Which old iMac to run Glyphs / FL7 smoothly?

Adam Jagosz

Greetings to all. A colleague is considering buying a second-hand iMac (2014ish) and Glyphs. I figure Glyphs will run on just about anything (https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/glyphs-hardware-requirements-macbook-air-2020/14348).

It's just that I've heard not-so-good things about the Macs with an Intel GPU only like the MacBooks Air and those 20ish" iMacs. I hear there are problems with the more recent Macs with Radeon 5300 / 5500 too. That's in reference to more intensive work like video editing though; maybe it doesn't really matter in a workstation meant just for font editing?

1. Does FL7 and/or Glyphs use the GPU a lot? (I'm thinking general operation, but also some more intensive stuff like working with complex outlines, Glyphs plugins like LettrInk etc.).

2. Is there a chance Glyphs stops being so generous in its support of macOS 10.11? (It's more of a question whether it stops supporting Mojave/Catalina, but I guess that one's tough to answer for anyone?)

By the way, I'm considering getting an M1 Mac and working with FL7 and possibly Glyphs there. Any roadbumps with using those via Rosetta?

Ramiro Espinoza

FL always runs way faster than Glyph in any mac because its code is compiled.

James Puckett

I’m using a Late 2015 27" iMac with 16GB of RAM and Glyphs performance is fine. It doesn’t take much power to run a font editor and Indesign.

Chris Lozos

I have the latest iMac with the Intel chip and it runs anything great. Both Glyphs and FL7 run fine

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Georg Seifert

I’m using the 2014 iMac (first generation with Retina Display) for all my production work (making Glyphs and using Glyphs).

Glyphs 3 supports 10.11 and will keep doing so. And It runs very nicely on the new M1 macs.

Ramiro Espinoza said:

FL always runs way faster than Glyph in any mac because its code is compiled.

Why do you think Glyphs is not compiled? Do you confuse it with RoboFont?

Ramiro Espinoza

Why do you think Glyphs is not compiled? Do you confuse it with RoboFont?

Because it's not very fast when compared to FL. Sorry for my assumption.

Paul Hanslow

Georg Seifert said:

I’m using the 2014 iMac (first generation with Retina Display) for all my production work (making Glyphs and using Glyphs).

Similar to Georg, but I'm using a 2014, 17inch Macbook Pro and I've had some issues with Glyphs 2 being laggy, but it's due to my own workflow rather than an issue with Glyphs —the Brill typeface is a bit of beast when multiple versions are open. 

I've only had issues with Glyphs when I have design files open (Illustrator, Photoshop) plus Glyphs, plus Chrome open with too many tabs. I'm the kind of person who doesn't close applications often . Glyphs can slow down when undoing operations but this is easily fixable by closing and reopening the application. In summary, I've had minimal issues with Glyphs 2. I don't own Glyphs 3.

Adam Jagosz

Thanks for your input, everyone!

Btw, oops, I messed up the link in the OP, it should have been https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/glyphs-hardware-requirements-macbook-air-2020/14348

Claudio Piccinini

Unfortunately I do not know about circa 2014 Mac models, but I can tell you Fontlab 7 works fine with El Capitan 10.11.6 (with which I am "stuck", having a 2009 Mac Pro).
I recently installed Glyphs 3 to try it and it seems it runs smoothly as well.

Fontlab becomes a little slow when you have many large files open and/or metric windows, but I see it happened always when I had other programs open (Photoshop, Chrome, Illustrator). In general, a key factor is having a good quantity of RAM.