It’s Nearly 2022 and I Bought An Intel iMac. Am I Mad?

[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes]

With all the attention that the new M1 based Mac’s are getting these days, and with the stated intention of phasing out Intel in the Apple hardware, someone would have to be mad to buy an Intel Mac at the moment. Wouldn’t they?

Well I did, and here’s why…

What am I Coming From?

Ok, so to understand why I did this, it might first help to understand what I bought and what it replaces.

My current daily driver is a 2017 27″ 5K Retina iMac. As I always do when buying Mac gear, I pretty much max’d out the specs (with eventual resale in mind, apart from anything else):

• 4.2GHz 4 core i7
• 64GB of RAM
• 1TB SSD
• Radeon Pro 580 8GB.

The RAM was upgraded from an original as-ordered 8GB with an OWC after market kit, at a significant saving over the $ premium that Apple charge. The 27″ iMac was – and still is, for now at least – one of the very few machines that Apple still designs to be easily user-upgradable in this respect.

That machine replaced a 2011 iMac which gave great service but understandably for a 5+ year old machine, when the 2017 model came along, it blew the 2011 out of the water. 4 years later, it’s the 2017 machine that’s now looking a little long in the tooth.

The 5K Retina screen is of course as gorgeous as ever and imho simply can’t be beat, only matched; and then only by other infamously expensive Apple displays.

Yes the 27″ iMac is an expensive computer, but displays this good are expensive. Period. You have to take that into account when weighing the cost. Of course, if the display quality isn’t a concern for you, then it’s just an unnecessary extravagance. But it matters to me.

So much so that I did not upgrade to the nano-texture, anti-reflective coating. As impressive as the reflection reduction is, reflections in my workspace are not a problem, and the nano-texture comes at the cost of more pernickety care instructions (it can be damaged if cleaned the wrong way) and the nano-texture itself results in a not insignificant reduction in contrast and definition, since it acts like a very soft diffuser in front of the screen.

And they want NZ$500 to “upgrade” the excellent display to (what for me is) a less excellent one? No thanks.

So why update now? And why to an Intel Mac rather than waiting for the M1 Max Pro Ultra Super Mega Duo Ultimate Plus (or perhaps just “M2”) based 2022 update that is surely coming?

First of all, let’s look at the specs of my new machine.

• 3.6GHz 10 core i9
• 128GB RAM
• 2TB SSD
• Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16GB

Again, the RAM was upgraded using an after-market kit from OWC. Apple wanted NZ$4,550 to upgrade from the base 8GB!!

I may be mad, but I’m not stupid.

Out of the gate it has to be said that the slower processor clock on the old i7 is deceptive.

A Need.. A Need for Speed

In Geekbench5, the new i9 machine clocks in at a comfortable 20% faster than the faster-clocked i7 in the old machine, for single-core tests. More on that in a minute.

For multi-core tests, those extra 6 cores (2.5x the number of cores in the old i7) make for a better than 3x improvement. As you’d expect with numerically more cores.

Comparison of on-board graphics isn’t really relevant or fair since I don’t intend deliberately crippling the external GPU. And while that GPU may be beaten by the GPU cores on the M1, neither media content nor gaming are a significant proportion of my time spent on my Mac’s, so I’m simply not concerned.

For what I do do – software development – this machine is fast. I have no benchmark to back this up other than the stupid grin that spreads over my face when using it. 🙂

Is it as fast as an M1 Pro or Max? Nope, I guess not. Or at least, not when it comes to what geekbench has to say.

But those benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. In particular, a more rigorous benchmarking analysis identifies that Intel chips are disadvantaged in single core tests particularly, since they are optimised for their hyper-threaded SMT architecture, running 2 threads per core. M1 chips have no hyper-threading and are optimised for running a single thread per core.

The really big advantage that M1 has over Intel of course (at this point in processor development history at least) is compute muscle per watt. Which in a desktop system is far less of a concern than it is when extracting maximum battery life in a laptop.

Even so, is it possible that a new, big-screen iMac will be even faster, based on a further enhanced M1 or M2 chip?

Almost certainly.

