help in choosing a 2015 imac

I didn't notice the date.

Here are the specs on the iMac 27 inch 2015 models from Ars-Technica.

Apparently, Apple has, yet, again pulled a fast one by only including a 24 GB SSD on the 1 TB 7200 RPM fusion drive.

But the 2 and 3 TB fusion drives still have a 128 GB SSD tied to the standard 7200 RPM drives.

No 27 inch screen iMac is going to ship with slower 5400 RPM hard drives.

Not for the serious increase in costs.

Mac users do serious work on the larger screen iMacs.

Apple better NOT start using slower hard drives in their large screen iMacs.

27 inch screen iMac users will start pitching some serious fits.

Full SSDs have not, as yet, come down enough in costs to match the costs of a standard large capacity 7200 RPM hard drives.

Perhaps give it another two more years or so.

I am really stunned by the 24 GB SSD on the base 1 TB fusion drive, though. Farkin' Apple at that bit.

I have, POSITIVELY, confirmed, through, one of our highly knowledgeable and high level ranking regular contributor to these forums (user name deggie) that went the extra efforts for me and found out all the info DIRECTLY from Apple, that the new 27 inch screen iMacs come with standard and fusion drives DEFINITIVELY use 7200 RPM hard drives.

Your source is wrong!

Also, if you want the bigger 128 GB SSD fusion drive, you need to get a 27 inch screen iMac with the 2 OR 3 TB fusion drive option (to avoid the very small 24 GB SSD on the 1 TB fusion drive option).

I have also, been informed that the 2 or 3 TB fusion drives nearly match the performance of the pure SSD drive.

An SSD or Fusion drive (large capacity SSD and large capacity hard drives) will be best, not just for video work, but for Photoshop work, as well as with the 128 GB fusion drive, you might be able to allocate the SSDs remaining storage space to use as a scratch disc area for Photoshop, as well as allocating some data scratch space for video work on the SSD portion of the Fusion drive.

OS X, by itself, won't eat up anywhere near half of the available 128 GB SSD storage space.

So, there you have it!

If you are still reluctant to believe anyone, make your own phone call DIRECTLY to Apple at 1-800-MYAPPLE, ask for the sales department and start asking your own questions on the technical specs of the new 27 inch screen iMacs with Fusion drives and find out for yourself.

Your own source for Mac info is mistaken/ misinformed on this issue.

Good Luck to you.

FWIW, all Late 2015 27" Retina iMacs come with 7200 RPM drives. The only difference in the Fusion drives is the 1TB Fusion drive comes with a 24GB SSD instead of a 128GB SSD. I read an explanation of why Apple chose to do that but I forget. 😎

In the subject of SSD drives, I am using a Late 2009 27" iMac which I replaced the optical drive bay with an SSD conversion for the main boot drive, it has speeded up the machine tremendously. Previously it would take seemingly forever to wake up the hard drive before the iMac would do anything, if it had gone to sleep or just spun the HDD down due to inactivity.

I would never want to go back to a plain HDD as the main boot / application drive now, and would hesitate even at a Fusion drive as I wouldn't have any control over what was on the SSD portion (for which I haven't been able to find any solid facts either - who makes the SSD part? Does it have automatic garbage collection? Samsung are the only manufacturer of SSDs worth using at the moment IMO, the rest are, by comparison, garbage).

If you wanted to save some money and still go for an iMac then I would say go for a used one with HDD and just replace the HDD or optical drive with a Samsung 850 Evo or Pro, it will blow all other SSDs away and give you 250 or 512GB depending on how much you want to spend, use the internal 1TB HDD or an external drive for your main storage.

As for AE and AMD, you could get a far faster i7-based PC that would be much better for AE with an Nvidia graphics card, your only problem then would be the added expense of a good display, however you could cheat and use the old iMac (non-5k, so 2014 or older) in Target Display Mode, my 2009 iMac is worth about £500, you would pay more than that for an equivalent monitor alone.

Use the right tool for the job, as much as I hate Windows one really can't argue about the hardware (or lack thereof in the case of iMacs for certain tasks, such as gaming or AE video editing).

There is another consideration you might want to check out - it's something that I've wondered about: where exactly does the rendering/processing take place on a fusion drive? If it's on the SSD portion, there isn't enough space, and if it's on the spinning drive, you will absolutely want one with 7200 rpm - the slow 5400 rpm will drive you insane.

If you are regularly dealing with large project files, the general recommendation is that you maintain at least as much empty hard drive space as you have temp project files for the rendering/editing processes. I gather easily anywhere from 100 - 200 GB of temp files (which I later archive elsewhere and/or delete) including some special effects I create in Final Cut Express and Livetype. So, I maintain about 300 GB of empty space in order to give the process enough room to work efficiently.

And, that brings up another consideration: as SSDs have a certain lifetime number of erase cycles, especially when dealing with large files, is an SSD the best solution for video projects where one deletes 200 GB or more regularly?

Finally, you might want to check out Apple's refurb site: their machines come with a regular full warranty and you can add Applecare - additionally, you do save on their refurbs. I've purchased them for years.

http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/imac

I'd not buy a used Mac from anyone else unless it had at least a year of Applecare coverage left.

I checked at an Apple Store on Monday and all of the current 27" iMacs, including the 1 TB fusion, have a 7200 RPM drive. This is not true for the 21.5" models. Given how long it has been since the Apple computer line has been updated, including the 27" models, I would suggest you hold off on your purchase until later this year and see what happens when new models are released. At that time the current models in the store should become available for a lower price.

Premiere, Premier Pro, etc. Now work with AMD GPUs in the iMacs.

Personally I would go with the Skylake model. You might want to find a review comparing the Haswell vs. Skylake and see if it is worth it to you.

Compared the i3 CPU in my 2009 iMac, anything faster would be a welcomed plus!

My feeling is that the previous generation processors in the previous iMac generation would still be fine with enough RAM and those models with a fusion drive will have the larger SSDs on the fusion drives and still 7200 RPM hard drives.

I don't think the CPU speed or performance difference will be that big a difference.

I still opt for a previous generation iMac with an i7 CPU for video work, though.