On Tuesday this week, Apple finally updated the iMac after 2 years. Sadly, Apple didn’t take the opportunity to do anything new or fresh with a design that has been around since 2012.

The Look

While I had wanted a fresh take on the iMac (and still do), it doesn’t really change what the machine can do. Sure I wanted the thick bezels around the screen to be slimmed down, and I’d even settle for a thicker machine, but it didn’t happen. The iMac hasn’t seen a serious redesign since 2007.

The machine still looks okay, if not dated. If the machine didn’t look good, but still performed well, it would still be a good system, but maybe not the Apple-like machine that we’re used to.

Buying one of these machines is worrisome right now too since it didn’t get redesigned. If you buy one now, and the system does see a redesign next year, did you miss out? That’s hard to say since the design is so long in the tooth.

Inside

Inside, there’s lots of good stuff going on. You can get a 9th generation Intel processor if you get the top of the line iMac. The ram has been upgraded to DDR4. There’s a new more powerful Radeon Vega video card in there.

However, Apple has kept the Fusion Drive around. The Fusion Drive combines a small but super fast SSD hard drive with a slower spinning hard drive. It’s a great idea in theory, but that spinning hard drive in this day and age will just bring all the speed benefits to a crawl.

I’m assuming that the spinning hard drive is the reason that the iMac wasn’t updated with the T2 chip that has been put in to every other Mac released in the last year. The T2 is actually an iOS chip that helps the system with security, audio, video, and a few other things.

The price of SSDs is a high cost of entry for sure, but the prices are coming down. For most people though, I’m sure that they’d rather have a place to store their photos, movies, and music more than they’d want the speed or cost of an SSD.

Why I’m Still Buying the iMac

What it all boils down to is that I want a desktop Mac.

For the price, the iMac is a great deal. I’ve tried to convince myself to get the Mac Mini instead since I realized all the things lacking in the iMac. Doing that, adding in a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and a larger hard drive pushed the price beyond what I would pay for the iMac.

The iMac is actually a great deal for the price. The Mac Mini is a great machine, and if you already have a monitor and keyboard it’s even better. I don’t have any of those things. When pricing things out, the monitors I was looking at couldn’t compare to the screen on the iMac and it was only around $500.

So that really left me with two options: buy or wait.

I choose to buy now. I even went with the Fusion drive instead of opting for a pure SSD. I like to have a local copy of all my photos and purchased on a computer and I haven’t been able to really do that since my last iMac died.

So what about you? Are you thinking of ordering an updated iMac? What is holding you back? Let me know in the comments or on twitter.

Also, stay tuned to the site for coverage of Apple’s Media event on Monday. Follow me on instagram for unboxing of the new AirPods coming next week, and the iMac the week after.