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Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Four months on, and I'm having another go at dragging the iMac replacement up the priority list, so I'd like to try and pick the brains of users of more modern iMacs.

i) Trackpad vs. Mouse. My only trackpad experience is with our old (white) MacBook, which doesn't support the full range of gestures currently available. Any views on the pros and cons would be appreciated. Also, if we opted for the trackpad, would we still be able to use the magic mouse from the existing (late 2009) iMac with the new one?

ii) Memory. The new iMacs come with 8GB, which is what we have in the existing one. Is there any point in going for any more (I don't do any serious movie editing and certainly have no plans for playing with 4k video).

iii) Processor. There are three processor speeds available. Am I really likely to be able to tell the difference?

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Douglas Cheney
I have changed from a mouse to a trackpad as I find it easier to use with my arthritic hands and you can do a lot more with it, it works well with my 2011 iMac

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Trevor, you're trying to talk yourself into it — be strong!

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Richard I
My experience of fitting an SSD into a windows machine was that the difference was huge. Start up* and general responsiveness was much improved. A shiny new device with an SSD or fusion drive should make quite a difference.
*from 4 mins to 40sec approx

Also, although I was content with the display of my old laptop, as soon as I got a Retina display on the Macbook there was no going back.

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Richard.

Eric, I am indeed trying to talk myself into it but I don't need strength to resist - apathy and inertia seem to be doing quite well enough!

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Tony Still
I use both trackpad and mouse (one with each hand, primarily to stave off RSI, not as some power-user machismo) and they each have their separate merits. If pushed, I'd probably choose the trackpad but why not go for both too?

You really want an Apple trackpad but any BT/USB mouse with two (or more) buttons will work fine; they're very cheap if you don't already have one.

On CPU speed, as ever, it depends. Unless you are using heavyweight multi-threaded apps (video processing, RAW photo processing etc) then the single core speed is probably the most important thing and all the options are then about the same (speed, that is, not price). OTOH, I have seen Lightroom push all 8 cores on my MacBook to the limit when doing bulk processing so do think hard about applications.

I rarely found 8GB of RAM an issue and new machines with SSD, not rotating HDs, can swap very quickly. 16GB is again a heavier-weight requirement in my mind; also, if you are going for a 27" machine then it's user-accessible so you can always upgrade post-purchase.

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Tony, that’s very helpful

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Well, with John Lewis now stocking the 2019 iMacs at competitive prices, I’ve finally pushed the button. Now for the joys of coping with the absence of optical drive, SD card slot, USB A ports etc.. .

It’s ten years since we last changed iMacs so any hints or tips on the changeover would be welcome. I’m assuming we’ll transfer our user data from a time machine backup using the Migration Assistant, assuming it still exists - once I’ve sourced a USB A to USB C adapter to connect the hard drive.

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Quick update and correction: Having placed the order today, I’m now told the new iMac will be delivered tomorrow! This wasn’t in the plan and sent me into a bit of a panic about adapters and cables. Fortunately I double checked the spec first and found that the old style USB ports (and indeed the SD card slot) are still provided, so no Thunderbolt adapters needed.

It seems that Migration Assistant is still with us and there seems to be an option to transfer data over WiFi. Presumably using a backup on an external USB hard drive will be quicker though?

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Mick Burrell
Yes, plug your existing (up-to-date) Time Machine backup into the new iMac and it will transfer pretty much everything over. It will ask you to set a password for each user but you can use the one from the old machine. Just dome this for someone and can't think of anything it missed.

Be aware that, as always, the estimated completion time will go wildly up and down and can never be relied upon.

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Mick. I'm not expecting it to be a quick process - my user folder claims to be 688GB, some 550GB of which is split roughly 50/50 between movies and photos - and life's too short to sift through that lot!

Presumably if one ticks the Applications box in the Migration Assistant, it does something intelligent with the pre-installed Apple Apps rather than installing additional older versions?

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Mick Burrell
Right again - it won't install old apps over a newer version but it will transfer incompatible apps then tell you that they're incompatible. It's likely that there will be updates which have come out since the new machine was manufactured - the machine I referred to came with 10.14.4 for example and of course we seem to get a weekly update to Pages etc.

Re: What's so good about the newer iMacs?

Avatar Tony Still
If you want an extra job whilst migrating, don't forget that Catalina will lose a number of older video format CODECs since the old QuickTime is 32-bit so will no longer run. If your videos are old and still wanted, this could be a problem.

There are various methods for checking video files but none seem very efficient, generally involving loading into iMovie/Final Cut. You might be able to characterise them by date/camera if you're lucky. The other inefficient part of the process would then be transcoding all the ones you want to keep.
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