01 The Problem
A branding and packaging design studio in Culver City had five 2019 iMac 27" machines that had become painfully slow. Photoshop took 45+ seconds to open, Illustrator crashed during large artboard exports, and saving files to the Fusion Drive caused beach balls lasting 10-15 seconds. The studio owner got quotes for five new Mac Studios at $2,000 each — $10,000 total — and wanted a second opinion before spending.
02 Our Approach
We diagnosed the bottleneck: all five iMacs had the stock Fusion Drive (a slow HDD paired with a small SSD cache). We upgraded each machine to a 1TB NVMe SSD using an adapter, expanded RAM from 8GB to 32GB, and performed a clean macOS Sonoma installation with migration of all user data and Adobe licenses. Total parts cost per machine: $185. Each upgrade took approximately 2.5 hours.
03 The Result
Photoshop now opens in 4 seconds. Large Illustrator exports complete without crashes. File saves are instant. The studio saved $9,075 compared to buying new machines, and the upgraded iMacs now benchmark within 15% of a base Mac Studio for their typical design workloads. All five machines were upgraded across two days with zero data loss.