Should I Upgrade Current iMac 11,1 or Buy New?

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

Hi, everyone. I'm new to MacForums, any help would be appreciated.

I have a late-2009 iMac 11,1 with i7 2.8 GHz processor and 12 GB of RAM. I'm at that point where the computer is starting to show its age. I'm still rocking Snow Leopard, which I've loved dearly, but I know I'll need to upgrade the OS soon. I'm wondering if upgrading the HD to a new SSD and adding the remaining 4 GB of RAM to max out at 16 GB will make my machine like new and ready for El Capitan or if that would just be a case throwing money at a machine that should be replaced with a new iMac?

I do graphic design and some video work, so I'm doing a lot of work in Adobe programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, etc.

Thanks!

Slydude · Sep 13, 2015

An SSD can be a good upgrade though I haven't looked to see how easy the drive swap would be in that machine. When I put an SSD in my 2008 MacBook Pro it cut the boot time almost in half. As far as memory goes the 12 GB will be OK for many things. I'm not sure how much of a difference the extra 4 GB of ram will make. Others with more experience in graphics and video will have to comment on that.

BTW I'm running El Capitan on an that MacBook Pro that I put the SSD in and El Capitan runs dine with 8 GB of ram.

harryb2448 · Sep 13, 2015

I am not with Slydude with the 12GB of memory you have being ample. You are into heavy photo programs, 3D imaging or graphic art so go for the 16GB. Actually that model can run up to 32GB despite at the time of release Apple advising 16GB was the maximum. An SSD from OWC will sure make it faster, but you will still be limited by the gfx card. Your problem is one we all face alas. For sure the memory and SSD will be a cheaper way out, but on the other hand if you use the iMac for business, the depreciation limits will be falling rapidly.

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

harryb2448 said:
I am not with Slydude with the 12GB of memory you have being ample. You are into heavy photo programs, 3D imaging or graphic art so go for the 16GB. Actually that model can run up to 32GB despite at the time of release Apple advising 16GB was the maximum. An SSD from OWC will sure make it faster, but you will still be limited by the gfx card. Your problem is one we all face alas. For sure the memory and SSD will be a cheaper way out, but on the other hand if you use the iMac for business, the depreciation limits will be falling rapidly.

Thanks for all of the good advice. I perform some video editing and graphic art work, but no 3D modeling at this point. How many years do you think additional RAM and an SSD from OWC would give me on this particular machine? Funds are a little tight right now with my wife in graduate school.

Also, do you recommend OWC over Crucial for hardware components? Also, if do these updates do you think, like Slydude, that I'll have a machine snappy enough to run El Capitan?

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

How do you like El Capitan? I never thought Snow Leopard would have lasted me this long. It's been rock solid.

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

Slydude said:
An SSD can be a good upgrade though I haven't looked to see how easy the drive swap would be in that machine. When I put an SSD in my 2008 MacBook Pro it cut the boot time almost in half. As far as memory goes the 12 GB will be OK for many things. I'm not sure how much of a difference the extra 4 GB of ram will make. Others with more experience in graphics and video will have to comment on that.

BTW I'm running El Capitan on an that MacBook Pro that I put the SSD in and El Capitan runs dine with 8 GB of ram.

Sorry, I meant to use the "reply with quote option" - How do you like El Capitan? I never thought Snow Leopard would have lasted me this long. It's been rock solid.

harryb2448 · Sep 13, 2015

Yes I do think with the upgrades you will do well and notice the snappy difference. For me OWC is prefereable as their prices, even with USPS First Class Air Mail, are much better than local Mc suppliers and their after sales srvices rocks!

You will run El Capitan just fine.

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

harryb2448 said:
Yes I do think with the upgrades you will do well and notice the snappy difference. For me OWC is prefereable as their prices, even with USPS First Class Air Mail, are much better than local Mc suppliers and their after sales srvices rocks!

You will run El Capitan just fine.

Awesome! Super helpful. Do you have a particular setup you'd recommend for me, or should I just get in touch with OWC?

chas_m · Sep 13, 2015

SurferPizza: a 2009 with an i7 and lots of RAM should not be "showing its age" except for graphics at this point, that's still an impressive machine. You might want to run OnyX over it and make sure you have lots of free space.

That said, adding more RAM and in particular changing out the HD for an SSD will put a LOT of spring in that machine's step, so if you're a couple of years away from being able to afford a new(er) one, that would be a recommended path regardless.

