MBP or iMac for photographs?

Hi, I'd appreciate a little help choosing the right Mac.

I'm a fairly heavyweight Lightroom and Photoshop user who's struggled too long with his black macbook. This is a 13-inch non-pro 2.2Ghz MB w/ 2Gb RAM, so it's been quite a struggle. It's time to look at something with more grunt, instead of endless spinning beachballs.

The apparent 'mistake' I made with the black mac was to upgrade from an old-but-beefy G4 desktop system to the dizzy heights of Ghz-rated chips. I guess I expected Core2 processing to be all I needed, but I see there's more to it now. I'm prone to manipulating 200Mb+ files in PS and have a 30,000-image LR library online most of the time. Things regularly grind to a halt, which is basically costing me more time than a new Mac, if you see what I mean.

Now that I've stopped travelling (the reason for the original hardware change) a desktop machine is a possibility and I'm very taken with the idea of the quad-core iMac, largely because of the decent graphics card and fast bus speeds, something (I think) I've missed out on with the basic MB.

But then there's the MBPro... I've become quite use to being portable in conjunction with the external ACD and I'd stump up the extra if I thought it would make a big difference.

I should add I'm aware the Mac Pro desktop would have me grinning from ear to ear, but I'm currently negotiating a divorce and building a house, so budget issues are... relevant.

Any clues? How does the i7 MBP shape up to the i5 iMac for my purposes? Is the 'pro' architecture hugely significant compared to the big iMac?

get a quad core imac, no question hands down. as a full time freelance graphic designer i cant tell you how much more productive you'll be sitting down at a desk with your imac than you will be with your laptop. not to mention your laptop will wear down faster from dragging it everywhere. some people have a hard time parting from their laptop because they get so used to being able to take it everywhere, dont let that detract though, your imac will run better for longer. by the way you should get a TB external harddrive for all of your files. I work with event posters that are in excess of 1GB all the time, just get an external hard drive to file everything on, and get a portable external hard drive so you can take that places.

also, the quad core imac will be more than you need for what you're doing, dont waste your money on the tower (unless you have money to blow).

Thanks, that's pretty much what I thought.

Any idea if the i7 version is worth springing the extra for? I'd guess not... I'm also inclined to leave the memory at 4gigs, despite what I read about 6Gb+ making better use of the CPU..? And that wireless keyboard not having a return key would drive me nuts. Otherwise, I'm pretty much sold.

Don't need encouraging to buy more ext drives though. It's kind of an OCD issue for me already

yeah, from the sounds of it the i7 wouldnt be necessary, it will be more than powerful enough. what programs do you typically run simultaneously?

Lightroom 2, Pshop, Firefox, iTunes and Mail are the only significant ones that are always open. If I'm feeling lucky I might launch Word too.

The biggest drain is LR2, mostly rendering the previews (takes ages) but also import/export routines get the fans going flat out. Heavy scrolling though anything remotely close to 5000 images is beachball city. This is the main time drain for me; by way of comparison PShop seems to cope relatively well with ~350Mb files.

I regularly run LR 2 and PS on my MacBook Pro's, and while they're actually pretty efficient, I can not disagree with malicho's assessments. I do appreciate being able to take my workflow mobile, which is the biggest selling point, but I'm a photographer, not a graphic artist so it is more important to me that I'm able to take my MacBook Pro to an assignment and tether my shots for a faster turn around time.

I will eventually get an iMac for more heavy lifting, but I can not say that either of my MacBook Pro's have let me down. I upgraded the RAM in my late 08' 15" Aluminum to 4 gigs, and the new 13" is standard base model.

By the way, if you decide to upgrade the RAM in your new machine (whatever it is you'll get) don't forget to run Lightroom in 64 bit mode. Same goes for CS5 !

Doug

true, that's another point, some photographers like to take their computer with them, so you're really getting two entirely different takes.

Yeah, in a toss-up it's always great to have both sides of the coin!

I'd be crazy to get a MBP for the simple reason I can get an iMac and carry on happily with my old MB in the field. It's only post-processing I'm struggling with. This seems so blindingly obvious now it's almost embarrassing. Not selling the laptop was never on the agenda but for the couple hundred bucks I'll lose out on, keeping it's a no-brainer.

Thanks guys.

One last Q to Doug: have you ever tried using an external drive to locate your LR catalog file(s)? I've often considered it because they take up so much of my internal drive, never tried it due to concerns over losing (yet more) performance.