The Here and Now…

So the future bigger-screen iMac will almost certainly shade the current i9 based model (which is immediately on the backfoot by virtue of not even using the latest i9 processors).

But here’s the kicker: It doesn’t exist yet.

And when it does, if I want to max out the RAM I will have no choice but to pay Apple for the privilege. The price premium for the SoC RAM upgrades may not be as eye-watering as the SODIMM upgrades, but they’re still excessive and – crucially – the only option.

When it does exist, I anticipate my existing 2017 iMac will lose a chunk of what resale value it still has (which traditionally for Macs is significant – far more than a similarly aged PC system).

You can call me “shallow” if you like, but we also don’t yet know for sure what the styling will be like.

I know I like the existing 27″ iMac (don’t judge me). The thick bezels don’t bother me, in fact I appreciate the way they “frame” my work and separate it from the ambient lighting around my workstation.

On the other hand, I actively dislike the 24″ M1 iMac styling, and whilst it is not certain that the bigger cousin iMac would be the same or even similar, the simple fact is we don’t know. What we do know is that the 24″ iMac shows that Apple’s design studio is capable of producing things I don’t like, so there is always the possibility that they will do so again.

Some rumours say a new iMac will simultaneously look like both the 24″ M1 iMac and the Apple XDR display. Which would be a neat trick: To simultaneously have a white bezel and a chin AND no bezels and no chin. For now I think we have to admit, we just don’t know.

This is all highly subjective. Some people love the new 24″ iMac styling (though I have to say the majority I know don’t).

But this is about what I decided to buy. I am not trying to convince anyone that my reasons should apply to them.

In simple terms, I decided to go with what I know I like over what I might like.

Especially since Apple have an annoying habit of immediately pulling end of line models when new SKU’s are announced. So if I waited until I knew for certain what the new model would look like, and don’t like it, I could miss out on the opportunity to get one of the last iteration of the model that I did like.

And if I do like what comes next, well then I just have to weigh up whether I like to more enough to want to upgrade in a hurry. In the meantime I have something that works well for me.

Teething Trouble…

And to all that, we can add a disturbing number of stories emerging about problems that specifically afflict M1 based products. Let’s count the ways…

• Problems with charging
• Problems with SD cards
• Excessive SSD ‘wear’
• Problems with external displays
• Memory Leak (caused by customised mouse pointers of all things!)

Some of these are resolved or have work-arounds, and the memory leak issue is actually a macOS Monterey problem, affecting both Intel and M1 systems.

But, the point remains, that it is very early days yet for M1. The days of Intel in Macs may be numbered, but unless Apple stoop to some particularly nasty tactics (surely not?), introducing bugs specifically to only Intel Macs, the ecosystem has years of experience on Intel to have ironed out problems that could impact on me severely or even just annoyingly.

And as much as Apple are to be admired for delivering on their transition program so rapidly, the rest of the Mac world have yet to catch up and that may take years. In some cases, particularly niche apps and utilities may never get updated.

Rosetta2 is an impressive solution for continuing to support Intel native only binaries running on M1 hardware, but is another factor to take into account when comparing performance. If the binaries you are running on an M1 Mac are still only available in Intel form, then you need to take a further dose of salt with those impressive M1 benchmark results.

And Finally…

Although I spend most of my days these days working in golang, with some time still spent in c# I do still have one toe in the Delphi pool.

As such, the ability to run Windows (via Parallels virtualisation) on a Mac at “better than PC” performance was always a huge plus. This is less important now on my daily driver, as I have switched to using a dedicated Mac Mini (Intel again, obviously) for hosting Parallels VM’s for Windows development, and RDP into them. Plus a “farm” of Intel NUC’s that I use as build agents.

Maybe I just need to “let go”, but for now M1 still feels like a platform that has most appeal for people working with media and able to use the Apple M1 tuned apps. For general purpose development, the thought of not having an Intel platform under me just feels a little uncomfortable for some reason.

As I say, maybe I just need to get comfortable with that.

So, Am I Mad?

So what do you think? Am I mad? Am I indeed even stupid?

Have you made the switch to M1 on a development workhorse system?

How is/was the experience for you?