Will new iMacs come with SSDs standard?

I hope they do. Make 128 GB the minimum with options for 256 GB and 512 GB. If 1 TB is possible, make that an option as well.

Disclaimer: we can't possibly know.

 

Having said that, of course not.

You draw conclusions totally unsupported by evidence. There is simply no reason to assume that an iMac with standard SSD will provide a bigger return than standard HDD. Including both as standard equipment makes no sense at all. Doing so would mean that the iMac would have to be larger to accommodate the added SSD. An iMac with standard SSD implies a thinner form factor because SSDs are physically smaller than HDDs of equivalent capacity, use less power, and thus require less cooling, and are silent.

 

There is no doubt that the days of spinning discs are limited. The determining factor is economics. When while their increased productivity due to their added speed and price premium become competitive with HDD. For many laptop users, that time has come already. Desktop users are still waiting. Whether they can stop waiting with the introduction of new iMacs is left to be seen.

Of course we don't know but that doesn't mean there isn't a good chance it will happen.
I have just the opposite opinion. There is already room in the current machines for such a drive and considering a total design overall, space isn't an issue. The SSD doesn't need to be huge physically to actually be very beneficial to the average user. In fact every day small SSD drives in various form factors are debuting from various manufactures, size simply isn't an issue.

The real question becomes why wouldn't Apple do this. A base machine, for users with modest requirements, wouldn't even need a magnetic bulk storage device. For the rest of us they can easily have an HDD option that serves the bulk storage needs of various user classes.

The space is already there!
Apple doesn't give away anything. I would fully expect them to configure the machine to have similar margins as today's machines. The price of the SSD isn't an issue as can be seen with the Mac Book AIRs.

Whatever the outcome it's always stupid to choose an SSD option from Apple or extra memory for that matter due to their outrageous markup. I bought 2 256GB SSD drives that are 2 1/2 times the speed for 500CHF, Apple charges 750CHF for the pair and their much older and slower drives.

Lion is made for SSDs, so I hope Apple moves aggressively in the direction of making them standard equipment.  Until I bought my MBA, I couldn't have imagined the difference that SSDs make in the overall speed and responsiveness of the Mac. 

Whining about Apple's markup clouds the issue. Whether from Apple or some other company, SSDs are substantially more expensive that HDDs of similar capacity.

Not really, I personally don't want Apple to upgrade to SSD as they'll inflate the price. I would much rather add it later as it allows me to choose a much better drive then some abscure OEM vesion. I replaced my Macbook Airs drive for a faster and larger one.

They can already accept an HDD + SSD. The space is there, although that was already stated. 

Yep... although some people do try to overly simplify pricing calculations.

This is just crap. Lion is ram hungry. If you don't have enough ram, it leans harder on the drive, which then favors an ssd. There's no reason you need one or the other for your computer to run Lion properly.

I hope the new iMacs can handle more then 16GB of ram. On the subject, Apple is crazy, nuts, lost there friggen minds if they think anyone is going to spend 800 dollars for four 4GB modules for 16GB. Don't they know that even the most expensive ram only cost 40 bucks a piece, you can buy 4GB Kensingtons for only 25 bucks a piece now for a total of $100 dollars and their much better rams then Apple uses. 800 dollars for 16GB, what is this the 1990's I actually stopped breathing when I read that. http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC814LL/A? Check out the 500 dollar price tag on the 256GB SSD, their like 250 bucks now and for faster drives, insane Apple, insane.

The AIRs kinda discredit your statements. They demonstrate that Apple can produce very credible and cost effective hardware.

As to add ons ALL of Apples custom order parts are expensive. It is the base macine where they are aggressive.

A lot of companies do this with ram. Many of them offer consumer models with 8GB standard without further configuration options. When it comes to workstations or any of the more expensive lines, they charge a fortune for ram. This includes Dell, Lenovo, and HP. Many of them offer really cheap base configurations, but you pay quite a lot for upgrades. You'll find similar behavior with SSDs. The current imacs can take 32GB of ram. There's one thing I find stupid. Many people complain about a bloated OS and programs when ram upgrades are mentioned, yet SSDs are somehow a more favorable concept. Ram is extremely cheap when you buy it from a third party retailers. I typically look at Crucial and run memtest after it arrives. I don't know if Ivy Bridge will take 32 or 64GB. I haven't looked up the maximum supported for desktops. Ivy Bridge laptops can support up to 32GB.

 

Anyway I'm getting off topic here. The point was that you can be annoyed all you like, but it's common practice. It won't be too big of an issue unless we lose the ability to upgrade ram and Apple sticks to a minimal base configuration. 

All Apple, HP, Dell & whomever are doing is encouraging people to engage third party suppliers. This to minimize the amount of custom building they have to support. Each of these companies would be better off never even offering these upgrades , but since individuals demand such support Apple feels obligated to charge them for it.

I was already aware of that. It will only become an issue for me if we hit a point where all of their machines go the route of the macbook air. I'm not convinced this will happen anytime soon. I'm due for a new machine this year. I'll figure out my next purchase once we have new models out. It's close enough that there isn't a lot of motivation for me to deal with it right now, and I don't buy into the hype of what will/will not make it to the next generation of machines.

