So today’s confession is really a two-parter: I’ve been using an iMac for the past year, and I’ve been using a hard drive as a part of my primary storage for the past year. I’m happy to report that it actually did. Obviously Apple’s Fusion Drive is designed to mitigate the inevitable performance degradation, and my initial take on it after about a month of use was very good - but would it last?

When the OS is a clean install, the drive is mostly empty and thus operating at its peak performance. It’s entirely possible to mask the overwhelmingly bad experience of a hard drive in a high performance machine by only sampling at the beginning of the journey. This past year has been the most insane in terms of travel, so it wasn’t a lack of mobility that kept me on the iMac but rather a desire to test Apple’s new Fusion Drive over the long haul. I always said that if I had a less mobile lifestyle the iMac is probably the machine I’d end up with (that was prior to the announcement of the new Mac Pro of course). For the past year I’ve been using a 27-inch iMac as my primary workstation.

Imac 27 late 2013 price