I was intrigued by the Retina iMac when it was announced last fall. I liked what I saw on the Apple Store showroom floor. I’d been planning to replace my aging Mac Mini with a new Mini whenever Apple released one, and last fall, they did. Except, to equip the Mac Mini the way I wanted to equip it was going to put it into a pretty expensive price range. And I wanted a larger monitor than my 17″ Samsung which had served me well since 2002. When all was said and done, I could get the Retina iMac for not a whole lot more than than maxed out Mac Mini. But, the Mac Mini still worked, so I waited. Then, the Mac Mini died, and Apple reduced the price on the Retina iMac (slightly) that same week.<\/p>\n
Really. It was fate, right? Memory is user upgradable, so I ordered the iMac exactly the way I wanted it except for memory. Then I ordered 32G RAM from Amazon. It arrived before the iMac. Before turning the iMac on for the first time, I installed the new RAM, maxing it out. This beast is gorgeous. I have one difficulty, and that is waking it up after it goes to sleep.\u00a0 That’s easy on the laptop, tap the ESC key on the keyboard twice. No go in the iMac. So far, I have to force shut down and restart to get it back once it goes to sleep. I do NOT like this. I’ll have to check with friends or do some research. I must be doing something wrong.<\/p>\n
One thing I liked but found briefly unsettling was the automatic configuration of ALL my email accounts (except for Sprynet–a POP only account). I finally figured out that was an iCloud feature. I don’t use iCloud for much, because I would quickly have to use a paid account, and Apple’s fee structure is untenable. Dropbox is much more reasonable, and more widely usable. It won’t, however, set up my email accounts on a new machine. I’m okay with that.<\/p>\n
One thing I had to do even before receiving the iMac was order a seven USB external hub. I now have one empty USB port, so even with seven, I may not have enough.<\/p>\n
I also ordered a Blu-Ray external DVD writer. I’ll have to find software to be able to use the Blu-Ray capability, but the drive itself cost about the same as any other external DVD writer, so I’m happy with that. I don’t need one often, but when I need one, I need one.<\/p>\n
I had to order an external back up drive. My one terabyte external drive is too small. I have a 5 terabyte drive on the way.<\/p>\n
The screen is gorgeous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was intrigued by the Retina iMac when it was announced last fall. I liked what I saw on the Apple Store showroom floor. I’d been planning to replace my aging Mac Mini with a new Mini whenever Apple released one, and last fall, they did. Except, to equip the …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}