That was one thing that bothered me. Before I decided to get this M1, I had been contemplating an Intel iMac and was going to get minimum Ram but then upgrader to something like 64GB from aftermarket Ram. With this M1 you can't upgrade the Ram after the fact, which is disappointing. I know that a tricked out Intel Mac would have been faster at some tasks, like video editing, but so far I have not been disappointed in the performance of this thing. In fact, the day to day user experience is amazing - it turned on in a matter of seconds and when I awake it from sleep, it pops on instantaneously.

Knowing that Apple and other Apple App developers are going to be moving more towards programs that are optimized for the M1 chip and ARM programming, I am happy with my decision to go with this new iMac, even though it isn't as tricked out as I'd have liked.

It is a very different memory setup from Intel computers. The internal storage is used as swap RAM when needed, but *because it is much faster and closer to the processor cores,* the user almost never notices that swap.

Effectively, setting a large cache size becomes more important than maxing out RAM.

The technology is over ten years old. Apple’s been doing this in all their other devices since the iPhone 4. So they have a very solid track record with it.

The first iPad that Steve Jobs introduced in 2010 was so fast for its time that people started wondering when computers could get that fast.

The system on chip concept is important — Electrons traveling much shorter distances means everything happens faster.

The 5nm process is very helpful, too. Not only does it use much less power, but it, too, draws components closer together.

Then there’s the RISC ARM architecture, which is more efficient than Intel CISC.

Future Apple processors will feature more memory. There are rumors of up to 40 CPU cores, 128 graphics cores, and 64 GB Unified Memory coming in two years.

I too was using a mid-2011 27in iMac which ran my software well but was stuck at High sierra as an OS. As a result, some of my software would run using the latest versions like PhotoShop and LightRoom 2021. Then a security update wouldn't complete and it started having issues so I had to do something. After seeing photographic-based reviews I pulled the trigger on an M1 Mac Mini. Without a doubt, the best value. Bought it from Apple under educational pricing, put it on my apple credit card with the purchase split over 12 months without interest and got 3% back on purchase for a bit over 1k. Superfast (Topaz Sharpen AI runs in 7 seconds rather than 7 minutes), noiseless, cool (never heats up even processing 32-panel pano in Affinity ). I'm sure the next Apple Silicon chipset will be incremental faster but this m1 is a huge leap forward. Btw I wasn't sure about the move because it took apple a lot of time to move to Intel from the PowerPC chipset. Rosette I was a disaster. Other than 32bit apps nothing I own which is compiled for Intel fails to run as fast or faster. I did lose the Nik plugins I PAID for which DxO will not upgrade but that's it. One last thought. I'm a retired software exec and have used the best and most expensive PC laptops made. I seriously looked at migrating to a gaming laptop and even borrowed a friend's tricked-out laptop running the latest intel chipset with 64Gb ram, 16Gb ram GPU, and a fast SSD. While faster than my 10 yr old iMac by about 1x to 2.5x it was noisy as hell and got so hot I had to put an oven mitt under it as I was afraid it would damage my teak desktop. Oh, and it cost over 5k.