Looking at picking up a new iMac 27"

[StreetDoctor]

I'm a PC guy sick of all the PC issues. Windows Vista/7 has finally pushed me over the edge and I'm switching to apple. I was at the Apple store today and checked out the new iMac 27". I spoke to a sales representative about what I'd like to use it for- music and photo/video editting. Nothing super involved but I'd like to have something that will grow with me as I learn more. Right now I use Adobe CS4 and I want something that can run photoshop and open .raw files in under 15 minutes.

What I can't figure out is whether I want the 3.06ghz or the 2.66ghz quad core (and if so with the i5 or i7 processor?)

Any opinions?

 

[Gombessa]

If you're going for raw processing and photo/video work, the quad core will definitely help as all of these are highly parallelized tasks. Preliminary reports show the i7 with a significant performance advantage (20-30%) over the i5, which is surprising and makes the price premium worth it IMO. You can't upgrade the CPU or graphics chipsets in the iMacs, but you can upgrade pretty much everything else, so I lean towards maxing out these options.

 

[NETim]

OS/X rules!!! I am sold on Apple computers. The only MS based computer in the house is the company issued laptop. It's junk.

 

[TropicRat]

This past August, I finally had enough and took the advice of my 19 year old and got a 24" I-Mac.
I love it. Should have done this years ago- I'll never look back

 

[M_Bipartitus]

... You can't upgrade the CPU or graphics chipsets in the iMacs, but you can upgrade pretty much everything else, so I lean towards maxing out these options.

I agree, due to the limited upgrade potential, max out CPU, GPU, and possibly HD. The memory should be easy to swap in and out and is typically overpriced from Apple, so you could save some $$ if your willing to upgrade that separately yourself. The HD could be cheaper to upgrade yourself, but is a real pain to get to the HDs in most iMacs I've used.

I'm not sure what you mean by "under 15 minutes," but it should be pretty fast. You may enjoy the built-in support of RAW in Mac OS. You can get a quick preview without having to open the files in a dedicated RAW viewer (select in the Finder and push space bar.)

 

[gotwake]

You will love the new iMac. I was a PC guy until last year when I bought a new Macbook Pro 15. I replaced my desktop this year with an iMac 24. If you are afraid that your'll need Windows, just install it through Fusion or Parallels. I agree with the others on here, Max out the specs, but buy the extra RAM latter. It's way over priced from Apple.

I would take a look at the prices on MacMall and some of the other online retailers. You will probably save some versus the Apple store....wait......... There could be on a whole discussion on "Supporting your local Apple Store not the evil online MacMall"..... LOL

 

[Damselfish]

We tend to max out our Macs when we buy them, since they seem to stay happy and useful longer than our PCs. Our dual processor G5 from around 2003 is still going strong. (Actually just had this discussion a few days ago - it's perpetually low on disk space with all the music and photos, and I recently realized it only has 1G of memory - 4x256! Quickly decided we still have no good reason to replace it, so its getting a 1.5T disk and more memory for Christmas. :xmas_2: )

 

[gotwake]

Damselfish - Take a look at Dropbox. I have have upload all of my photos and files to it. I can access it from any of my Macs.

 

[Damselfish]

Thanks for the suggestion, but we've no need or desire to use a web service for storage and it wouldn't work for the way we use stuff. Plus it would be much more expensive - disk is going for around $100/T nowadays. Dropbox charges $20/month for their top 100G service which is less than we need anyway.

 

[Gombessa]

disk is going for around $100/T nowadays. Dropbox charges $20/month for their top 100G service which is less than we need anyway.

Unless you need offsite backup, picking up an external USB/eSATA drive really seems like the right way to go.

The one expansion solution I've had many headaches with is NAS, as most of the cheaper arrays have slow processors with really middling transfer rates.