I'm writing this column on the most beautiful personal computer I've ever owned. Its monitor case is 5 millimeters thick. You have to see it to believe it. It has a 1 terabyte fusion drive _ apps are stored on a solid state portion of the drive, while documents and other files are stored on the traditional part of the drive. And it has 16 gigs of RAM, upgradable to 32 gigs.
The 27-inch Retina display is capable of producing a billion colors, and the video card is fast _ it has 4 gigabytes of video memory. For photos and movies, what you shoot is what you get. The keyboard and mouse are wireless.
I'm writing about my new iMac.
But with all those specs, why am I having buyer's remorse?
I had given up my 21.5-inch, late-2013 iMac for this one. To my old eyes, it had a very nice display. It was fast enough and it did pretty much everything I threw at it _ photo and movie editing, fast wireless browsing, and other intensive tasks. It looked nice, too. I hated the USB keyboard because the keys had almost no travel, but the magic mouse was sensitive enough.
Unfortunately, it was developing problems. It wouldn't wake up, it would shut down randomly, and, with a full hard drive, it was running slow. Apple replaced the logic board and the power supply _ it was still under an AppleCare warranty _ but I had a funny feeling it would fail again after the warranty expired in a few weeks.
Some would have kept the old iMac, and if it developed more problems, they'd fix them. But when it comes to computers, I can't help myself. I wanted _ needed _ the latest, fastest, biggest.
The iMac Pro hadn't come out yet, so I had to settle for the 27-inch iMac with a quad core processor. The huge monitor would be perfect for someone who needs a lot of windows open at the same time. Stock brokers come to mind. I chose it because I want to do some heavy-duty movie editing, so I guess the extra space will come in handy.
Now, for the buyer's remorse.
The monitor is so big that it's almost impossible to use the mouse _ it runs out of space to maneuver easily. It's not noticeably faster than my old iMac. The 5K monitor is the latest standard for color and vividness. I suppose if I had put the old and the new side by side, I might have noticed the difference. Like I said, the old monitor looked just fine. Despite the fusion drive, it doesn't boot up or load apps all that fast. And the wireless keyboard is like typing on paper.
If I had it to do over, I'd just get the basic new iMac to replace the old one (which I sold to a smart buyer). As it is, I spent $2,200, including the AppleCare Plus warranty, which covers phone and hardware support and damage.
Tech support: Phone support for software and hardware issues is superb. When my old iMac needed fixing, I took it to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. Turnaround was about a week. It's common for a senior tech to check back to see if all is well. The AppleCare Plus warranty, for $169, is worth every penny, considering I would have had to pay more than $600 to repair my old iMac.
