My Experience with the 2019 iMac 5K So Far
See my Mac wish list at B&H Photo and 2019 iMac 5K: Recommended Models and Accessories.
I thought I would shared a few quick notes on my experience with the 2019 iMac 5K, having
switched to it from the 2017 iMac 5K about a month ago.
Throughout 2018 the 2017 iMac 5K was a solid performer and excellent for field work (along with the NEC PA302W) in my Mercedes Sprinter photography adventure van.
However, over time I kept running into slowdowns in my work, some small, some moderate, and some disruptive; see My Days of 4 CPU Cores Are Over: Six Cores is Dubious for My Work, 8 CPU Cores Might Have to Be the New Minimum + Might Need 8TB SSD.
- The small and moderate slowdowns are solved— the 2019 iMac 5K is substantially faster for most things. Indeed it might be the most significant time-saving upgrade in many years for my work. There remains one key task that takes longer than I like because the task is largely single-threaded (scripted task), but there is nothing for it.
- Having 128GB memory has eliminated issues when working with aperture series (multiple layers in Photoshop) of high pixel count. Especially for lens comparisons, 64GB had its limits; those slowdowns are now gone.
- I can backup and work at the same time without running out of CPU cores. With the 2017 iMac 5K, half the cores could be sucked up, so the machine become sluggish and unresponsive at times. The 8 CPU cores of the 2019 iMac 5K have done away with that.
- Raw conversion is substantially faster, which is very helpful especially for interactive use when I adjust and compare conversion settings.
- Enhance Details is about 25% faster with the Vega 48 GPU—very nice though since the Vega 48 GPU upgrade is $450 and it doesn’t do much of anything else for me, probably not worth it.
- I can run CPU-intensive tasks in the background like IntegrityChecker verify with little impact on my other work.
- Working off the internal SSD and the 8TB OWC Thunderblade has eliminated all delays from disk I/O and all noise from spinning hard disks. That’s more important than ever with 8 CPU cores.
Check out my review of the 2019 iMac 5K.
Please engage me in consulting for any questions on your specific situation on choice of computer, backup, RAID, SSDs, etc, and thank you for buying your Macs and other stuff through B&H Photo and MacSales.com, which make most of my computer and related gear reviews possible, via loaners.
- 2019 iMac 5K: Memory Bandwidth
- 2019 iMac 5K: Adobe Camera Raw Enhance Details
- 2019 iMac 5K: diglloyd Adobe Photoshop Benchmarks
- 2019 iMac 5K: Photoshop Filters
- 2019 iMac 5K: Real World Photoshop: Make Multi-Res Image Series
- 2019 iMac 5K: IntegrityChecker Verify
- 2019 iMac 5K: Convert RAW Files to JPEG With Adobe Camera Raw (Sony A7R III)
- 2019 iMac 5K: Convert RAW Files to JPEG With Adobe Camera Raw (Nikon D850)
- 2019 iMac 5K: Convert RAW Files to JPEG With Adobe Camera Raw (Hasselblad X1D)
- 2019 iMac 5K: Convert RAW Files to JPEG With Adobe Camera Raw (Fujifilm GFX)
- 2019 iMac 5K: Zerene Stacker Focus Stacking
- 2019 iMac 5K: Helicon Focus Focus Stacking
- 2019 iMac 5K: Recommended Models and Accessories