Daily at work: CS4 Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge, Acrobat, Word, Excel, Exchange, Safari running at the same time with large documents open on an iMac that's at least three years old with 4 GB of RAM. Works smoothly most of the time with the occasional glitch. Typically working on files from networked servers as well, not local files. Sounds like your office has some IT problems.
I copy all the files I work on over to the iMac first before opening them since many of them are large and I like to keep working files separate from final print artwork and proof files, what IT problems do you suppose our office might have? Just on another note, when copying the files to and from Win7 PCs, there are more issues than there were with the older Power PC Mac's using OS X 10.5 and Core 2 Mac running 10.6. When coming out of sitting idle for a bit (not even sleep) the network drives connected to are usually unresponsive and half the time have to be re-connected to. If a finder window is open displaying files from one of these network drives then the spinning colour wheel usually appears giving me a nice 10-20 sec wait to endure when I clearly want to use the thing right away. Furthermore when the screen turns off I can't transfer to or from the iMac, as wake on lan doesn't appear to work... and yes, this is after completely disabling a timer for turning off the hdd. All of these are new problems to the early 2012 iMac/OS X 10.7 as the older Mac's exhibit none of these issues, at least in this manner. What's more is all the bottlenecks are still there, in the same places. The new iMac is much quicker (expected) where the older mac's are at their quickest, but at their slowest, it's maybe twice as fast as the old freakin G4 from 2002. That's fucking pathetic considering how often these slow points rear their ugly heads. I have an app that shows cpu/memory usage and most of these slow points are when the memory appears to start swapping to the hdd. This happens a hell of a lot more than it should, especially when compared to my win7 PC doing the same damn thing with the same amount of RAM. Clearly our network is to blame.
You pop a panel off and stick in some laptop SODIMMs. What's so hard about that? That actually looks easier than upgrading the ram on most desktops. The HDD/SSD is a bitch to take out, but modern SSDs are pretty resilient and will probably never need to be messed with. And in this day and age, everyone should be opting for the SSD.
They seem to be phasing that out, at least with the lower end models. The new 21.5'' iMac does not have the RAM slots but the 27'' one does for a mere £400 extra. Infact the 21.5'' has its RAM soldered to the board so it is completely unfixable if it goes wrong! You can't configure these yet but it doesn't seem you will have the option for an SSD on the 21.5'' models so you have to have the 5400RPM drives. Fantastic value at only £1099, non user upgradable RAM, non upgradable 5400RPM HDD. A throw away computer for a 4 figure sum but it is OK because it looks pretty!
That looks like too much effort. I think I'll go to that website that lets me download more ram instead.
I think you're missing the point. Normal people have no real need to access those things, and if anything it's probably best if they're kept away from them. Of course power users aren't going to be happy. But most people are not power users. And power users will build their own desktops. For the vast majority of people, an iMac is going to be a much better experience than whatever shitbox the kid in the blue shirt at Best Buy recommends.
OK, you have a PC that cost you £500, is 13 months old and out of warranty, RAM goes wrong you pay £30 for RAM and £50 for a chap to come out and fit it. iMac that cost you £1099, is 13 months old and out of warranty, RAM goes wrong... Fuck you throw it in the bin! You can apply this logic to any of the parts of the new iMacs as they are completely sealed units. I am sure Apple will probably fix it for you but I suspect you have to pay them a few hundred £'s. Apple care is nearly £300 for 3 years which takes the base price of an iMac to £1399, you are an idiot if you take a Mac without it IMO or you have more money than sense. Far too much money to throw at something that can easily go wrong and be a paper weight. £1399 for a system with a 5400 RPM drive and comepletely non replaceable/upgradable parts. A real bargain.
Read the first sentence, then read the paragraph following. That's your IT problem. You obviously don't really know what's causing the problems, and yet at the same time you automatically blame Apple. I use an iMac with a 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM at work and have none of the problems you're talking about, either with large networked files (hundreds of MB) or local files (same). The performance certainly blows away the old G5 desktops we had in every way. It's not even close.
