My 2019 iMac model runs 50% slower than my Macbook Pro

I never heard of a Fusion drive in a MacBook Pro. A 2019 MBP has a solid state drive (SSD) that is at minumum 10X faster at read/writes than the slow 5400 rpm, 3GBps mech drive in your iMac.

A 6GB SSD in a USB3 external enclosure will be about 8x faster than your current internal drive. All the symptoms fit.

Although you are technically just outside out of your 14-day grace period for a "no questions asked" return. I would contact Apple and tell then how unacceptably slow this thing is. If they allow a return, re-order one with an Apple internal SSD (not the Fusion drive). Their SSDs are very fast, I have one and could not be happier.

You are comparing a Fusion drive (MBP) to a VERY slow 5400 RPM HD. The iMac is an entry level machine designed to do not much more than surf the net and do e-mail. If it's less than 2 weeks old and purchased directly from Apple then return it and buy a 21.5" with a minimum of 16GB of RAM and the largest SSD you can afford. Then you will have a great performing iMac.

If you cannot return it, they your best option is to buy an external SSD and clone the internal drive to the external SSD and then make the external SSD your boot drive and use the internal drive for only storage.

Let's get a closer look, but i3, 8 GB of RAM, & 5400 rpm drive are all slowdowns,

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report...

https://pastebin.com/

Or use the paperclip at the bottom of a Reply to attach the full report here. :)

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck.

Yaron196 wrote:

First of all thank you guys for answeres!

So if I understand correctly what most of you are saying is that the Hard drive is the main factor for th slowness?

That and the fact that you got a bottom of the line entry level processor... An i3 can't hold a candle to an i5...

It makes me wonder for 2 things:

irst, why apple is releasing imac model in 2019 with such underperformence, in a way that it can't even work under email/documents usage? if the HDD is such an old technology and so bad why they are still attaching it to the base models of imac in 2019?

Why? For the same reason that Ford still sells economy cars in addition to Massive F350 trucks and Shelby GT500 Mustangs... One size does not fit all. Some people are just fine with the performance of the machine you got. They don't want or need to spend the money on state of the art super fast computers.

2nd, so the SSD is actually much more important than the processor? because as I see it from comparing my laptop to the imac, the fact thet my imac has HDD and not SSD is making way more difference than the stronger processor my imac have compared to the macbook?

Which one is more important depends largely on what you're doing with it. Applications will load faster, the machine will boot faster, etc. with an SSD. If you regularly have to work with very large files, an SSD will make a world of difference

Fusion drives, which I know may here are not fond of may be an acceptable middle ground. I have a fusion drive in my iMac and am quite happy with it. I don't do much of anything in the way of video editing or anything dealing with monstrous files. I run the same core set of applications pretty much all the time, etc. A fusion drive will cost significantly less for large amounts of storage (1TB and up) compared to an SSD and can (depending on usage) perform significantly better than a mechanical hard drive.

If you're concerned about processor intensive tasks, on the other hand, the CPU will make more of a difference.

RAM over 8GB may or may not make a difference depending on what you're running and how far you're pushing the envelope on memory pressure. For me, 8GB has been fine, keeping in mind that most of what I do is MS Office, Remote Desktop to connect to servers, web browsing, email, very light photo work, etc... typical office stuff. I am not a gamer, graphic designer, or engineer... YMMV

We cannot speculate on Apple's policies, plans or strategies in these forums per the Terms of Use we all agreed to.

Yes, these days most CPUs and GPUs are pretty fast, the bottleneck for all computers has been the storage devices, this has been the case for years. Traditional HD's are inexpensive therefore popular. SSD's are the quickest albeit the most expensive (however prices have been dropping). Fusion drives are a stop-gap solution.

SSDs are becoming much more popular as the population realizes their benefits, however as always that takes time.

The problem most likely is the slow 5400 RPM mechanical hard drive.