My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now.

Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

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.

I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.

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.

A quarter of the storage at a premium price isn't exactly appealing to a lot of people, regardless of how much faster it may be.

If you are willing to accept separate components, you can buy much cheaper hardware.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...

Because 90% don't need computing power; they just browse Facebook and Spotify.

The Fusion Drive is available for $100 more, if you actually need to access local storage.

The process was surprisingly fun, too.

In fact, the laptop is still usable.

That 5400 rpm hard drive was a bad mistake.

This doesn’t even make sense given how cheap SSDs are now. Especially with Apple’s buying power.

I’m sure some people still want high-capacity HDDs for various workloads, but that’s what Thunderbolt 3 is for, surely?

Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.

Great for the bottom line, but unlike in a supply chain, your cash source (customers) will eventually want something different.

I'd gladly overpay for Apple products if they were bleeding edge tech because I love the touchpad. Give me optane + m.2 + SSD, huge RAM, lots of ports, etc.

But you cannot claim you're "for the pros" and offer a spinning disk as base storage. Archival? Sure.

Apple never claimed any iMac was for Pros except the iMac Pro.

You are free to choose any combination of memory, hard drive, processor speed trade offs that meet your budget.

Apple explicitly claims the iMac is for "pros" in the article this page is discussing:

"iMac is ideal for pros"

"iMac is loved by consumers and pros alike."

"the most demanding pro workloads."

"even a pro studio."

and more.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-perfor...

> should they also sell them all with the highest performing graphics card and 64GB of RAM?

Nope, those are each about $400 retail (well, the delta from 32GB->64GB is only about $200 retail), and won't benefit everyone.

But at this point, every iMac they sell with the HDD or fusion drive will meet your description of "the margins were both ridiculously high and the Mac’s were slow."

They should deliver the OS installed on a 128GB SSD ($25 retail) just to preserve the reputation of the platform.

Even during the brief period where the PowerPC was faster than the current Intel processors, Macs were hobbled by an OS that was still partially emulated and bus speeds that were slower than PC motherboards. Not to mention the anemic graphics hardware.

Not sure outside their exhibition pieces which nobody really buys (10k fully specced mac pros etc) they've ever been going to market with a 'best hardware in class' story, have they?

Most other desktop components can obviously be found in various PCs as well.

This is the part they gave up on, while keeping the other two.

Edit: Apparently 3TB HDDs cost as low as 60€ nowadays...

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat...

https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...

A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.

Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-120GB-Solid-SA400S37-120G/dp...

That was kind of a big deal. I'd already had a 7200 rpm disk in my old machine and this was still hands down faster. I can't imagine going back to 5400.

So why buy Apple?

I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash chips and resoldering to a board with a working microcontroller (I'd love to be proven wrong here).

At any rate, I replaced it with a Western Digital M.2 SSD and it's been working fine since.

But, that whole episode shattered my notion that SSDs were more reliable than HDDs because of the fact that they have no moving parts.

A bit like buying an OS-less PC. But I agree full-heartedly that it's counter-intuitive to the brand.

I’d just throw a thunderbolt or usb3 SSD in a port instead. I boot off a USB3 SSD on my Mac mini and that seems to work fine, despite not being quite as good as an internal or TB drive would be.

Battery life and durability are better on 5400 drives. Performance is a tricky one too. Depending on use case, say a PC doing lots of large sequential data (Media)? 10/15k with high IOP and random access times don't actually help much when streaming home movies instead of serving up highly concurrent database records.

This is Apple doing Apple; very well-designed but midrange hardware with a premium price tag.

Fusion Drive is a hack.