I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system.
I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.
The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.
First generation 1TB fusion drives had 128GB of SSD storage. 2017 and 2019 1TB fusion drives have 32GB of SSD storage [1], which is basically just enough for the OS and a couple of apps if you are lucky. People are not exaggerating when they say Apple hardware are regressing, not progressing.
Putting/letting Jony Ive on designing the new campus is one of the dumbest things Apple has done. Effectively dereliction of duty.
Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.
The size need only be proportional to the amount of hot data. And realistically, it need only be proportional to the amount of hot data that's randomly accessed in small chunks, because that's where the bulk of the improvements will come from.
I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.
That's quite the opposite of my experience where only very cold data is not SSD-level performance. Do you have anything like anti-virus software which might be interfering with the HSM mechanism?
A $3k desktop for which you need to buy an external drive. At some point slavishness to the Apple brand must have a breaking point.
Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.
Seeing that hardly any reputable company sells 5K displays anymore besides LG, the monitor itself is worth $1300. The cheapest 5K iMac is $1800. You’re not going to find computers “much cheaper” than $500 that match the iMacs specs.
They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.
I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.
The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.