Forums | MacLife

Mac Pro. 2 Cores vs. 8 Cores.

I think you'll regret it later if you don't.

unless you intend to start buying a new computer every 3 years I would steer clear of the iMac. as you have experienced it takes a good long while to out grow a tower.

I wouldn't call a MacPro "overkill" for someone working full-time. It was overkill for my part-time photography business, so I got an iMac. I also tend to change computers every few years anyway.

Mac Pro; my next PC will be one once I wear out this Dual G5.

-mark

Aqua OS X wrote:

I'm a professional designer and I just bought an iMac for the office. IMHO, my upgrade from a 2 year old 1.5Ghz G4 to a Core 2 Duo is sooo dramatic that the need for a Mac Pro really hasn't crossed my mind.

That said, the 20in iMacs have horrible viewing angles. Things start to look yellow if they're not perfectly level and smack dab in front of your face. We have a bunch of these 20in iMacs and work, and the viewing angles doesn't bother most people, but they bug the design department.  When what's at the bottom of the display seems to have 2 - 5% yellow added to it, that causes print problems.

20in iMacs have smurfy screens and really aren't appropriate for a design house. You have to get the 24in to get a decent display and if you are going to spend that much you might as well go all out and get the tower.

I have a 23" cinema display and love it - except for the power adapter. i've had two die on me - and it's more common than apple would like you to think. But, like I say, when it works, it's fantastic.

also, i think apple fixed the power adapter issue in more recent batches of the monitor.

one tip when looking for monitors: matte, not glossy (for pro design work, anyway).

What about simply hooking up a decent external monitor to the iMacs - your designers will love you for the extra screen real estate and then you'll get a display you can calibrate.

At my current job, as multimedia developer I have a iMac 24inch, its not really my personal choice but for my job its adequate. The biggest drawback of the iMac really is the RAM, specifically the lack there of. For $85, you can dump 4 gigs in of namebrand stuff but after that, you're done. There's no potential to go further. 

At my job, I'm often bouncing between tasks as I'm the web guy, the flash dev, programmer, network admin, sound designer, graphic designer and occasional motion graphics guy. Rather than always close each app, I prefer to just leave my stuff open. So I'm likely to have Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, Sound Studio and/or Logic Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, the terminal, Safari/Firefox and sometimes Motion or Office Apps/VNC/Terminal. I'm not trying to brag but its just my work flow, I bounce between tasks if I find my concentration waning and distract myself with other tasks. The iMac feels like it has legs compared the G5 I had, namely because the G5 that it replaced had The FX5200 which was death for anything graphics related and the Intel Macs render flash faster namely in playback. Having to open/close all those apps would really impede me and frustrate me.

Ideally I'd have a Mac Pro as my work computer but my Office is so cheap that none of the LCDs in my companies posession are larger than 20 inches and none ever worth more than $300. The iMac 24 was my chance to rid myself the two 17 inch non-DVI LCDs.

For the cost of the 2.8 GHz iMac, I'd have hard time buying one over even the 4 core Mac Pro.  Inevitably for grad school next year I'll get a Mac Pro.