I soldiered on for another 18 months, through the Catalina release and then macOS 11 Big Sur, upgrading my Mac laptop to each in turn for researching and writing. Parallels Desktop requires heavy disk usage, and it was a slug alongside other apps, even with so much memory available.

I chose the cheapest path again, which was upgrading to 64 GB of memory and selling my previous 32 GB to a friend. A shift to Catalina would require additional resources to run a virtual machine effectively so I could keep Mojave available for those two apps (see “ Moving to Catalina: Keep Your 32-Bit Mac Apps Running with Parallels,” 18 September 2019). It was only once I upgraded to 10.14 Mojave that I found myself waiting seemingly forever for apps to launch and disk-intensive tasks to finish.Īs I grew increasingly frustrated, 10.15 Catalina appeared in late 2019, and I had two critical 32-bit apps I wanted to keep using indefinitely. The Fusion Drive initially suited me well with macOS 10.12 Sierra and seemed to sail through 10.13 High Sierra without causing me grief. I didn’t notice the performance tradeoff most of the time. (See “ iMac 1 TB Fusion Drives Have Smaller SSDs,” 7 August 2017.) However, Apple had just shifted to including substantially smaller SSDs in Fusion Drives, which I believe ultimately became a huge liability. At the time, spending $300 for a 512 GB SSD didn’t make sense because I needed more storage, and $700 for the 1 TB SSD upgrade was too dear for my budget. While I had configured it with 32 GB of memory, I opted for a 1 TB Fusion Drive, Apple’s combination of a fast, low-capacity SSD with a slow 5400 rpm, high-capacity hard drive. When I bought the iMac, I unfortunately cheaped out in one important regard. But it took me until two weeks ago to truly unleash its power. When I purchased a quad-core 21.5-inch iMac with Retina display in 2017 and added a secondary 4K display, I felt that I had spent the right amount of money relative to my needs. With a few delightful exceptions that involve printing history and letterpress, I spend most of my day looking at a screen, tapping away on a keyboard, and manipulating a mouse. #1593: Wordle, vinyl skins for Apple laptops, Apple Music Voice Plan, ad hoc Wi-Fi networksĪn External SSD Gave My iMac a New Lease on Life.#1594: iOS 15.2.1, AirTag stalking, CES Tech Trends for 2022.#1595: Replacing the Time Capsule, AT&T and Verizon 5G coverage expands, is iOS 15's Focus overkill?.#1596: OS updates, Apple Q1 2022 outpaces supply constraints, Yahoo POP bug, Apple Personal Safety User Guide, Simply Piano.#1597: Apple Watch fitness tracking, cloud storage issues, Roku Express 4K+, watchOS 8.4.1.

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