Hey everyone lovely day to you and hope your enjoying the sunshine today. I think I want to treat myself to a new mac, my current one is late 2015 and running Monterey of course, so it's getting a bit long in the tooth and not secure anymore. In this day and age that is becoming more important of course with all the bad guys out there. I am hoping that it can be emptied/fixed up for use by my 11 year old but not sure if that is an option because it still works really well. Anyway, anyone know if they are going to up the M4 chip in the next while? It would be just my luck to buy new and have them release the next gen chip a week after! Checking with the apple site I was thinking the 10 Core 256GB, do you think that would be enough for someone who is a moderate user? or bite the bullet and go up to the 512? Thanks all Donna
I want/need a new imac
- Thread starter DonnaH
- Start date
DaveWT
Well-Known Member
The answer to that lies in how much stuff you have on your present Mac. If you click on the hard drive icon and type Command-i, it will show you the Capacity of the internal drive, how much of that you have used, and how much is still available. If you are a big photo / video taker then I doubt a 256 GB SSD will be big enough. Of course, you could buy an external drive and offload a lot of stuff to that, but then you have to think about that setup and how to back it all up etc. As to whether there will be an M5 etc. soon you should at least wait until after the June WWDC but even if there are announcements there, a Mac that has a newer chip may not be available for some time. In any case a "moderate user" will never strain an M4 machine.
Dave
Dave
Hi Dave: Thanks for the reply, I checked the hd and it's a 1TB with 250GB available. I know when I bought it there was the option of how large a hd was available so I went bigger just in case, I keep stuff for longer than most people do (2001 car in the garage) Also have a 5TB ext hd on it, and that one has 3.9 available so I have a tendency to overdo somethings. 20000 photos, that I should slim down, but over that it's just mail, messages, some documents saved, browsing, banking, shopping, movies and tv, and thats about it. The mac I have now would probably last me for some time yet except for the fact that it's not supported anymore and I worry a bit about lack of security, you just never know. So I think I may just do as you suggest and wait till after the WWDC and then move ahead. Again thanks, I always learn something new from the great members here.
DaveWT
Well-Known Member
Hi Donna, So with about 750 GB of stuff on that 1TB drive, (* see below) I don't know how you will cope with a 256 GB or even a 512 GB SSD in a new Mac, unless you are prepared to move a lot more of your stuff to the external drive. The photo library itself is probably going to eat up most of the new drive. Of course there are other things you can do like use iCloud to store your photos and just keep (smaller sized) thumbnails of the photos on your Mac. Movies are another big drain on storage. When you say "Movies" do you mean movie clips you have stored in the Photos library, iMovie etc. or perhaps actual Movies you have downloaded from other places and stored outside the Photos app, Movies app etc.?
* with 750 GB used in your 1TB drive, you are getting darn close to "full", as I believe the common wisdom is you shouldn't go beyond about 80% of capacity. So even if you could justify going for a 1 TB SSD on the new Mac, if you put everything back just as you have it on the old Mac. you would already be "near the end". Time to move some stuff off to that external drive in any case perhaps.
Dave
* with 750 GB used in your 1TB drive, you are getting darn close to "full", as I believe the common wisdom is you shouldn't go beyond about 80% of capacity. So even if you could justify going for a 1 TB SSD on the new Mac, if you put everything back just as you have it on the old Mac. you would already be "near the end". Time to move some stuff off to that external drive in any case perhaps.
Dave
Wow and here I thought I was pretty well covered, goes to show you how much I really understand about this tech stuff lol. I really should try to learn how these things work. I do like things simple cause as I say I am not very tech savy, most of it is over my head. As you say maybe it's time to clear out a lot of stuff before moving to a new machine. It would be sort of dumb to buy new and then fill it immediately. I think most of my problem is photos and videos (most taken by the 11 years old that are horrible but he likes them) only have 2 real movies, some music of course and documents that most households have and school stuff again from the kid. I do use icloud for the photos so that is in my favour anyway. I'll sit down with a glass or two of wine and see what kind of damage I can do getting some space hoping to keep it simpler when I trade up. Thanks again Dave
chas_m
Well-Known Member
Late 2015 … oh yeah, you’re IMO overdue to upgrade to a newer machine. And I thought my 2019 MBP was getting long in the tooth!
As a rule of thumb, when your Mac can no longer upgrade to the latest version of macOS, that starts a ticking clock.
There’s no reason to run out and buy a new one the day that happens, because the previous OS versions get security updates for another two or three years. But after that point, it is definitely time to buy a new Mac. Given the big jump in performance that arrived with the M1/M2/et al class Macs, if you’re on an Intel-based Mac like I am, the upgrade — when you do it — will feel satisfyingly zippier.
As for storage management, my rule of thumb is that everything I need regular access to stays on the boot drive (backed up to another drive, of course). Stuff I don’t routinely need access to, I put on iCloud or a secondary drive*. Since photos and videos tend to take up the most space on any storage, those are the things I tend to put on cloud storage or the secondary drive, and the secondary drive also needs a backup — either to another disk or cloud storage.
*secondary drive is NOT your backup drive.
I also periodically make a “clone” of my boot drive to a secondary hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. That way, if my internal drive crashed, I could boot from the clone and finish up my work before I take the machine in for service.
As a rule of thumb, when your Mac can no longer upgrade to the latest version of macOS, that starts a ticking clock.
There’s no reason to run out and buy a new one the day that happens, because the previous OS versions get security updates for another two or three years. But after that point, it is definitely time to buy a new Mac. Given the big jump in performance that arrived with the M1/M2/et al class Macs, if you’re on an Intel-based Mac like I am, the upgrade — when you do it — will feel satisfyingly zippier.
As for storage management, my rule of thumb is that everything I need regular access to stays on the boot drive (backed up to another drive, of course). Stuff I don’t routinely need access to, I put on iCloud or a secondary drive*. Since photos and videos tend to take up the most space on any storage, those are the things I tend to put on cloud storage or the secondary drive, and the secondary drive also needs a backup — either to another disk or cloud storage.
*secondary drive is NOT your backup drive.
I also periodically make a “clone” of my boot drive to a secondary hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. That way, if my internal drive crashed, I could boot from the clone and finish up my work before I take the machine in for service.
DaveWT
Well-Known Member
I thought there was some issue with CCC that prevented these backups from being bootable now. (Can't recall why this was but perhaps an M series thing?} But perhaps they have found a way around it again? I must do some more reading...
Dave