Apple iMac 24-inch (M3)

Source: 76 comments total, top 25 by upvotes shown — all from HackerNews (tech-savvy, price-sensitive crowd; no verified buyer reviews). Dominant themes: (1) Base-config hostility: '8GB RAM/256GB SSD at 1.6k euros' in France is called 'cheapo entry level HP territory'; the $1,300 US model has only two Thunderbolt ports, no gigabit ethernet, and muted colors — ethernet, colors, and 512GB storage are all paywalled behind the $1,500–$1,700 tiers ('There is some brutal +$200, +$200 again upsell here'). (2) Design nitpicks: external power brick despite the thin chassis ('Apple users used to joke about badly designed monitors/PC who could not integrate the PSU... Oh, the irony') and 'the headphone jack is still in the most impractical position.' (3) Target-market skepticism: an anecdote of a friend sold by marketing whose iMac is now 'a paperweight,' and parents who paid 3x a similar-spec laptop's price 'to view photos... once in a blue moon'; the one serious use case surfaced is an apartment business-center guest kiosk. (4) Performance reality check: commenters argue even the M1 is 'good enough for most editing jobs' and that a dev 'can work on a macbook air no problem' — time lost to bad documentation exceeds compile-time differences. (5) The one conceded value is the display: 'no one else was making a monitor of that size and quality,' and the Studio Display 'costs as much as a low end iMac used to cost,' hence the old joke that 'the computer came for free' with the monitor. (6) Advice-seekers (a mature MSc/PhD maths student needing Maple, Python, C) are steered toward a refurb M1 MacBook, a 14/16-inch MacBook, or a cheap monitor later — not the iMac.

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