with all the amazing Apple silk and Max available I never thought that I would
be saying this but in 2023 the best bang for the buck Mac that you can buy is
this Intel 27 inch 5K iMac for a few reasons and once I give you guys the
price point and the performance compared to Apple's silicon I think you will be
shocked so make sure to stick around because I have updated numbers for you
would you believe that you can buy a 2019 or 2020 5K iMac that costs roughly
twenty five hundred dollars for just 500 bucks I couldn't believe it either
and the reason that I know this is because I'm trying to sell that 5K iMac
and I originally wanted to list it for 1200 1500 but then I looked at the used
prices so I listed it for shockingly low 850 bucks but two to three weeks later
nobody has even asked about it I dropped a price point down to about 700 still
nobody wants it and now looking at the other offerings I'm gonna have to lower
it down to 500 how is that even possible well in just a
bit I'll tell you how you can get a great deal on one but first I want to
mention that just that display alone in the LG ultra fine with plastic bezels
and a shaky stand is still selling for about thirteen hundred dollars and I
found the cheapest refurbished model and it comes in at about 700 bucks just for
that display alone now if we take a look at Apple's offering with a nice stand
and metal design it's sixteen hundred dollars for that 5K display that is
almost identical and if 5K iMac comes with a display with really good speakers
with a webcam and a keyboard and a mouse and all the computer components built in
and no it is not a crazy outdated one if you're looking for something older one
of my close friends actually bought a 2015 model that had an upgraded one
terabyte SSD 64 gigabytes of RAM including a keyboard and a mouse for
250 dollars here in the same city that is insane now what Mac can you get for
prices like these well the new M2 Mac Mini which is an amazing deal many
people have said it is the best bang for the buck computer ever that comes in at
six hundred dollars comes with eight gigs of RAM 256 gigs of SSD and an M2
Chip now the SSD is also fairly slow half the speed compared to last year and
comparing it to my iMac that I'm trying to sell well it is a lot slower it also
doesn't come with a keyboard or a mouse and if you start upgrading the ram well
that is very very expensive because it is built in whereas on the iMac you have
those slots built in with the cover on the back takes a few minutes to swap it
out and even if you buy it brand new you can get 32 gigs for 60 dollars compared
to just eight gigs going from 8 to 16 for 200. now I want to show you guys the
performance differences between these machines and we've made videos showing
that even the M1 Mac Mini can beat out the Intel 5K IMAX in many ways and not
to buy the iMac but that was when Apple was trying to sell these you're paying
over to Grand for one about 2500 and it was simply not worth the price diff
friends but now when you have all that built in you don't have to buy a
separate display and all your accessories the bang for the buck is
just absolutely insane and some people might say well this 5K iMac might only
be good if you're doing some web browsing some simple things and even
then you know the Apple silicon ones are faster which is absolutely true but I
was surprised seeing some updated numbers with software like Lightroom for
example that has been improved and uses Graphics another software that has had
optimizations to make it even faster so let's get into the performance and be
ready to be surprised now I want to start out with geekbench 5 here because
that's the numbers a lot of people are used to and here in single core the Mt
Mac Mini absolutely spanks this iMac now I am looking at the base model for 600
because this iMac is cheaper than that and if we look at multi-core the iMac
actually beats it out now if we switch over to geekbench 6 the interesting
thing is that it actually gave the M1 and M2 chips a boost in performance and
it lowered the performance of Intel based Max so in single core we have 2300
compared to 1600 and in multi-core we have 9600 compared to 7700 that's a big
change in actual performance but if we take a look at cinebench for Pure 100
percent uh performance of the CPU for example if you're doing a rendering
you're editing out photos you're processing with that CPU we're getting 8
000 on the Mt Mac Mini compared to 12 600. that just shows the efficiency of
Apple silicon when you're doing lots of random small tasks like in geekbench 6
but the raw power is still there now as far as Graphics the cool thing is the Mt
Mac Mini gives you full Graphics cores it is not binned it's a great value but
both in geekbench 5's metal the iMac beats it out and in geekbench sixes
metal it also beats out the M2 Mac Mini so you have more graphics performance
and if we take a look at gaming performance with gfx binge once again
