John Koetsier, a contributing writer at Forbes reportedly bought an iMac desktop a few months ago to replace his aging 2013 iMac. However, to his surprise the new model turned out to be slower than the older machine in a lot of scenarios. As a result, he and his wife decided to return the machine just two weeks after the purchase.
Koetsier argues that people buy new machines for a lot of varying reasons but one of them usually is the improvement in speed. He goes on by adding that, a customer expects a newer model of the same machine to be faster when compared to your older machine.
To get a clear picture, Koetsier did a thorough comparison between his 2013 iMac and the latest iMac (base model). Both models use HDD type of storage devices and not the Fusion Drive. He says that, iMacs take a lot of time boot compared to the MacBooks which only use SSD.
Koetsier says that in his tests, the new iMac did perform a little better in terms of startup speed as it took 93 seconds to boot up compared to 107 seconds for the 2013 iMac to do the same. However, the new machine failed to beat the 2013 iMac when opening apps like Apple’s web browser Safari and the default Mail app.
The new machine showed the spinning beach ball of death, says Koetsier. A computer should always be faster than you expect it to whereas the new iMac suffered from the “spinning beach ball of death” lag when closing a simple window like the System Preferences, adds Koetsier.
SSDs are not exactly new. Apple begun adding SSDs to its machines way back in 2010. However, its very odd that the company continues to sell an iMac with an HDD in 2020. Koetsier suggests that people spend some extra cash and get the iMac with the Fusion Drive (SSD+HDD) which will make their lives easier.