As for El Capitan, I've been testing it for a while now and I have good things to say about it and a few bad things to say about it. Without getting into a long story, here's the highlights:

1. El Capitan is faster than Yosemite, and greatly improves upon routine operations. I like the "new" features like the MUCH improved Mission Control, improved Mail, and improved Notes. Photos is a bit better, too, and when the third-party plug-ins arrive it will be QUITE a bit better, so I look forward to that. Overall I'd call El Capitan a solid upgrade from Yosemite, particularly for speed, and a good upgrade. THAT SAID:

2. During the betas I found a LOT of stuff that "broke" pretty bad (not even talking about iTunes here, that's largely fixed now!). Quite a few things got fixed in the GM, which is what I have open for testing now (yay!), but some unsupported programs (just old things that haven't been updated in a few years) are still broken because while the surface changes have been fairly minor, there is a whole bunch of stuff on the deeper levels that has been changed. A good example of this is a program called Reflector that allowed one to mirror an iOS device with AirPlay onto the Mac: it had to be upgraded because Apple has deeply changed the internals of AirPlay (though this will largely be invisible to typical users). So this is definitely one of those instances where you had better make **DARN SURE** your software is VERY up-to-date before upgrading, and if you have some apps that haven't seen updates in a long time, keep a bootable clone of Yosemite around for a few weeks just in case!

3. On the subject of iTunes and the various iCloud Libraries, I think I can say that things are mostly fixed -- fixed enough to use. Plus, there's new tiers of storage that are either much cheaper or offer more space, so that's good news all around. I **did**, however, have to rebuild my library from a pre-12.2 version of iTunes, so I'm not saying all is forgiven, but I think El Cap will likely put iTunes back where it should have been. DEFINITELY back up your iTunes Library if you haven't upgraded yet first, though. Just in case.

SurferPizza · Sep 13, 2015

chas_m said:
SurferPizza: a 2009 with an i7 and lots of RAM should not be "showing its age" except for graphics at this point, that's still an impressive machine. You might want to run OnyX over it and make sure you have lots of free space.

That said, adding more RAM and in particular changing out the HD for an SSD will put a LOT of spring in that machine's step, so if you're a couple of years away from being able to afford a new(er) one, that would be a recommended path regardless.

As for El Capitan, I've been testing it for a while now and I have good things to say about it and a few bad things to say about it. Without getting into a long story, here's the highlights:

1. El Capitan is faster than Yosemite, and greatly improves upon routine operations. I like the "new" features like the MUCH improved Mission Control, improved Mail, and improved Notes. Photos is a bit better, too, and when the third-party plug-ins arrive it will be QUITE a bit better, so I look forward to that. Overall I'd call El Capitan a solid upgrade from Yosemite, particularly for speed, and a good upgrade. THAT SAID:

2. During the betas I found a LOT of stuff that "broke" pretty bad (not even talking about iTunes here, that's largely fixed now!). Quite a few things got fixed in the GM, which is what I have open for testing now (yay!), but some unsupported programs (just old things that haven't been updated in a few years) are still broken because while the surface changes have been fairly minor, there is a whole bunch of stuff on the deeper levels that has been changed. A good example of this is a program called Reflector that allowed one to mirror an iOS device with AirPlay onto the Mac: it had to be upgraded because Apple has deeply changed the internals of AirPlay (though this will largely be invisible to typical users). So this is definitely one of those instances where you had better make **DARN SURE** your software is VERY up-to-date before upgrading, and if you have some apps that haven't seen updates in a long time, keep a bootable clone of Yosemite around for a few weeks just in case!

3. On the subject of iTunes and the various iCloud Libraries, I think I can say that things are mostly fixed -- fixed enough to use. Plus, there's new tiers of storage that are either much cheaper or offer more space, so that's good news all around. I **did**, however, have to rebuild my library from a pre-12.2 version of iTunes, so I'm not saying all is forgiven, but I think El Cap will likely put iTunes back where it should have been. DEFINITELY back up your iTunes Library if you haven't upgraded yet first, though. Just in case.

Thanks, chas_m, I appreciate the heads-up. Good idea about using OnyX. I've used that on my old laptop before, but it slipped my mind to use it on my iMac.

I'm not even on Yosemite, yet. No joke, I've been rocking Snow Leopard for years and I've loved it so much that I haven't upgraded, but I'm seeing more and more new stuff that doesn't function very well in Snow Leopard. Also, I'm guessing my security gets worse with every passing year that Apple is not supporting Snow Leopard.

Slydude · Sep 14, 2015

First of you are probably right about security and Snow Leopard. AFAIK Apple is no longer making security updates for it.

Have to agree with chas_m about El Capitan. I was initially not expecting it to run at all on my aging Core2Duo based MacBook Pro but it has actually been running well for me. It's at least as fast as Yosemite overall and faster in some functions.

