Here is a link to my blog where I originally posted this: Replacing the 5K iMac
I usually keep my main desktop Mac about 3 years, usually until sometime after the Apple Care expires. This has been my practice for some time, and my 3 year old iMac 5K is the 4th in a line of iMacs that I have used over the years, before that I had a MacBook Pro 17 inch and even earlier one of those huge Mac Pro dual processor jobs with the giant cheese grater box.
3 years ago I bought the very first version of the iMac 5K. I actually ordered the regular current iMac at the time but the iMac 5K was introduced the day after I placed the order so I called Apple and asked to convert the order to the new 5K. They did but said it would take about a month so I waited. A couple weeks after I placed the order Apple sent me an email and told me that the price of the ordered configuration had dropped several hundred dollars so I used that to max out the RAM and storage to 32GB and a 3TB Fusion drive.
This iMac served me well for the last 3 years and I drove it hard. I ran 2 external 32 inch HD monitors along with the internal 27 inch 5K screen so the graphics card was pushed to its limit as was the CPU. About a year ago the screen cracked, I may have knocked it or something, but regardless Apple covered it under the Apple Care Plus that I bought.
A couple weeks ago however it started showing signs of a graphics card failure. I started getting random pixilation’s here and there and one night while watching a YouTube video (coincidentally about graphics cards…) the two external displays went black, the internal display went blue and the audio stopped. I restarted the computer and it seemed to work fine after that.
The following weekend I set up my older Intel NUC to handle all my work applications, our POS system, phone system and messaging. If the iMac would not work I could just swap it out and get back to work in a few minutes. I then decided to leave the NUC in place and use it for the phone system so I could disconnect one of the monitors from the iMac to try and keep the load and heat down a bit. While the iMac 5K was working fine since that freeze I did not want to chance having it fail while I was working. The little NUC was working fine but only supported two monitors. I could have used my other NUC (Skull Canyon) which supports up to 6 monitors if I really needed to.
Backtracking a few years before this I had a 24-inch iMac, one of those with the white plastic case about an inch thick. It exhibited very similar issues with the graphics card, thankfully about 2 weeks before Apple Care expired. I brought it in to the Apple Store and the issue was observed by the Genius Bar tech. They took it in and a week later they called me to say they would be replacing the computer instead of repairing it. They gave me a brand new iMac 27 inch, this was now the same form factor they have now, with the metal case coming very narrow at the front. This is the computer I replaced with the 5K 3 years ago
.
When I saw the video issues and had the freeze on my iMac 5K I suspected right away one of a couple scenarios. One was that the graphics card was just overheating, perhaps due to the heat transfer paste drying out or that it was misapplied when they replaced the display a year ago. The second scenario was that the card itself was failing or one of the supporting devices (controller, filter cap etc.) was going bad. Regardless of the actual issue it would cost at least $600 or so to repair and could possibly be more. If they needed to replace the display then that would be at least $800.
Faced with such a repair bill I looked into options. My original plan was to replace the iMac 5K with a new Mac Pro if the 2019 version was to my liking. I had hoped there would be a solution under $5000 that would allow 3 or more screens, decent processor and memory as well as a nice SSD storage package. If the new Mac Pro would not be to my liking I also considered building a Windows 10 system or getting a second Intel Skull Canyon NUC like I did for my radio bench and maxing that out. I really wanted to stick to Mac though, I am so thoroughly invested in the Apple world that it would be a huge culture shock to switch over to Windows for my every day workstation. Besides my Mac, we have another iMac for my wife, a MacBook Air for travel, 3 iPads, 2 iPhones, 4 4-K Apple TV’s, Apple Watches, a Time Cube and all the other Apple stuff.
I then looked into the 2018 Mac Mini as a possible solution, either short term or long. I could cheap-out and get a base model for $800 or max it out for $4200. Not cheap, but it would be cheaper than a Mac Pro and pretty much fills my need.
I decided to max out just about everything, getting the faster processor, the 2TB SSD and 10 GB Ethernet. I decided on 32GB of RAM, that should be more than enough for what I do. One of the deciding factors was that Apple would give me almost $800 for the iMac 5K in trade. I had originally wanted to give this to my sister but if the graphics was failing I didn’t want to saddle her with those issues.
I placed the order Thursday and got a delivery date of about 2 weeks, then got a shipping notice that it would be delivered that Tuesday. It actually arrived Monday. According to FedEx tracking it was picked up at the factory in China 4 hours after I placed the order and made it to the Phoenix warehouse via Memphis less than 24 hours later on Friday morning. It arrived here Monday afternoon.
