With new iMacs available this week, I was hoping to check that my understanding of what makes for the fastest possible Mac for working with a fairly large Xojo project is correct.
The order of my priorities are:
Fastest possible time for launching a debug build.
Time to open a project.
Time to launch the IDE.
I don’t care too much about the time it takes to make a build for a release, because that’s much rarer than my usual “work, launch debug build, test, make changes, repeat” cycle.
Previously, I’ve found that fast storage and maximum single core performance were important. What’s important now, for both 32- and 64-bit apps?
tl;dr: do I buy a fairly basic iMac, splurge on the best that’s available now, or hold off 6+ months for an iMac Pro that will make me regret buying a new computer next week?
This is still true
Compiling for 64 bit will use multiple cores BUT single core performance is still important as today the IDE is still 32 bit
A fast SSD is a big boost
Yeah, might as well use your slow old December one as a doorstop
Part of me does kind of miss the way that computers got so much faster so quickly, but the rest of me is very happy that my nearly four year old iMac is basically fine.
I’m still rocking a 2009 Mac Pro as my primary machine and it is fine. Granted it has few original parts left in it, one of the benefits of a modular, upgradeable system. I doubt I’ll be replacing it until I see what the replacement Mac Pro turns out to be in (hopefully) 2018.
I’m waiting for a compelling reason to replace my 2012 retina Macbook Pro. It still had a replaceable SSD in those days, so over the years I upgraded to a third-party 512GB then to a 1TB ssd which is faster than the 2012 stock drives. But for 5 years old, Geekbench 4 scores aren’t really all that much slower than the 2016 models. Or at least not enough so to justify the price. I’ve not seen benchmarks on the new 2017’s yet. I did have a new battery put in last year when Apple swapped out the entire motherboard free due to the GPU issue.