At $1499 Apple will typically sell you a dual-core notebook of some sort, but here you get no less than a quad-core, 65W Core i5-4570R. The entry level 21.5-inch iMac is one of the most affordable options in Apple’s lineup. The CPU: Haswell with an Optional Crystalwell As tempted as I was to begin my first look at the 2013 iMac evaluating the impact of going to faster storage, it was the entry-level model that grabbed my attention first because of a little piece of silicon we’ve come to know as Crystalwell. Displays and resolutions are the same, but silicon options are a bit quicker, 802.11ac is on deck and the SSDs all move to PCIe (including Fusion Drive). This year the iMacs get incrementally better. Yeesh, I never thought I’d do either of those things.Ĥ x USB 3.0, 2 x Thunderbolt, 1 x GigE, SDXC reader, headphone jack So today’s confession is really a two-parter: I’ve been using an iMac for the past year, and I’ve been using a hard drive as a part of my primary storage for the past year.

I’m happy to report that it actually did. Obviously Apple’s Fusion Drive is designed to mitigate the inevitable performance degradation, and my initial take on it after about a month of use was very good - but would it last? When the OS is a clean install, the drive is mostly empty and thus operating at its peak performance. It’s entirely possible to mask the overwhelmingly bad experience of a hard drive in a high performance machine by only sampling at the beginning of the journey. This past year has been the most insane in terms of travel, so it wasn’t a lack of mobility that kept me on the iMac but rather a desire to test Apple’s new Fusion Drive over the long haul. I always said that if I had a less mobile lifestyle the iMac is probably the machine I’d end up with (that was prior to the announcement of the new Mac Pro of course).

For the past year I’ve been using a 27-inch iMac as my primary workstation.

Late 2013 imac