I think you can get iPerf for OS X so it might be worth him running the server on a Win 7 PC and then running the client from a Win 7 PC and his iMac and seeing if there is a bottleneck on both. If only on one then it proves there is some sort of network issue with the iMac. It could be something silly like authentication between the Windows system and the iMac.
Well the drive adaptor didn’t work on the DVD drive. It would appear then disappear over and over. I’m getting a new USB DVD drive tomorrow. Worst case scenario is I use the Win 7 license from my PC which I don’t really need anymore. I’m just bound and determined to get the recovery partition to work.
It's two different problems - the RAM issue and general slowness with certain files has been there since the thing was new. I can't see how that isn't the fault of the iMacs hardware coupled with OS X? What sort of files are you talking about? I'm talking about editing large PDF's in illustrator (50-100MB) and saving them as .ai files for working on (500-1000MB) then potentially bringing that into indesign and saving it as a pdf or eps. Also photoshop files around 500MB-1.5GB. Yes, big files, but my win7 PC doesn't completely crap its pants like the iMac does. Also, when I close the file on my PC and do a simple tast like open up exlorer or browse the web, everything is instantly snappy. On the iMac it's like it's just run a marathon and you ask it to do a pushup and it just stands there for 10 mins saying "wait, hold up, I need some more water first". The network issues have persisted on all the mac's I've used in the office, but have only gotten worse with Lion and the new iMac. Maybe there is a local issue on this one, but with the problem getting worse on a newer version of the OS and not existing on various windows PC's communicating with one another, it still seems like a pretty Apple specific problem to me...
I'll have to look into this, shortly after buying our 2012 iMac removing the screen is what all the tec sites were saying you had to do to change the ram with guides on how to do it. Either these videos apply to the model just before the one we own, or the articles I read back then were wrong or simply referring to a way to upgrade both the ram AND hdd.
All of the above, both on networked servers and local. Photoshop files with 20+ layers and in the multi 100s of MB. Large PDFs between 100-150 MB. InDesign files with large layered graphics and full resolution for placed files. Creative Suite doesn't really place THAT much of a burden on reasonably current hardware with decent RAM. That's why so many companies just default to iMac's now for CS work instead of Mac Pros.
Which was exactly my thinking in going with the iMac. Sometimes it's fine, although not as snappy as my old Core 2 Quad PC which I'll assume is due to the lack of an SSD. Other times (where our old mac's fail as well) it's pretty slow to horrendous. My archaic PC doesn't have the same problems with the same files in my testing, whether reading from the SSD or 5400rpm mechanical drive. So, what IT problem could this be exactly? I have no idea how you can make such an accusation after the info I have given you.
Well, some of the things you describe are network actions, like direct connections between PCs and Macs for files. That opens up a whole can of worms that can have little to do with the actual capability of the hardware or the OS. As for using files with Creative Suite, you don't seem to want to acknowledge that CS itself might be to blame some of the time. Adobe doesn't exactly develop the Windows version and OS X versions in parallel, or with the same resources. They chose to develop Windows as the lead, and OS X would usually have to wait for certain things...like 64 bit support, or native coding. And, yes, using an SSD is going to make a difference in snappiness. CS6 apps start almost like iPad apps on my Mac Pro at home now that I switched to an SSD. Working on files is smoother as well.
It was originally, but that wasn't the case by the late '90s. Apple had basically been given up for dead at that point, and Adobe was focused on Windows primarily. Adobe wasn't too keen on rewriting their old code for OS X either. It took until CS5 on OS X for it to be fully native.
My recovery sank on the fail boat. I was able to make a recovery disk but to my surprise it only allowed me to recover from a back-up which I didn't have. For fun I made a back-up of the current system then tried to recover from it and all I got was a bad boot message when I tried to boot. I gave up. I think it has something to do with the partitions. There were two primary and one system partition. I think it was the system partition that I couldn't copy. Anyway I broke down and I'm putting a fresh install of 7 on it. I didn't want to do that because I'll need that 7 if I ever re-install my version 8 upgrade. 8 doesn't let you skirt the upgrade rules like 7 does.