Oh, and I'm not totally clear how much muscle I'll need (RAM?) to make the most of 64-bit. Tried it on the laptop (2.2Ghz/2Gb) and it was basically the same as 32.

Ok, that was 2 questions...

The two (MBP or iMac) are basically the same. Cool features and great for photography. The issue here is a matter of portability. It's like choosing between a laptop or a desktop with almost similar features.

For what it's worth ...

I carry my MBP whenever I shoot. Usually literally in my camera case with all most of my lenses. It's gotten insanely heavy. I have a 500GB FW800 self powered drive I use with Aperture on it. 8GB RAM I have no issues with speed on the appl and sucking the images off the camera works fine over FW800 too. I just like to review images at the hotel after I take them on a 15" screen.

I started using a MB with 2GB RAM, thinking, ****, I can just review them on the Dual G5, but that was just too slow. Lost alot of time processing. I get alot of that done in the hotel after I shoot now.

I guess it depends alot on your workflow patterns.

Richard

mikka said:

One last Q to Doug: have you ever tried using an external drive to locate your LR catalog file(s)? I've often considered it because they take up so much of my internal drive, never tried it due to concerns over losing (yet more) performance.

Oh, and I'm not totally clear how much muscle I'll need (RAM?) to make the most of 64-bit. Tried it on the laptop (2.2Ghz/2Gb) and it was basically the same as 32.

Ok, that was 2 questions...

Click to expand...

Sorry for getting back late, wasn't around for a couple of days. To answer your question: Absolutely ! Since day one, I've only ever used an external HD for all of my stuff. BUT... The actual LR catalog goes on the internal HD because it's faster to load that way, and I will keep a backup of that catalog on an external drive.

But as for the actual RAW images, they're ALL on external HD's. I don't like wasting internal HD space, as that's the one thing that will make your computer slow down to a stand still when it's almost full. External drives are so super cheap these days, that it's almost ridiculous NOT to use them for everything.

This gives you such advantages when it comes to keeping your Mac nice and tidy, and fast. HOWEVER... Lightroom uses the internal HD for scratch disk space. So the bigger the internal drive, the better. I allocate about 15 gigs of internal HD space for the Adobe RAW cache. This way my previews, once they've been viewed as a 1:1 object, don't have to be rebuilt every time I look at them again. Actually, at that point they're no longer 'previews'. I don't remember if Aperture works that way, with stored cache space etc..

Doug

i do some freelance graphic design and some photography and i hardly use my laptop only to show clients some work that i have done for them occasionally. i do all my work on the iMac it gets my work done more efficiently. so i agree with malicho more so.

also on a side note i use Aperture 3 for photography.

i have everything saved on a external wireless networked 1 TB HDD

misuses Mr

I think that when buying a new machine, things have been where both can be similarily powerfull, but it's more important how and where you use the computer what should affect your decision.

The iMac would have a considerably larger screen (24" or 27") over the MacBook (15" or 17"), more hard drive space (500 Gb vs 1 Tb). But, the MacBook can be carried and you can work if you move around (do that with a 27" imac, not as easy).

I just ordered an iMac, but I do all my work at my home office, and use a laptop if/when I need to show my work to customers. But I think I would decide otherwise if I were a photographer where I would be mostly out in the field.

If you get the 2.8 i7 and upgrade to 8gb ram, plus add a few other things, you run the computer up over $2500 after taxes. Then you qualify for 18 months interest free financing. That's how I justified spending the extra money lol.

I went the cash route via refurb...

FWIW I ended up getting a refurb i5 quad iMac, keeping the MacBook for assignments that need one (which TBH is about 10% of the time I'm out shooting) and loving a football pitch of screen real estate when I'm not

For those interested, I'm finding the i5 struggles a little with the demands I make on it in LRoom, similarly PShop is gasping at times, something I put down to insufficient RAM. I got the standard 4Gb and 8 would clearly improve things no end. Which is why I just ordered another pair of 2Gb chips, thanks to the savings made with the refurb..

I'd also recommend a FW800 1Tb ext drive for time machine. This Mac just screams through routine stuff and the last thing you want is a slow ext drive holing up your TM backups.

Beyond that, all I'd really fancy is some software that turns the screen UV-active, so I can generate some Vit D while I'm stuck indoors working on it.

In short: MacBook or iMac? Meh.. get both!

mikka said:

In short: MacBook or iMac? Meh.. get both!

Click to expand...

It's the most obvious answers that always eludes us. >_<"

Screen real estate really does make a big difference, having multiple screens is fun too.