I think consumers are ready for tiered storage.  

 

Truthfully you don't even need that much storage for the Boot and Apps.   Intel makes a 40GB SSD aimed at the Z68 motherboards that offer SSD caching.  There's little point in keeping an ODD 

around if it's not Blu-ray and SSD offers keen benefits.  I'm constantly amazed at my MBA it's just such an overall good performer because the storage isn't slowing me down and comparing the Samsung 

SSD in it now (250MBps) versus the Sammy 830 SSD (400+ MBps) the best is yet to come. 

 

I see that 7mm HDD are coming to market in 320GB and 500GB configurations for these slim configurations.   I think the market is ready for a duopoly in storage.  

What about integrated storage?

 

Drop an 8GB NAND chip on the logic board and have the OS on there. I've been saying this for years, and 8GB chips are certainly cheap enough to do this now. The Apple TV 3 has an 8GB chip in it, as did the 2, and the total cost for those is way below $100. Keep the backup partition on the spinning or SSD media for if something goes wrong with the running OS.

 

Faster load times from sleep and cold boot and no space taken up by the OS on the storage media. Win-win.

A single NAND chip isn't very fast and 8GB doesn't give much room for wear-levelling. Storage benchmarks of the iOS NAND (will be the same as the ATV) show at best 48MB/s reads and 16MB/s writes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2EP1MRmEMs

This works fine in iOS devices as you don't really do much writing (consumption = read, creation = write and no VM).

It would be ok as a dedicated recovery partition but to get SSD speeds, they need to use lots of NAND chips in parallel. You can even see the mainstream SSDs increase performance for larger capacity drives:

128GB M4 = 175MB/s write
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148448

256GB M4 = 260MB/s write
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443

Samsung has a table on this page showing 64GB = 160MB/s write, 128GB = 320MB/s write, 256/512GB = 400MB/s write:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147134

Also bear in mind the Windows partition should really go on the boot drive too so I'd say no less than 64GB but again, splitting it evenly doesn't leave much room for wear-levelling. It's not a good idea to fill up the storage on any drive or you can really impact write speeds.

Given that retail SSD is $1 per GB, the cost to Apple will be lower, maybe around 70-80c per GB. Their margins on the Mini will likely be $150-200 on a $600 machine. They could manage a 64GB and just lower their margins by $50 but they don't usually do that.

The only thing they can realistically do is remove the hard drives from the machines and then charge the customer for them as BTO. So they'd ship 64-128GB Minis and then you choose the hard drive setup you want. I think it would work well for the Mini Server as you get the high IOPs from the SSD and you can have two HDDs in RAID1 for redundant storage. If one of your HDDs fails, the Mini keeps going.

I think the Air will bump up the entry level to 128GB and 13" to 256GB. Any models above that, it's easy for them to use SSD boot drives. The great thing about SSD blades is that in the iMac, they can fit easily in the RAM slot area. This reduces wear on the hard drive and even in the event of a boot storage failure, a repair is as simple as taking the blade into a store. Ideally the main drive wouldn't be stuck in the middle of the machine but the SSD design would be much better.

Or just mass produce enough SSD's to get the price in line with regular hard drives and we'll all be happy. I suppose that wouldn't set to well with western digital and seagate at the moment.

It's actually demand and yields that have kept the prices somewhat high. You're grossly over simplifying it here.

 

You can custom order that set up and for the moment it is likely that that is how it will stay. Perhaps the top end iMac (27 inch, i7 etc) will come with an SSD as a standard piece even in stores but the rest will likely remain by order only. If only because the component prices are such that even when you mass produce they are out of most common consumers price range. 

 

At some point in the future when capacities are way up and prices way down to I think that SSDs will become the new wave for all internal drives. Sure, but that won't be for a good 2-3 years. 

I really don't see that. The chips that go into these devices are relatively cheap these days. Further the price continues to fall. On top of that Apple controls a great deal of the technology that goes into flash drives so lowering the price is something they have control over.

Beyond all of that, the AIRs demonstrate that Apple can build cost effective hardware with SSD technology. Sure the drives in the AIRs would just past capacity wise as boot/app drives in the iMacs, but isn't that the point? Considering Apple dominance in the flash market they could simply demand a factories entire production capacity.

It is funny but I think some guys here are eing grossly difficult when they deny the possibility here. Even an SSD with AIR like performance would give the iMac a huge speed advantage. Apple doesn't need a blistering fast SSD to benefit an iMac. Personally I'd like to see Apple skip the AIR like SSDs and show some leadership when it comes to broaching new tech for SSDs.

And yet Apple sells AIRs at competitive prices!

I really don't get this attitude, the AIRs have been around how long now? Beyond that the price on SSDs is dropping like a rock.

Mind you I'm not saying Apple will do anything. What I'm objecting to is this idea that a standard SSD in an iMac is impossible. Rather I see it as very possible and a way to give the iMacs a performance edge over other hardware.