I've been running the beta and have liked it from the jump. I've experienced some minor issues that have gotten fixed as we progress through the various iterations of the beta. In one case the Open With dialog would not allow me to choose an app that wasn't a;ready in the list. When you tried to use the "other" option no apps appeared for you to select from. That has since been fixed. For a short period of time I had problems with Junk filtering not working in Mail but that has also been fixed.

I will say that the jump from Snow Leopard to El Capitan may be a bit jarring in terms of the way things look. Most of the functions can be performed the same way they were in Snow Leopard but some things look a bit different.

SurferPizza · Sep 14, 2015

Okay, everyone. Thanks for all of the help so far. I guess it's time to move forward. Here's what I'm thinking:

Screen shot 2015-09-14 at 3.42.40 PM.jpg

Let me know if this looks like a good way to spruce up my machine for the next 3 years. Also, please let me know if you'd recommend any different components than what I have in my OWC cart. For instance, would I notice the difference between that SSD and the step down, which is less money? Is there anything I'm missing that I should be adding as I do the upgrades?

Also, I'm going to install El Capitan as soon as I get all of the hardware in place.

harryb2448 · Sep 14, 2015

Looks good to me and much, much cheaper than a new iMac. Your iMac can only run 3Gb/s SATA speeds so it may be OWC has a cheaper SSD at that speed? The 6Gb/s will be throttled back to the slower speed so you will not gain anything. The 3Gb/s comes in $85.00 cheaper. The downside would be if you updated your iMac in less than the three years you could not transfer the slower SSD over.

OWC Mercury Electra 3G Solid State Drive (SSD) Solutions - High Performance, Reliability, and Endurance

chas_m · Sep 15, 2015

Also, do you NEED 480GB of space? If not, get a smaller-capacity SSD and save a lot on that.

Further, I don't know what you're doing on that machine but VERY few users out there would actually need 32GB of RAM this side of full-time digital musicians or professional Photoshop artists (and they're not on 2009-era machines), so cut that order in half to a 16GB kit (you will likely never notice any difference, but your wallet certainly will). More recent OS X versions are designed to be *more* efficient with less RAM, bucking the old trends, but for future-proofing the remaining life of that machine, 16GB should be more than enough (double enough, if you're a light-duty user).

SurferPizza · Sep 16, 2015

Thanks for all of the help, everyone! I definitely need to comb through my computer and "trim the fat," so to speak. I have years worth of saving almost everything. It's organized, but that doesn't mean I need to keep it. I have several completed video projects that I did for clients years ago, so I can probably start there. Chas_m, I'll probably end up doing down to 16GB of RAM. I'm a heavy-duty user with multiple memory sucking programs open at once, so I probably shouldn't go with less than 16GB, though.

SurferPizza · Sep 16, 2015

harryb2448 said:
Looks good to me and much, much cheaper than a new iMac. Your iMac can only run 3Gb/s SATA speeds so it may be OWC has a cheaper SSD at that speed? The 6Gb/s will be throttled back to the slower speed so you will not gain anything. The 3Gb/s comes in $85.00 cheaper. The downside would be if you updated your iMac in less than the three years you could not transfer the slower SSD over.

OWC Mercury Electra 3G Solid State Drive (SSD) Solutions - High Performance, Reliability, and Endurance

Harry, I love saving $. But, to confirm, are you saying that if I were to buy a new iMac in 3 years, I wouldn't be able to install my 3GB/s SSD in the new machine because the new machine wouldn't be compatible with the slow speeds, or I could install the SSD, but the new machine would just run the old SSD at the drive's max (3GB/s)?

harryb2448 · Sep 16, 2015

Yes it will be a much faster SATA speed. Current iMacs are 6Gb/s and in three years who knows ~ maybe 9Gb/s.

A 3Gb/s drive will always work at that speed despite the SATA SATA II or maybe SATA III installation in a new machine. The question is always save $85 now and put that much towards a new drive in three years. Also it is very possible in three years all iMacs will be flash storage. I am thinking of the next model iMac for myself with 512GB Flash Storage.

chscag · Sep 16, 2015

I am thinking of the next model iMac for myself with 512GB Flash Storage.

Me too Harry. I gave my last iMac to one my grand daughters and will probably do the same with this one when I'm ready to buy another. Of course, I may change my mind if Apple ever gives us a new retina cinema display. Then I would buy that and a MacBook Pro.

Should I Upgrade Current iMac 11,1 or Buy New?

SurferPizza

Slydude

Well-known member

harryb2448

SurferPizza

SurferPizza

SurferPizza

harryb2448

SurferPizza

chas_m

Guest

SurferPizza

Slydude

Well-known member

SurferPizza

harryb2448

chas_m

Guest

SurferPizza

SurferPizza

harryb2448

chscag

Well-known member

Shop Amazon