a 2013 iMac 2.7 GHz quad-core Intel i5.Īnd that is a bad experience for new iMac owners. But it felt just as slow as our old iMac. It had a 3.6 GHz quad-core Intel i3 processor with retina screen. I tested an iMac with a Fusion drive in an Apple Store, and it booted in probably less than a third of the time of the iMac I had bought.Īnd it wasn’t the cheapest iMac Apple offers: it was about $1,800 Canadian, or almost $1,400 USD. Fusion drives have a small solid-state drive for commonly-accessed files and quick startups. The odd thing is that Apple still sells iMacs without one.Īpple does offer what it calls a “Fusion drive,” which offers the best of both worlds.
They do, however, make booting up and other disk-intensive tasks much quicker. Solid-state drives are much faster - up to eight times faster at accessing data - but they’re much more expensive. Traditional hard drives are cheap but slow. Ultimately, both machines are slow, and both machines are slow because they use old-fashioned spinning hard drives, not solid-state drives. The new machine was the clear winner in opening Apple’s Podcast app, however. That spinning beach ball came up on the new machine doing nothing more than closing System Preferences. your Mac’s way of telling you it’s busy, working hard and overburdened.
One thing that should never come up on a brand-new Apple machine is the spinning beach ball of death.
