Mac Pro or iMac

Ok, so I thought I was all decided on an iMac but now I am hearing that
I will not be happy or satisfied with its computing power and that I should
go with a Mac Pro. The iMac I was contemplating was the 2.93 with the
Radeon card, which would run me about $1900. If I go with the base
Mac Pro, I will need to drop $2400 and then buy some additional RAM.
I really did not want to spend this much, but I do not want a machine that
is not going to keep me happy for a while. I mainly am doing photography
with a 10 mega pixel camera. I do alot in Photoshop and Bridge, usually
making about 100MB files for each photo. I do have a back up external
hardrive with 1TB of space on it.

Will I be ok with the iMac?

Thanks for your help.

There's no reason to purchase a Mac Pro for what you need a machine for. The iMac you mentioned has plenty of horsepower both in the CPU and graphics to work with Photoshop, Bridge, and much more.

Regards.

chscag said:

There's no reason to purchase a Mac Pro for what you need a machine for. The iMac you mentioned has plenty of horsepower both in the CPU and graphics to work with Photoshop, Bridge, and much more.

Regards.

Click to expand...

+1

I would only make the investment in the Mac Pro if you were planning on some serious HD video rendering and graphics. That iMac should have plenty of computing power for your needs.

has anyone bought a refurbished imac from Apple?
Any problems or is this a safe thing to do?

Bonito said:

has anyone bought a refurbished imac from Apple?
Any problems or is this a safe thing to do?

Click to expand...

I would say that it's safe to buy a refurbished iMac from Apple. If there are problems with it you can always go in and have them fix it.

The MP would be an overkill for your needs. I think you should get yourself a nice 24" iMac.

I've got an iMac at work, and a Mac Pro at home. My verdict would be....

It depends.

To me, the big benefit of the Mac Pro is it can be set up with vastly better protection against data loss, via an internal RAID setup (and external raid if you want to go nuts). Hard drives are the most common component failure in modern machines, and hard drive failure in a new iMac is a take-it-in-to-Apple-and-have-them-fix-it, vs. being very easy and fast in the Mac Pro.

I don't take pictures professionally, but a hard drive failure in my previous machine cost me 3 months worth of pics of my kids (I know. I should have done my backups). This is one thing that skewed me to the Mac Pro for a home machine.

Last bonus for the Mac Pro is that it will have a longer useful life than an iMac. More CPU horsepower, upgradeable video, hard drives, and a higher than 8GB RAM capacity could come in very handy when Snow Leopard comes out, especially if you shoot RAW.

All that said, I'm pretty happy with the price, simplicity and power of my iMac also. With the iMac you could also buy an external RAID for your photos, and let Time Machine do the work.

Steve