the iMac does have higher frames per second now as far as music production
using logic we use the New Logic Benchmark you guys can look up exactly
how it runs and the iMac was able to handle a lot more tracks without over
loading so that was very impressive I think it also has to do with ram and for
coders using xcode the Mac Mini was faster but not by that much now of
course if you're buying something older than like a 2020 2019 has High Core
counts you're gonna have a bigger difference but I was still very
impressed now for those of you guys that do photo editing Lightroom has been very
quick with that unified memory but with the updated uh Lightroom that can use
Graphics as well and harness that Graphics power the difference was only
nine seconds in terms of export now I would expect brushes to still be a
little bit smoother on the M2 Chip at least if your RAM is not full because
with that 8 gigs of RAM and if you're going into 256 gig of storage that's a
lot slower your system slows down dramatically if you are getting into
swap which you absolutely will and that minute and 16 turns into 5 minutes and
10 seconds whereas the iMac does not slow down so in theory that 600 iMac
turns into about a thousand dollars once you upgrade both your RAM and your SSD
now as far as 4K video editing if you're still using a shot 264 which a lot of
cameras are the iMac can actually render slightly faster but if you use h.265
which I would recommend Apple silicon is very quick with that and it is faster
Now intel Macs have one major weakness as far as video editing and that is with
new 10-bit h.265 footage where they stutter like crazy even my fifteen
thousand dollar Mac Pro just could not handle this whereas the Mac Mini can
because of that you have to transcode the footage in doing so the Mac Mini is
more than three times faster but you don't actually have to do it on the Mac
Mini which is excellent now as far as prores footage well the M2 Chip has
prores decoders and encoders built in which is mind-blowing but because of the
stronger CPU which prores will use and the graphics the Intel machine is
actually faster than this 8 gig model but if you upgrade to 16 gigs while the
performance has increased dramatically so you have to do this if you use prores
now so far the Mac Mini is very close to that iMac it costs about 2500 brand new
uh and that is shocking because it's 600 bucks but where it really starts to fall
apart is when you have really heavy graphics and CPU tasks that can't use
the Apple silicon media engine so for red raw the time is almost triple to
export that five minute project and if you're denoising saying black magic
resolve your frame rate is less than half on the Mac Mini compared to the
IMAX so the Intel Max can still be Heavy
Hitters when it comes time to things like these so as you guys could see if
you want to get yourself a killer deal that includes an absolutely gorgeous
display it includes your accessories you can actually upgrade the RAM yourself up
to 128 gigs by the way and you can actually upgrade your SSD as well you
just have to unglue that display and there's kits online lots of guys to do
that you could still get such a killer deal and you don't just have to use it
for web browsing but even if you just want it for web browsing having such a
nice large screen with a desktop speakers everything all in one it is the
best bang for the buck in 2023 because nobody wants to buy them and why is that
well I think the M1 MacBook Air is a big reason for that same thing with the M2
MacBook Air a lot of people are preferring laptops of course that costs
more money and then if you want a desktop setup especially for
productivity or if you just prefer it well you got to buy the display a
keyboard mouse to do a clamshell setup so you're spending a lot more money but
then you could take it with you so I love that option as well but there's
just something about having a desktop that is there that's ready especially at
that price point so if you have the money to spend to go buy higher end
setup to buy separate things that makes complete sense but if you want a
computer for your kid for somebody that isn't attacked for a family I mean this
is the deal that I would recommend so let me know your thoughts down in the
comment section below and if you want to find one of these at this good of a deal
I would say look around there's many listings that are overpriced on Facebook
Marketplace on Craigslist they're sitting up there for months that I've
seen so then when people want to sell it just like me they need to drop the price
and a lot of people will so don't be afraid to ask for a lower price go meet
up with them and get yourself a killer deal click that Circle above to
subscribe check out one of those videos right over there that's been Max and
I'll see you in the next one [Music]
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