KevinIole.com

I am a man of many computing devices. I love technology and I especially love computers. I own a 27-inch iMac, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, a first-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a Surface Pro 4 and an iPhone X. And that’s not to mention my 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use for work which belongs to Yahoo.

Despite all that, I’ve recently added a 5k 27-inch iMac to my collection.

Honestly, I’ve been significantly dissatisfied with my previous iMac. From the day I purchased it, I would get the spinning beach ball when I launched Safari. Many calls to AppleCare and trips to the Genius Bar didn’t fix it. It would inevitably pass tests, but the beach ball spinning would never end. Sometimes, it was longer than others, but it was always annoying. Even after I replaced the spinning hard drive with an SSD, it did not improve.

It wasn’t as bad using Chrome or Firefox, and I took to using Chrome primarily. But there were some new browser features that Apple introduced in Mac OS Sierra that I wanted to use. That was particularly true of individual settings for each page you visited. I hate AutoPlay video and Safari has an ability to stop it before it starts.

I couldn’t use it before because the browser wasn’t reliable.

I finally bought a new one and it’s a doozy. It’s an i7 processor 4.2 GHz clock speed with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD hard drive. It has the Radeon Pro 580 graphics card with 8 GB of VRAM.

It’s been an awesome machine. I decided with this one, I wasn’t going to run a migration assistant. There are a few pieces of software I rely on and so much of my stuff is in the cloud anyway, so I felt I could get away not importing my data and settings from my old machine into my new one.

My indispensable software is:

• LastPass, a password manager program I highly recommend.
• DropBox, a cloud storage solution.
• Microsoft Office, which I use via an Office365 account, which I really recommend. It’s $99/year and you are guaranteed to always have the most up-to-date software. Plus, you can share it with family and put it on multiple machines.
• TextExpander, a cool program that lets me type short characters that expand into longer phrases. For instance, if I type “udw” TextExpander will convert that to UFC president Dana White. It’s especially helpful for those times when you’re not sure how to spell Jedrzejczyk and you can just type “jjj” instead. ☺️
• SuperDuper, a wonderful back-up program that allows you to clone your hard drive via smart updates.
• Airmail, an alternative e-mail client for Mac OS and iOS devices.
• Spam Sieve, a great spam-filtering program.

Before I installed those programs, I turned it on and did the set-up, which went quickly. Then I ran Software Update and got the OS updated to the most recent version MacOS High Sierra.

With the updates run those indispensable applications installed, I was most of the way there. When I signed into my iCloud and Google accounts, I had about 95 percent of what I needed, and so that eliminated the fear of importing a problem.

Without importing a problem, I felt more confident this new machine would live up to its billing.

And I must say, it’s by far the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s incredibly fast, very quiet and has a gorgeous screen. The colors are so rich, vibrant and accurate that it’s almost like looking out a window if you have a nature photo as your desktop wallpaper, as I do.

It’s steady as a rock and just using Safari for the brief time I’ve had it, not only haven’t I once seen the spinning beach ball, but I also haven’t had that auto-play video plague me.

I couldn’t give this machine a higher recommendation. I give it a 5 out of 5 stars.