After it arrived here I unpacked it and plugged it in to power and one of my redundant TimeMachine drives. I ran the updates and migration assistant and 3 hours later it was done. All I had to do after that was rename the computer, set up TimeMachine and connect to the monitors. I got 2 monitors working quickly but could not get the third to work. It turned out I had a bum Thunderbolt cable I bought on Amazon so I snagged one at Fry’s and the monitor came to life.
The last 4 days I have been using it all day and so far so good. It is noticeably faster than the iMac 5K was, partly due to the SSD and partly due to the faster processor. I don’t have a 5K monitor anymore (yet) but at least all 3 of my monitors are set to the same resolution and are all the same size and model. I already had an external HD webcam so I can still use FaceTime and Skype. The Mac Mini does get warm, not excessively so but I could use it as a hand warmer on a cold day.
All in all I am happy with the beast. It is the first Mac I have had with USB-C on it so I have some options down the road. While it supports 4K monitors with the internal GPU I would probably have better results with an external one down the road. I am probably going to replace the 4TB USB-3 hard drives I use for TimeMachine backups with faster USB-C drives, I can get an 8 TB one for under $300 these days. I may also off load some of my video and photo storage to external drives as I have close to half a TB now and growing. Even external SSD drives are getting cheap these days so that might be an option down the road.
While I am still interested in the Mac Pro, should Apple actually introduce it sometime this year, I think the Mac Mini will meet my needs for now. For my work-at-home job and casual browsing and entertainment it seems to be well suited. If I were into heavy video editing however I would not be so sure. If the Mac Pro looks sweet then the Mac Mini would replace my wife’s iMac 21 inch from 2 years back and I would get the Mac Pro.
I will likely replace the current monitor set up I have (3 32-inch Asus HD monitors) with a couple decent 4K monitors. I can get them for about $400 or so each. I will probably get an eGPU as well to offload some of the work since the Mac Mini supports them with its USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 ports.
The Mac Mini I bought retails for about $3300 plus tax and Apple Care. I reused my existing monitors and TimeMachine drives as well as the BT keyboard and mouse from my iMac 5K. I like the new BT Apple keyboard with the number pad they introduced last year. I have the older first edition of the Magic Mouse that uses AA batteries. It works great and I like the feel and operation. I thought of getting the new space grey Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2 to match the dark color of the Mac Mini, it also matches the dark cherry desktop and mostly black monitors and other accessories but that is another $250 so that will wait a bit for now.
I usually keep my main desktop Mac about 3 years, usually until sometime after the Apple Care expires. This has been my practice for some time, and my 3 year old iMac 5K is the 4th in a line of iMacs that I have used over the years, before that I had a MacBook Pro 17 inch and even earlier one of those huge Mac Pro dual processor jobs with the giant cheese grater box.
3 years ago I bought the very first version of the iMac 5K. I actually ordered the regular current iMac at the time but the iMac 5K was introduced the day after I placed the order so I called Apple and asked to convert the order to the new 5K. They did but said it would take about a month so I waited. A couple weeks after I placed the order Apple sent me an email and told me that the price of the ordered configuration had dropped several hundred dollars so I used that to max out the RAM and storage to 32GB and a 3TB Fusion drive.
This iMac served me well for the last 3 years and I drove it hard. I ran 2 external 32 inch HD monitors along with the internal 27 inch 5K screen so the graphics card was pushed to its limit as was the CPU. About a year ago the screen cracked, I may have knocked it or something, but regardless Apple covered it under the Apple Care Plus that I bought.
A couple weeks ago however it started showing signs of a graphics card failure. I started getting random pixilation’s here and there and one night while watching a YouTube video (coincidentally about graphics cards…) the two external displays went black, the internal display went blue and the audio stopped. I restarted the computer and it seemed to work fine after that.
The following weekend I set up my older Intel NUC to handle all my work applications, our POS system, phone system and messaging. If the iMac would not work I could just swap it out and get back to work in a few minutes. I then decided to leave the NUC in place and use it for the phone system so I could disconnect one of the monitors from the iMac to try and keep the load and heat down a bit. While the iMac 5K was working fine since that freeze I did not want to chance having it fail while I was working. The little NUC was working fine but only supported two monitors. I could have used my other NUC (Skull Canyon) which supports up to 6 monitors if I really needed to.
Backtracking a few years before this I had a 24-inch iMac, one of those with the white plastic case about an inch thick. It exhibited very similar issues with the graphics card, thankfully about 2 weeks before Apple Care expired. I brought it in to the Apple Store and the issue was observed by the Genius Bar tech. They took it in and a week later they called me to say they would be replacing the computer instead of repairing it. They gave me a brand new iMac 27 inch, this was now the same form factor they have now, with the metal case coming very narrow at the front. This is the computer I replaced with the 5K 3 years ago
.
