My college's new 21" Retina iMacs!

back in july, college purchased new imac desktops video editing lab in our fine arts building. before imac line refreshed previous month, had planned 27" 5k retina imacs, ones discrete graphics cards. when imac line updated, college saw make 21" 4k retina imacs discrete graphics cards, , got instead!
got $1499 model, eleven of them lab. sure pretty sweet machines! have 3.4 ghz i5 quad-core processors , ati radeon pro 560 graphics cards 4 gb dedicated vram, , bought them 16 gb of ram , 256 gb solid state drives. result, fast, more 24" early-2009 imacs replaced, , they're faster late-2012 quad-core mac mini (which has 2.3 ghz i7 processor , 16 gb of ram).
got adobe creative cloud suite 2017 imacs, along microsoft office, avid media composer first , davinci resolve, , and planning final cut pro x , compressor them once new versions released. helped put garageband , imovie on them beginners digital audio/video editing! (it helps both apps free download now.)
tv studio director surprised , astonished @ first, because wasn't aware imac line refreshed , thought 21" models still had integrated intel graphics shared vram, didn't want. showed him apple website showed tech specs of new imacs, , showed him "about mac" screen on 1 of them indeed revealed used discrete graphics cards dedicated vram, , pleasantly surprised that. how have usb 3.0 ports, thunderbolt 3/usb-c ports , sdxc card slots, , we're planning thunderbolt 2-to-3 adapters students use macs, along firewire-to-thunderbolt adapters if need use our firewire drives them. (we still have legacy equipment around need use archiving purposes.) them lacking optical drives, don't mind much, tv studio doesn't burn dvds or blu-rays anymore, except archiving purposes. if need be, have few external usb dvd , blu-ray burners available. surprised find out online these new 4k imacs have user-replaceable ram, though can bit tedious open machines , swap ram modules, glad know it's doable, once time comes , want upgrade imacs 32 gb of ram or something.
sent ticket , list i.t. department want have software updated on imacs during winter break, including operating system macos 10.12 sierra 10.13 high sierra, adobe creative cloud 2017 2018, etc. (the tv studio not have administrative rights such things; have i.t. department handle them, , typically software upgrades in-between semesters, such last summer when of pcs on campus upgraded windows 7 windows 10.)

far, impressed these imacs, how things formerly found on 27" models have made way 21" models (especially discrete graphics.)
felt sharing interesting tidbit.

 

good apple went dedicated graphics cards , slotted ram 21.5", though that's undoing downgrades made prior 2015 models. it's college spent , got ssds, should standard on every imac, , not recommend using 1 of models doesn't have ssd.

 

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