My boss Chris picked up a Retina 27" iMac for my use last year. The 5k display is awesome, particularly when rendering small size italic text. Deep color doesn't hurt either, and the best part for me is the ability to have an xterm open with 120 rows of text that aren't too small to read. I've had a 27" iMac at home with the 'standard' 2560x1440 display at home, beautiful display. Yet, look at that small text, looks blocky…
One of the best features on the work computer is the Fusion drive. It's a combination of a standard SATA drive and a fast SSD on the PCIe bus. Apple's CoreStorage presents the pair to the operating system as a single volume. It automagically migrates the most often used files to the faster storage. Bootup is fast, application loading is fast, and so on. I use Microsoft Word for Mac as an example of bloatware - it loads and is ready for use in under a second. Well, who wouldn't want such a machine? It runs Unix, is very Linux-friendly - and every once in a while it's fun to watch a 4K YouTube video just to enjoy the display. I spend hours mangling Perl code at the computer and generally approve of its features. Save your pennies, get the computer. I ordered a 3.2 GHz Core i5 unit with the same 1 TB Fusion drive. It arrives, I set it up, looks fantastic; I bring it home. Lucky thing I looked at System Information. After the initial shock, some research. It seems that around August Apple chose to reduce the size of the SSD from 120 GB to 23-1/2 GB. Without telling anyone, let's cut the capacity by more than a factor of five. Something stinks here, and the smell is coming from Cupertino. After a few discussion with Apple I picked up the 3.3 GHz model with the 2 TB Fusion drive - this one actually has the 120 GB SSD. Meanwhile, some performance metrics… I thought there would be no observable difference between a 3.2 GHz computer and a 3.3 GHz computer. Indeed there are. Since I'd invested a full day in setting things up on the 3.2 GHz unit, I used Super Duper to copy an image of the OS onto a 2 TB drive, using USB 3.0. Very impressive performance - 105 MB/sec sustained performance. The 3.3 GHz unit comes home, now the imaging is set up in the other direction. Wow, it sustains 150 MB/sec transfer speed going onto the system disk. I am impressed! I had been doing SCP file transfers from the older 2.7 GHz iMac. With the 3.2 GHz iMac the speed was about 90 MB/sec - and that's doing encryption/decryption on the files of course. I did the same transfers with the 3.3 GHz unit, seeing some sustained 103 MB/sec transfers. I've never seen SCP run this fast. The swap of the 3.2 GHz unit for the faster one with the 'real' Fusion drive coat $175, more or less - well worth it. But if you like Macs and think the 1 TB Fusion drive is a good idea, you may wish to reconsider. Curt -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
