Poll: *** The official 24" M1 iMac thread (it has seven colours and everything!) ***

[Ryan-3]

That's the price without VAT. Actual price is £1,664.40

Ahh, gotcha. Thanks

 

[v0n]

Thunderbolt is an intel standard which is effectively PCI express 3.0 (x4?) over the USB cable. Intel ‘donated’ thunderbolt 3 to the USB 4.0 standard. It’s very fast but is obviously supported by a much smaller number of devices. It’s particularly useful for eGPU, docking stations and very fast SSD storage. It can also be daisy chained which is very useful.

Careful there, M1 SOC does not support eGPU. Apple decided to cripple their T3/USB4.0 to wage war on nVidia...

It's the unified memory architecture on the M1 which makes the way RAM is used way more efficient and gives you more for less, compared to previous implementations.

This is very often misunderstood. Although BigSur MacOS is optimised for M1 to keep track of memory usage like a hawk and does very good job at it, M1 is not some magical micro kernel situation. The real things that use real memory don't become smaller in M1 memory. So if you need to run a half an hour FCPX project that takes 20Gb of memory and you want to keep it open for several weeks so it doesn't re-render the entire timeline several times a day, it will naturally still need 20Gb of memory, no magical bullets there.

Thanks to M1 architecture it will swap to SSD faster, but swap it will ef loads, make no mistake about it. This is needed because M1 was designed for iPads, it was never meant to have more memory or more peripherals or run multiple monitors (or include licensed patented eGPU implementations for that matter). It's early days of ported architecture. In fact if a mythological M1X simply shipped with 32-64Gb of memory and multiple thunderbolt buses, but exactly the same core configuration, it would blast through benchmarks with considerable speed advantage and it would be possible to milk as the next gen architecture, despite being the same M1 with more options.

Anyway - the efficiency (policed mainly by OS and software) of M1 works, and works relatively well, there is no doubt about, they optimised the **** out of it, which was btw largely doable also outside of that architecture, but that's a long story. The point is - incredibly fast swapping instead of large memory bank works (at the moment) and you're not going to notice it (for now). Not until few years from now when we do the same advances as when moving from HD to 4K, and file sizes become too much for the tiny portable architecture to handle. At that point you'll look at the 8Gb of RAM constantly swapping to 256Gb of SSD the same way as when Windows advertised using USB sticks for faster cache than HDD. But by then it will be largely irrelevant, if everything goes according to plan and Apple doesn't just run everything on one good-ish mobile chip and Imac Pros and Mac Pros of the day run M4 or M5 generation with 64 cores and 128Gb of memory.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

At the moment using a 2011 27 imac with the 1TB 7200 hdd.
I have 16gig ram
I use primarily the Photos app to edit canon raws which are approx 38MB.
I edit one at a time and have no problem with that its a smooth easy experience.
If I buy the baseline Imac 24,bearing in mind im asking re this one question regarding phtos app raw editing as above.
Should it find that task reasonably stress free?
thanks

 

[LiE]

@ChrisBuzz I would opt for 16GB.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

thanks,to get that wouldnt i need to buy from the apple store as none of the pre built ones come higher?

 

[LiE]

thanks,to get that wouldnt i need to buy from the apple store as none of the pre built ones come higher?

Yes most likely, sometimes you do find high memory models from other retailers but they aren't very common.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

so no interest free from apple,dont have enough spare cash or better option so will see what I can do

 

[ChrisBuzz]

so without the 16 ram in the new machine do you think my 2011 mac performs better than the 24 M1 ?

 

[ChrisD.]

I have an 8GB M1 Air and I can mass edit RAW photos in Lightroom without any issues at all, depends on the app I guess and what you're doing exactly.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

interesting as Lightroom is supposedly a bit of a hog,i would assume the apple app should be optimised .

 

[ChrisD.]

interesting as Lightroom is supposedly a bit of a hog,i would assume the apple app should be optimised .

CC is, I think Classic is still x86 however it worked fine (via Rosetta) when I tried it.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

thanks, I have a perpetual licence for LR6 but i understand that the installer is 32 bit and wont work with Catalina and Big Sur?

 

[ChrisD.]

thanks, I have a perpetual licence for LR6 but i understand that the installer is 32 bit and wont work with Catalina and Big Sur?

Correct. I believe the app itself is 64 bit and it's either the installer or the license agreement part which is 32 bit. I'm in the same boat, I have a perpetual license for LR and I can't use it as you're now forced to use the subscription model. CC is far cleaner than Classic but you can't turn off cloud sync permanently.

 

[LiE]

I have an 8GB M1 Air and I can mass edit RAW photos in Lightroom without any issues at all, depends on the app I guess and what you're doing exactly.

I also did this, but my swap was contantly 12-16GB while editing. It's doable but the high swap tells me that more RAM would help.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

i stopped using Icloud as it drove me nuts waiting for the sycning and stuff so i have libraries on ext drives instead,
Lie thanks for that about the swapping,will consider what you have said but also my purse

 

[GeorgeFell07]

I have an 8GB M1 Air and I can mass edit RAW photos in Lightroom without any issues at all, depends on the app I guess and what you're doing exactly.

Apple M1 chip with 8‑core CPU, 7‑core GPU, 8GB, 256GB SSD storage and for editing wedding videos (I work as wedding photographer and videographer) I use Lightroom (for colorcorrection), and movavi (for effects, transitions, music, merging and so on) I'll leave the link to it here. And everything works smoothly, the videos don't play choppy, so I guess it really depends on the software.

 

[ChrisBuzz]

I have exactly the same history) and lightroom works perfectly.

good to know

 

[IronSpider]

How do you use a monitor calibrator with this screen? Do you have to turn the true tone off? I'm just curious how you get accurate colour representation.

 

[LiE]

Estimated date is 3rd, Apple just took payment. Fingers crossed for sooner delivery.

 

[Throrik]

Estimated date is 3rd, Apple just took payment. Fingers crossed for sooner delivery.

I look forward to hearing yours and others comments before I have the guts to purchase one for myself. I also want to hold off and see them in person before choosing silver or a potential colour.