When I saw the video issues and had the freeze on my iMac 5K I suspected right away one of a couple scenarios. One was that the graphics card was just overheating, perhaps due to the heat transfer paste drying out or that it was misapplied when they replaced the display a year ago. The second scenario was that the card itself was failing or one of the supporting devices (controller, filter cap etc.) was going bad. Regardless of the actual issue it would cost at least $600 or so to repair and could possibly be more. If they needed to replace the display then that would be at least $800.
Faced with such a repair bill I looked into options. My original plan was to replace the iMac 5K with a new Mac Pro if the 2019 version was to my liking. I had hoped there would be a solution under $5000 that would allow 3 or more screens, decent processor and memory as well as a nice SSD storage package. If the new Mac Pro would not be to my liking I also considered building a Windows 10 system or getting a second Intel Skull Canyon NUC like I did for my radio bench and maxing that out. I really wanted to stick to Mac though, I am so thoroughly invested in the Apple world that it would be a huge culture shock to switch over to Windows for my every day workstation. Besides my Mac, we have another iMac for my wife, a MacBook Air for travel, 3 iPads, 2 iPhones, 4 4-K Apple TV’s, Apple Watches, a Time Cube and all the other Apple stuff.
I then looked into the 2018 Mac Mini as a possible solution, either short term or long. I could cheap-out and get a base model for $800 or max it out for $4200. Not cheap, but it would be cheaper than a Mac Pro and pretty much fills my need.
I decided to max out just about everything, getting the faster processor, the 2TB SSD and 10 GB Ethernet. I decided on 32GB of RAM, that should be more than enough for what I do. One of the deciding factors was that Apple would give me almost $800 for the iMac 5K in trade. I had originally wanted to give this to my sister but if the graphics was failing I didn’t want to saddle her with those issues.
I placed the order Thursday and got a delivery date of about 2 weeks, then got a shipping notice that it would be delivered that Tuesday. It actually arrived Monday. According to FedEx tracking it was picked up at the factory in China 4 hours after I placed the order and made it to the Phoenix warehouse via Memphis less than 24 hours later on Friday morning. It arrived here Monday afternoon.
After it arrived here I unpacked it and plugged it in to power and one of my redundant TimeMachine drives. I ran the updates and migration assistant and 3 hours later it was done. All I had to do after that was rename the computer, set up TimeMachine and connect to the monitors. I got 2 monitors working quickly but could not get the third to work. It turned out I had a bum Thunderbolt cable I bought on Amazon so I snagged one at Fry’s and the monitor came to life.
The last 4 days I have been using it all day and so far so good. It is noticeably faster than the iMac 5K was, partly due to the SSD and partly due to the faster processor. I don’t have a 5K monitor anymore (yet) but at least all 3 of my monitors are set to the same resolution and are all the same size and model. I already had an external HD webcam so I can still use FaceTime and Skype. The Mac Mini does get warm, not excessively so but I could use it as a hand warmer on a cold day.
All in all I am happy with the beast. It is the first Mac I have had with USB-C on it so I have some options down the road. While it supports 4K monitors with the internal GPU I would probably have better results with an external one down the road. I am probably going to replace the 4TB USB-3 hard drives I use for TimeMachine backups with faster USB-C drives, I can get an 8 TB one for under $300 these days. I may also off load some of my video and photo storage to external drives as I have close to half a TB now and growing. Even external SSD drives are getting cheap these days so that might be an option down the road.
While I am still interested in the Mac Pro, should Apple actually introduce it sometime this year, I think the Mac Mini will meet my needs for now. For my work-at-home job and casual browsing and entertainment it seems to be well suited. If I were into heavy video editing however I would not be so sure. If the Mac Pro looks sweet then the Mac Mini would replace my wife’s iMac 21 inch from 2 years back and I would get the Mac Pro.
I will likely replace the current monitor set up I have (3 32-inch Asus HD monitors) with a couple decent 4K monitors. I can get them for about $400 or so each. I will probably get an eGPU as well to offload some of the work since the Mac Mini supports them with its USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 ports.
The Mac Mini I bought retails for about $3300 plus tax and Apple Care. I reused my existing monitors and TimeMachine drives as well as the BT keyboard and mouse from my iMac 5K. I like the new BT Apple keyboard with the number pad they introduced last year. I have the older first edition of the Magic Mouse that uses AA batteries. It works great and I like the feel and operation. I thought of getting the new space grey Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2 to match the dark color of the Mac Mini, it also matches the dark cherry desktop and mostly black monitors and other accessories but that is another $250 so that will wait a bit for now.
