and iPhones and streaming music/films via airplay to Apple TV and Airport Express is easy and reliable.

Beware – once you’re into the ecosystem it’s hard getting out!

You can’t add RAM to the new ones so get more than 8gb.

You can – it even says as much on Apples spec list. Good shout on the keyboard, thanks.

Oh. Sorry, I was under the impression the RAM is soldered in so you can’t easily add more.

We are on our third over 15 years used by all the family regardless of what other machines people have individually the macs always there for everyone. Whenever we talk about stuff we’ve bought that’s been worthwhile they come pretty near if not top of the list.

There also easier to work on than you may expect, I just changed the HD drive on the latest one, took about 20 minutes to fit including cleaning and a couple of hours to re load from a time machine back up which is incidentally on a WD external HD we have used to back up these machines for 10 years plus.

Your wife’s right get one.

The keyboard and mouse that will ship with your new iMac are rechargeable and are much nicer than the old ones.

Go for the 2TB fusion drive if you want a bigger ssd as part of the fusion drive. I wouldn’t bother with the non fusion.

As long as you go 27″ you can upgrade mem so that’s definitely the model to get.

I bought mine earlier this year (refurb – search for my thread)..it’s lovely (and I still haven’t upgraded the mem)

eddiebaby,
You’re right in respect of the smaller, 21.5″ version.

My iMac is over seven years old and still going fine. The only mod I’ve done is to double the memory from 8Gb to 16Gb. The only “problem” I’ve had turned out to be due to the WD external drive I was using as Time Machine was preventing the iMac from waking from sleep mode.

Moved from the mouse to trackpad, makes handling multiple virtual screens (among other things) with gestures easier to do.

eddiebaby

OP won’t be buying poverty spec kit! 😀 😀

northwind

Contact by email and arrange to send a 8/16GB USB stick and I’ll mail you out an installer stick on it.

All my iStuff is bought refurbished from Apple. Decent saving with the same level of cover.

another person on a 7 year old iMac, and I’d echo having the larger wired keyboard as a good thing. increasing the memory from 4 to 12 is th only change I have ever had to make. I will miss the CD drive, and having the SD card slot on the side, if and when I upgrade…

If it were me I’d go with the 2TB hybrid drive. It’s got a bigger SSD capacity than the basic 1TB hybrid.

I’ve just upgraded my 5 year old iMac with a 1TB SSD and it’s like a new machine. It was previously struggling with Spotlight on the latest macOS but is now instant with loading (all apps(.

Thats a £270 upgrade though talking the machine to £2k – do I really need it for home use?

Kryton57 – Member
£2k – do I really need it for home use?

A 2k machine? No, you don’t! 😆 So you may aswell go full Bhoona! You’re already past the usefulness of any cost benefit analysis!

do I really need it for home use?

No.

I use an iMac at work (in print industry) with 1TB fusion drive and its fine. All apps open very quickly and start-up is very fast.

@eddie the 27 iMac is about the only Mac you still can add RAM too. IMO 8GB will be fine for the OP.

@fanatic its an interesting choice, if it where me I might look at base 27 and put a 500gb ssd in it “after market”. There are warranty issues (voids it) but after 3.5yr years with 750 I have still only used 500 and could easily delete 200gb of movies (I ripped and compressed my dvd library) or move them to an external. 2tb I will never need and with usb3 external disks are as fast.

Thats a £270 upgrade though talking the machine to £2k – do I really need it for home use?

We already answered that, you don’t need a £1500 machine for home use. Need is the wrong word. As I posted the £270 would imho be far better spent on an aftermarket ssd (void warranty) and you can put the original in a caddy and use it as an external drive.

Get the base or fusion one. The base model if you “sleep” it it wakes almost immediately so negates some of the ssd benefits. I have a 7200rom drive in my Mini and it’s fine. No not as fast as wife’s ssd running at 500mps (mine is 100mps) but hey ho.

Startup from cold (approx) hard drive 2-3 minutes, ssd/hybrid 30-40 seconds. From sleep both about 5 seconds

Ok so in summary I can live with the standard 1TB and continue to save the family photo album on an external HDD, resorting to base price for the machine (currently £1759) but changing to a full length keyboard.

Not worth buying one with an HDD rather than Fusion/SDD IMO. Such a massive performance boost for so little cost.

Have you checked the refurb store? I got the base-spec iMac with fusion drive for £1359 this time last month, plus 4.4% cashback from Quidco (which works out at almost £60 back)

I replaced my 21.5 with a 27 last month. Bought refurbished as I really wanted a full fat SSD (1 TB) and 16 gig of memory. The standard drives aren’t great and if you get any paging (I use mine with a Windows boot as well and it’s a bit of a monster memory wise), that’s where you’ll get some longer load times, etc. My old one was the 5400 drive tho so the 7200 ^^ up there might be may better.

I really like the big display, it’s so crisp and clear and allows me to get stuff side by side in a good font size which is pretty helpful for a lot of what I do.

It’s very fast, quiet, lovely to look at and just works. And I can play city skylines with everything turned to the max.

So if you’re going to upgrade, go for at least some SSD. We have an oldish Airport Express we use as a wifi hotspot and backup for time machine (a few macs in the house). It’s seamless and transferring data from old mac to new mac was totally painless, but I’m sure there’s something else that’d work.

Oh yeah keyboard thing… I bought the Mac one with the USBs (tethered not bluetooth) as I can’t get on with the little ones… Amazon had them for about half price..

Keyboards – I like my wireless one new batteries every 3 months (2 AA’s) now as I have a Mini which moves around with me and spends some time under the tv a wired keyboard is not an option. Mouse/trackpad have a play in an Apple Store.

OP how big is the family photo album ? It will go on the 1tb internal surely ?

Hmm

So it struck me to buy the next model up for £200 more. But that seems to add only the 1TB fusion drive rather than HDD, only a £90 option on the base machine and a AMD Radeon R9 M390 with 2GB video memory instead of a M380.

So whats the difference in this chip set that would have £110 of value to me? Or is there something else I’ve missed?

OP how big is the family photo album ? It will go on the 1tb internal surely ?

Yes, but its already on a 1tb external HDD, no point moving it.

The fusion is a combination of a small ssd and a hdd, the ssd is big enough to take the OS and apps so makes startup fast.

Photos, depending on size I would move that to the iMac too so you have multiple copies and easier access.

So whats the difference in this chip set that would have £110 of value to me? Or is there something else I’ve missed?

Nothing!

To put it in perspective, this is like debating if you want the AMG Merc or the M5 for the school run.

To put it in perspective, this is like debating if you want the AMG Merc or the M5 for the school run.

You realise that would actually be a serious question for the OP? 😀

Lol!

So rather than pay the £200 extra its the £1759 + £90 for the fusion drive. With my corporate discount that lands at £1729.40, so lets see what black friday brings!

The way computers go (particularly Macs possibly), is that as the years go by the operating systems become more process hungry, as do the apps. My 2011 iMac struggled with macOS Sierra and MS Office 2011, but that’s after 5 years of happy use. It was only slightly above base model when I bought it I think (1TB vs 500 GB hard drive if I recall correctly).

So your options are:

1) Get a base model now, which will perform just fine for the next ~5 years, then crack it open and do some DIY upgrades when/if it slows down. Based on the extra performance I’m seeing from boosting mine to 12GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, I can imagine I’ll get another 3 years out of it. The major downside with mine is that it has only USB 2.0 and a poor graphics processor. Both of which I can’t change myself. The graphics is the biggest concern because according to Zwift it’s not up to it (but then it still seems ok to me).

2) Or get a £2k machine now and live with it happily for ~8 years or whatever.