Holy S**t! What a Mac!

I got my first Mac in 2006, a 17” MacBook Pro. Since then, I’ve not bought a Windows PC of any kind. I’ve owned several Macs and tried to keep a fairly recent iMac in my office and a MacBook Pro for when I’m on the go. My current portable is a late 2013, 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display. Until recently, I’ve had a late 2009, 27” iMac in my office. It served me quite well with its quad-core Core i7 processor, 16 gigs of RAM and 512 GB SSD (I added the SSD myself). When I first got it, I thought it was the best Mac a body could own. It performed very well, especially after I swapped the 1 TB hard drive for the SSD. I was 100% satisfied with the machine until I got my latest MBP. You see, once you start using a Retina display, all other displays look like crap. So, when Apple announced the 5K iMac in 2014 my techno-lust reared its ugly head again.

It took until last week for it to get the better of me. When I saw this late 2015 5K iMac on Apple’s refurb site I started clicking. It has everything I wanted: a quad-core Core i7 running at 4 GHz, 32 GB Ram, 512 GB flash storage and the upgraded AMD 395x GPU with 4 gigs of VRAM. The only item that could be improved is the 512 GB flash drive. A 1 TB option is available for another $500, but I’ve been happy with the 512 since 2009. I was only using 300 GB of it. I use a 4 TB external RAID for my bigger storage needs, mainly movies, pictures, music and backups. All those things need lots of disk space and accessing them externally has little or no impact on a machine’s overall performance. And unlike a laptop, you don’t move an iMac around much, so storing media externally just makes economic sense. Besides, Apple doesn’t make an iMac with enough disk space to store all my media.

Never fear purchasing a machine through Apple’s Certified Refurbished site. As I recall, I’ve bought over a dozen refurbished Macs, each the most current model available. Without exception, each one was indistinguishable from a brand new machine. The only difference is the packaging. Refurbished Macs are shipped in a plain white box with no fancy graphics. Current Mac models usually show up on Apple’s refurb site two to three months after they’re released and they aren’t user-configurable like on the regular store site. Getting exactly what you want requires a little patience. You have to watch the refurb site closely until a machine with the right processor, memory and storage becomes available. When you find what you want you need to act quickly. There’s no guarantee the configuration you’re after will be there an hour (or even a few minutes) later. When you do find what you want your diligence is rewarded with a 10 – 15% discount from the regular price. No, not the deal of the century, but it’s cheaper than you’ll find a new Mac anywhere else, and all Apple Certified Refurbished Macs come with the exact same warranty as a new one. You even have the option of adding Apple Care. If you’re willing to wait a couple months for a current model and patient enough to hawk the refurb site frequently, there’s no better way to get a new Mac at a substantial discount.

So, here I sit with my new (refurbished) iMac. Its 27” 5K retina display is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. As I type this using MS Word, I’m continually reminded how eye-pleasing the font rendering is. This document is quite literally more pristine than it would be if it were printed on the best paper stock by the best laser printer. That’s not to say graphics, icons and photos aren’t beautiful, but Apple’s particular attention to typography is evident on this machine. After all, that’s what has distinguished the Mac from its inception and no machine from any other manufacturer even comes close. Let’s face it, the vast majority of users spend the majority of their computing time using font-intensive apps. Web browsing, email and document creation are all tasks that become infinitely more pleasurable on the 5K iMac with its 218 PPI (pixels per inch) pixel density. Don’t get me wrong, my 15” MacBook Pro with Retina Display is absolutely beautiful as is my iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, but there’s something about the iMac’s 27” Retina display that blows them away. The first time I booted it up I was astonished. Even after over two years of using Retina displays on all my other Apple devices, seeing this iMac in action for the first time put a huge smile on my face and quite frankly, surprised me a bit. I knew the experience would be good, but I had no idea just how much I would enjoy using this machine.

First, this thing is fast! As I mentioned before, I opted for the fastest CPU. It came from Apple with 16 GB of RAM, but I ordered another 16 GB from macsales.com and installed it before booting the machine for the first time. RAM is the only user-accessable hardware on this Mac and even that is denied on the 21.5" model. Shortly after the initial setup I ran the Black Magic Disk Speed test on the fresh 512 GB flash drive and couldn’t believe the results:

 Wow! 

As you can see, the disk I/O is blazingly fast, nearly 1.5 GB/second write and nearly 2 GB read speeds. I don’t think I’ve ever run this test with every checkbox checked green as a result except for my late 2013 MacBook Pro. It’s equipped with a 1 TB flash drive and tests just above 900 MB/s (read & write) and I thought it was smokin'. As I’ve always said, the single, best way to improve a computer’s performance is to upgrade the disk it boots and launches apps from. This new iMac does both exceedingly quickly. In fact, it’s the fastest I’ve ever seen. To put in in perspective, this iMac is capable of copying a full-length 1080p movie (~5 GB) in about 3 seconds! When I launch an app like iTunes, its dock icon doesn’t have time to bounce. With 32 GB of RAM, I haven’t seen the memory pressure exceed 10% and it normally hovers around 6 or 7. The only time it gets to 10 is when I’m running a virtual Ubuntu machine using VMWare Fusion 8. I allocate two of the eight processor cores and 2 GB RAM for the 64 bit virtual machine and other than the slight increase in memory pressure, the iMac displays no symptoms of stress at all.

I’m not one to leave a bunch of unused apps open, but I bought this machine to act as the hub for my digital home. I simultaneously run iTunes to serve media to my three Apple TVs and various AirPlay devices and Plex Server for serving music, movies and pictures to my DLNA-equipped DirecTV DVRs, Android devices and yes, I use the Plex app on my iOS devices. Plex is just a better media server than iTunes, especially for media I ripped or purchased outside the iTunes ecosystem. Read all about it here.

I also run OS X Server on this machine. It performs file serving, update caching and hosts Time Machine drives for all my Macs. I spoke at length about the virtues of OS X Server in a previous post, but to briefly reiterate, it’s the best $20 I’ve ever spent on software.

The point of all this is that this new iMac handles everything I’ve thrown at it without breaking a sweat. It is, by far, the most powerful Mac I’ve ever owned. It is an absolute joy to sit in front of and I am absolutely convinced I made the right decision.