Both Seagate and WD are moving to combined flash/HDD units in both 2.5in and 3.5in form factors.

 

How much flash storage will be utilised moving forward is an unknown, probably 64G in basic units as a minimum - for iMac I'd imagine 128G as a sweet spot tied to a 1T drive as a minimum.

Those drives would be more useful if you could determine what went on the cache. It just decides for itself and it might pose a security risk if a drive erase doesn't erase the cache.

It could use a software interface to let you choose to put on the OS permanently along with the apps that you want.

I don't think hybrid drives are going to keep mechanical storage going though. It will just need some new technology to come to market and it's all over:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/ucl_reram/

"Our ReRAM memory chips need just a thousandth of the energy and are around a hundred times faster than standard flash memory chips. The fact that the device can operate in ambient conditions and has a continuously variable resistance opens up a huge range of potential applications."

It's like what happened with CRT displays. A new technology arises, prices drop, quality improves and the old standard is wiped out. The ultimate goal is where your RAM is the same as your storage. In other words, you don't actually have what we understand as RAM at all because the data executes so fast between your storage and the CPU/GPU. It might have a VM space on a designated drive to allow you to boot from slower storage and to prevent data corruption of original files but it pretty much removes memory limitations entirely.

Like you, I find the Register of importance for quick information - they have run a few articles recently on what Seagate and WD are up to, from their research, it seems we'll have mechanical HDD's until at least the end of the decade, but, its a given that solid state technology as it improves will surpass mechanical HDD's in the longterm - I prefer mechanical presently as have large storage requirements - 13T Plus - and SSD's would bankrupt me.

The SSD causes Lion's "instant on" features to perform much, much differently than they do on a HD.  All things being equal, the responsiveness of the SSD will be noticeable. 

It lets you wake from sleep two seconds faster. That is not the same as driving application performance. I don't use a laptop much, so my laptop is older. It still launches applications within a few seconds on an older HDD. I've used plenty of computers with ssds. The difference is greatly overstated. 

I've thought about this a bit. I do think you're on to something. I've been wanting SSD but really couldn't get past the cost.

Take this video from OWC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shVhpKnzfp4

Booting the computer and loading four apps in Adobe Creative Suite saves about 35 seconds on SSD vs. HDD. Once the app is loaded into memory, I don't think there's a huge difference. It seems like a lot of money to spend to shave seconds here and there.

It gives me the impression of being a luxury, but it can be a benefit in some cases. If you use it for paying work for three years and it saves you a minute a day, that upgrade would easily pay for itself if it results if that minute each day is put towards better productivity. That seems unlikely if the time is seconds here and there. Or if you have a drive-intensive task for it, compiling software hits the drive quite a bit.

There are other considerations, the drives are more resilient to impact, and I don't think they're as prone to immediate failure due to the fewer moving parts. The drives only save about a watt or so, so improvements in battery life and heat generation aren't that significant compared to the rest of a notebook computer.

I get your points, and they're valid. Regarding this one specifically, 32 bit application builds and limited laptop ram made these a much bigger deal when they started in terms of performance beyond a few seconds here and there. It's still quite valid for that purpose if you hit a point where going higher on ram would be cost prohibitive. OWC published this a long time ago, and it demonstrates my point toward the bottom of the page. Photoshop can address an enormous amount of ram. Toward the bottom they're using a 12,500 pixel wide image. This is relatively large, but nowhere near unheard of for commercial purposes. Once it can hold everything in ram, the times drop off a cliff, and with applications like that the feeling of a real time feedback that you get with this is nice. I don't think there's anything wrong with using ssds even for small gains. It's just some of the guys who feel it's a night and day difference when working within an application may want to step up their ram. For anyone who doesn't want to click the test ran 100.87 seconds on a late 2011 macbook pro with an SSD and 4 GB of ram compared to 72.15 seconds with 16GB of ram and an HDD. The whole chart comparison is there, and I'd expect some similarity with after effects too given the features that were added recently.

Some apps like Safari cache data to the hard drive in many small files. Having a high random write can make things feel more responsive. I'd say a big improvement is in saving and loading big files. Although you can have a huge image opened in RAM and the SSD makes little difference, once you hit command-s after a modification, it might have to write 1GB out to disk. On a standard HDD with 50MB/s write, it would take 20 seconds to save.

This is more common with video files. If you ever edit a clip in Quicktime Pro and save it back out after a quick edit, it can easily take 1--15 seconds to save. An decent SSD would be done in 2-3 seconds.

The prices are expensive sure but dropping like crazy.

The 512GB model is coming down now too ($424):

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-CT512M4SSD2/dp/B004W2JL3Y/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1338922791&sr=8-4

That's 83c per GB. It has a bit to go to match the 10c per GB of HDD but HDDs seem to have bottomed out. I can't see them going much lower in price because most people just don't need the higher capacity drives for their main drive. SSD will continue to plummet as the demand goes up.

In other words, it sounds like make sure you have enough RAM first, and if you have money left over, shoot for an SSD. Upping RAM is something I've tended to do for a long time.