I’d been looking to upgrade to a 27″ iMac from my mid-2010 MacBook Pro, and five years from a machine is not bad at all! I was hoping that the non-retina iMacs would get one last upgrade but it was not to be. I checked the Apple Store after the cheaper model of retina iMac was released last week, and they had in fact removed all of the custom options from it other than RAM and storage, so the only video card available was the base-level 1GB one. Bleh.
However! There was fortuitously an almost-maxed-out 27″ Late 2013 iMac available on the refurb store: 4GB Nvidia 780M GTX video card (top of the line), and 3TB Fusion Drive. Only 8GB RAM but it’s user-replaceable in this model anyway, so I have another 16GB on the way. The thing with the refurb machines is that what you see is what you get, there’s no upgrades or anything available, but that was okay. The only change I’d have made is a 1TB SSD (the Fusion Drive is a large hard disk combined with a relatively small SSD—128GB) but ah well. I saved probably more than a grand all up!
kungfupolarbear has inherited my old machine as it’s a decent step up from her MacBook Air, and we’re going to use the MacBook Air as a travel computer, and if I want to do some coding from the lounge or some such.
\o/