Hey welcome back to the channel! So I just recently bought an older iMac and in this video I’m going to tell you why I bought a 2013 iMac in 2018. So if you’re somebody that’s been watching my channel for a while you know that I’m into building hackintosh computers, but honestly I’ve just completely gotten burned out on that recently and wanted to get a real Mac so I could run Final Cut Pro in all its glory. Now doing some research and stuff I decided quickly that I did not want to get a brand new Mac mostly because of the price and it was overkill for what I wanted to do so I decided to go with an older one now I’m gonna get into the reasons why I chose an older one but before I do if it’s something you’re thinking about there’s really two ways to go about this you can either buy it refurbished from Apple so I’ll put a link down in the description to the Apple refurb site they have more recent Macintosh’s out there that they’ve been factory refurbished by Apple and you can purchase them from Apple you can get all the warranty you can get the Apple care and all that stuff they’re slightly discounted they’re still pretty expensive and they’re the newer model so that’s definitely one route to go the other route and the route I chose to go is to buy it used from someplace like Craigslist or Ebay or swap ax I got mine on Craigslist did a little bit of negotiation and ended up with this machine so like I said primarily what I want to do is edit my YouTube videos which I shoot in 4k my lumix g7 camera and I wanted to be able to edit those in Final Cut Pro and after doing some research I found out that anything after like 2012 2013 with a dedicated GPU not the Intel processor can edit stuff just fine in Final Cut Pro now because I was getting an older machine I wanted to get what was top of the line at that point in time for the machine because I knew I’d leave meat the horsepower to do the editing that I want and that’s what I got with this machine it’s a 2013 27-inch iMac it’s got a 1440p display a fourth-generation i7 processor 32 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM a 3 terabyte fusion drive and a 4 gigabyte 7 atm after a little bit of haggling I was able to get it for 650 bucks now if you’re looking to go the user out like I did I would not recommend getting anything older than 2012 2012 for pretty much the whole Mac lineup is when they switched over to USB 3.0 and a faster system bus as well so the ports on this machine has pretty much
everything I could want it’s got four USB 3.0 ports two Thunderbolt ports that’s Thunderbolt one Ethernet port SD card reader 3.5 millimeter headphone jack it has bluetooth 4.0 internally and 802 11 AC Wireless and it does support up to the 5 gigahertz ac and like I said for me that’s pretty much all the connectivity I could want and this was a great setup for me so design wise right about 2013 is when they went to that slimmer iMac design and this one actually looks very very similar to the iMac Pro so it’s got the very thin edges with a bit a little bit of a bump behind but overall it’s still incredibly thin and the 1440p display is absolutely beautiful in this machine so as you would expect in day-to-day activities this thing works fantastically well browsing the web and doing office work and you know watching YouTube videos things like that we’re great in fact you’re not really gonna see that much difference between this machine and a brand-new iMac that you might get if you’re doing just those day-to-day activities it works just as well applications open super quick everything performs well you can multitask to your heart’s content with that 32 gigs of ram everything just works great alright so I got to talk about gaming just a little bit here now Mac’s are not designed for gaming if you’re looking to buy a machine and your primary objective is to be gaming on it then don’t get a Mac go out and buy yourself a Windows machine buy a gaming machine build a gaming machine go that route but if you just want to do some casual gaming and stuff I was actually really really surprised at how well games worked on this machine I played games like fortnight and seven days to die and you know a few other games that are available on Mac and they actually all worked really well it has to do with that for gigs that’s on that gtx 780 m now you’re not going to be able to go out and play triple-a titles at 1440p ultra settings and get over a hundred frames per second that’s just not going to happen but a lot of games at 1080p ‘i’m setting you’ll get anywhere from thirty to sixty frames per second which is really playable unless you’re doing like competition games it’s not so playable but if you want to get even better performance then there’s the option of loading Windows 10 on the iMac through boot camp and booting into that and you get a much better performance in there I’ll put a link up here to a video I did of fortnight
running in Mac OS and windows on this machine if you want to check that out and get an idea of what the performance would be like now like I said near the beginning in this video one of the things I wanted the most out of this machine was editing in Final Cut Pro and I could not be happier with this machine in that regard on my lumix g7 I shoot 4k video mp4 h.264 encoded which is a horrible format for editing you usually have to transcode that video to get a smooth editing but I can take that right off my camera load it into this 2013 iMac load it into Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve for that manner and have a beautiful editing experience plays back at full speed the scrubbing is completely smooth I can even add transitions and effects and color correction and color grading titles all that good stuff it doesn’t slow down stay smooth and it’s just a buttery smooth process from the beginning to the end exporting a video is also extremely fast on this machine sure it would be a little bit faster on a newer machine with faster internals a faster drive faster processor and GPU and all that stuff you know that export time is going to be shorter but on this machine it is great I’ll put another video up here that I did of editing 4k on this machine so you can see more details of that performance but for me where I’m at with my channel with how often I do videos I’m completely fine with waiting just a little extra for that video to be exported over a brand new machine it didn’t make sense to me to spend the extra money for a brand new machine or even a newer machine for that little bit of gain in speed on the back end I’m completely happy with how this performs right now in Final Cut Pro and that’s really what I was looking for now you may have noticed I mentioned Final Cut Pro in DaVinci Resolve but I didn’t mention premiere and that’s because Premiere does not work very well on this machine those same files I can take them put them into premiere and the scrubbing is not smooth at all the playback is really choppy I would have to create the optimized media and you know my goal was to get a machine that I could edit smoothly in Final Cut Pro which this machine does so I honestly don’t care how premier performs on this machine so for me I am so happy that I went this route and bought this used machine I feel like it does everything that I needed to do for just a fraction of the cost of a brand new machine I basically got a
top-of-the-line machine yeah it’s used but it for 650 bucks with the specs that are on this machine with the way it performs I think I got a steal of a deal if you’re gonna buy it use just be patient especially on craigslist and ebay and swapper be patient look for the good deal see if you can haggle with people and adjust that price a little bit if you go with the refurbished machines on the Apple site that’s another good option too you get the full warranty you get a newer machine and that is a great route to go and then of course there’s always the route of buying it new I’ll leave that up to you but thanks for stopping by and checking out the video I hope you found this useful and informative please come see me on Twitter Instagram and Facebook I love meeting new people on all those different forms of social media and I will see you in the next video
source
