I am mostly going to use it for editing, and maybe a little bit of gaming on the side, but mostly editing. I’ve seen a lot of positive reviews, but I want to be sure it’s good before I spent that much money on something.

For context I’m a beginner videographer/filmmaker using a Sony FX3 and only shoot 4k short videos. Feel like the longest video I’d shoot for now is around 5-6 minutes. Will be editing in Premier.

I’ve read that the M1 is a bit outdated now since we’re now at M3 but I honestly can’t afford a newer model (in grad school, live in NYC). I only have a 2020 MacBook Pro and it can’t run Premier worth a damn!

Trying to do my research now so I can buy one in the next couple of months. If this won’t cut it are there other computers no more than $1300 that would suffice?

After 6 months of usage I have decided to share my experience with my M1 iMac 24". I do want to mention before you read this that I am not an Apple hater, I have a base M1 air and love it, and I collect old PPC era Macs for fun.

I'll start by mentioning that my iMac is the maxed out model with the 2TB SSD and 16GB of RAM. I have the magic keyboard with TouchID and the magic trackpad. I'll list things I like and give the reason why and then the things I dislike and why.

The Good:

The Display, This is a beautiful panel and I love using it for productivity and content consumption. The colors are accurate and the pixel density is amazing. (Seriously why haven't PCs gotten this resolution dense?)

The Stability, I have had almost 0 issues using this computer. I have restarted it I think 3 times during my time with it. I'm sure its restarted itself a few times during updates and whatever but I've never had an issue while using it.

TouchID on the keyboard, This is great and I feel like its a must have for any computer going forward.

The Meh:

Port selection, Only having 2 Thunderbolt 4, 2 USB 3, and 1 headphone jack is limiting. I can't imagine having a base model with only 2 ports on the back. (I've used 2 almost the entire time I've had the computer.) This can be solved with adapters and on the desktop not really a huge deal but a slight annoyance.

Magic Trackpad, it's cool and miles better than the Magic Mouse but using it for an extended period of time is tiresome and tedious. Especially when moving from the top right to bottom left and other similar actions requiring long distance movement.

The Bad:

(I need to warn you that this is subjective and partially particular to my use cases. These may not even be issues for most people but I want to include them because they're important to me.)

The keyboard, I'm just gonna say it here: The Magic Keyboard is awful. I hate typing on this thing (Which I'm doing right now). I don't even understand why its so awful to use, I love my M1 air's keyboard and they seem to be the same thing just about. Maybe it's my desk? I also dislike that because TouchID is in the keyboard you lose that if you dare decide to use another keyboard (which I tried and had to have 2 keyboards on my desk as a best of both worlds solution).

The Stand, I hate that I can't adjust the Mac's display outside of tilt. I like my monitors lower than the iMac sits and it is annoying that I can't do anything about this (the iMac's chin makes this issue more pronounced but I wouldn't care if I could adjust the height of the display).

Legacy compatibility, I know this is a rare use case and I'm not faulting Apple for catering to the 5 people that care about this but I'm gonna say it anyway. I use floppy disks and CDs semi-regularly to help with my old computer collection. MacOS makes this so annoying for me. MacOS struggles beyond belief making both CDs and floppy disks. MacOS also struggles to read floppies and will claim corruption even if they aren't.

RAM usage, I have 16GB of RAM and usually only have Discord and Chrome open. Why does that need 13GB of RAM used and 14GB of Swap used to run that? My Windows PC uses 5GB of RAM to do the same thing.

Reliance on bluetooth, Apple hates wires and owning their products makes you want to as well. No matter how hard I try I just can't break free from wires. My headphones are still wired because of all the issues I had with both my AirPods and AirPods Pro cutting out as well as just not connecting to the iMac. (Never had this issue with the headphones and my iPhone). Luckily the keyboard and Trackpad haven't had this issue but it would be a nightmare if they did.

Overall Thoughts (Kinda tl:dr too)

Overall the iMac is a good computer if you just browse the internet and just want it to work while looking nice and being quiet. MacOS is a great appliance type OS. It figures most of itself out for you and creates a power on and go experience which is fine if you're a normal user but outside of this it can be a hassle. The peripherals included are awful and there really isn't any suitable alternative if you want TouchID. The ports are unacceptable for a desktop class machine (I believe Apple is backpedaling on this if the new MacBooks are to be a sign of the future). I think I'll be retiring my iMac and going back to my MacBook and Desktop PC combo as it just works better for me. I want to hear your thoughts good and bad on your M1 iMac experience as I want to love this computer but just can't.

Thanks for reading!