Mac Pro

First, what do you do?

High End iMac 27 with Thunderbolt is hard to look past IMO.


At this point the Mac Pro is ideal for people in vertical markets like Audio or Video Production that actually have expensive boards that need to be installed or networking guys with Fibre Channel HBA to install.

27" iMac Core i7

16GB of RAM

SSD option

Yep. If you want to wait for the Ivy Bridge refresh, go ahead, but this is basically all you'd need.

Mmm what, May? We don't know. There was just some sort of an announcement of chips being pushed back, and then another announcement of them not being pushed back

They keep referencing the mobile Ivy Bridge chips but the iMac no longer uses Mobile Intel processors so I'm wondering if we will still see an iMac refresh earlier.

No way is anything but the iPad 3 coming out this month. And if it's coming out in April, we'll have to wait until May for anything else to come out.


Oh, sure!


You won't.

That's not the most accurate.

But yeah, just like we said, there's an update coming within a few months.

IMO...
You won't SEE a Significant difference in performance by waiting for something new. Certainly, it will be spec'ed a higher performance ... but they are such screamers currently, that you'd really have to push it to actually SEE a difference.

As for iMac vs Mac Pro...
The Pro is only marginally better performance these days (and are you even doing anything where you would NOTICE the difference?), but at a huge price premium. The iMac is a MUCH better deal (and even more so if you figure the cost of a big monitor into the 'Pro price.)

I've got an old (6 years now), original C2D iMac that still runs like a champ... though Lion will be its last OS, MountainLion won't support it, supposedly.

The desktop models should run cooler with Ivy Bridge. The CPU in the highest iMac has a TDP of 95W. The Ivy Bridge lineup is listed in Intel's latest PDF (which seems to have been leaked prematurely):

http://www.slideshare.net/M8Rex8b3j/...sorflipbookpdf

The 22nm Core i7 has the same 3.4GHz clock speed but has a TDP of 77W.

The iMacs are generally quiet even with the fans running but they still should run less with Ivy Bridge.

Although there is room to keep the optical drive in the iMac, Apple has removed it from the Mini and the entry laptop. I fully expect them to do the same for the new MBP and there would be no reason to leave one in the iMac.

These slot-loading drives cost $100 for Apple to put into the machines so that cost saving goes elsewhere when they are removed. You can see how much space the drive takes up over on the right in this picture, even in something as big as a 27" model:



They can reconfigure all of the internal parts without that drive and get it to be more compact and I personally hope they make the hard drive slots accessible from the bottom so that you can easily add SSD storage.

They could also choose to take the $100 saving from the optical and make the default config a 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD both of which could be made accessible from the base like the RAM.

This.

I don't want to see another integrated optical drive in the iMac. That ship has sailed IMO. Take that money ...buy NAND storage in a blade configuration and pop it on the motherboard.

I hope Mountain Lion is a bit more savvy about managing SSD + HDD storage without the end user having to worry about creating symlinks and all of that.

I think you're budgeting the cost of the implementation much too high. This includes the budget used to purchase the component and implement it unless they're on the edge where it means that they could drop down to a lower wattage power supply, and see other gains from simplification of the chassis. We also don't know where their rounding is at currently on the price of these units. I just think Apple will pocket the savings. You mention this stuff, and yet in previous circumstances, Apple has not budgeted much back. I don't recall the pricing raising with the implementation of thunderbolt chips. If anything it will offset the cost of those.

The Mac Mini is the clearest example:

http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html

"And removing the optical drive gave us room to do one more thing with Mac mini: lower its price. If you still want to burn discs, consider the external MacBook Air SuperDrive, which connects to Mac mini with a USB cable."

They lowered the price by $100 compared to the previous generation for the entry model and the optical was pretty much the only difference.


$20 per device isn't that high and Apple probably didn't pay that much:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/int...sus,14370.html

Some of the processing is in the $50 cables.

I must have missed that or it was that they raised it before. Regarding $20/device, Apple likes to round things up. Look at the mac pro 8 core 2009-2010. Both had high markups. The 2010 cpus went up by a small amount, price goes up $200. They really tend to do whatever they like. So the top one (the mini server) gained a second drive instead and the middle one stayed the same?

I think it's still a rounding thing, so it was more than just the optical, but that they were close enough on build to round it without dropping below a certain margin.

First time poster to AppleInsider. Very empathetic to the OP. My wife and I are not professionals in the graphics/photo business. We don't do 3D modeling, or architectural renderings, or 3D protein molecular epitope mapping. But we do a lot of hobby type work including photos, videos, movie editing and DVD burning etc. We have a lot of pics ... easily more than 100k of pics (don't know the actual GB size. (Currently use Aperture 3 and iPhoto). I have been an Apple user since the early 80's, through many itterations from an Apple 2e through our current Macbook Pro i5 (8GB ram). This last weekend my wife (who is pretty knowledgable re Macs) edited and burnt a 13 min iMovie. She spent the better part of Sat and Sun! (sad) She endured numerous crashes ... more than 50 through the process. Soon we wish to start a project of scanning over 50k of slides. So you got the picture ... whenever we visit the Apple Store and tell our need we are always pointed to an iMac or MacBook and invariably we soon find the system lacking in capability. Enter the wonderment of: "Are we Mac Pro candidates?" We are ardent Mac users. I refuse to entertain the thought that a PC would be the machine we need (over a Mac). So could it be that after more than 3 decades of Apple experience we still need remedial help? ... just self deprecating ...pls don't flame me too hard or is there a need for a capable machine (like a Mac Pro light) and OS for us types? Could the issue be the OS? Currently running the latest version ... Lion.
We welcome helpful advice regarding our next upgrade.

Probably not, but 27" iMac candidates? Sure.

Either way, wait for Ivy Bridge versions of both devices to make a decision. If you can wait, that is.

Can you offer a bit more detail on these crashes and things? I've noticed plenty of issues with Apple laptops and dying fans or dead chargers, but this sounds like it may just be something simple. What did it crash on? What other programs were open? Much of the time it's just too little ram and too full of a local hard drive. Apple's filesystem has some wonky behavior, and such situations make it even worse. With external peripherals if their firmware isn't 100% bug free they can hang the system a bit at times as well. Crashes can happen on any system, but you're just not really providing enough info to help track them down.

Thank you for your comments. I made sure that all programs were close and opened up iMove this morning and started to edit my project. After insert a text over a clip...I got the beach ball and did a Force Quit and the pop up box said that iMovie was not responding. We are using iMovie 9.0 with our OS X Lion on my Mac Pro and we do understand that iMovie has a new version for $14.99. I looked at the reviews on the Apple site and there were negative comments, mainly crashing issues with the new version.

You're using a previous version of imovie under Lion. I don't whether it's fully stable and bug free with that combination of OS and application version. If it's waiting on hardware or caching things, you can see "not responding" in activity monitor even when the application will recover from it if given enough time. Assuming you have enough ram that everything was maintained in ram, it could have been something as simple as a bug with Lion. That kind of problem sounds like a bug rather than a problem with the underlying hardware, which is my real point here. You mentioned what they said about the new version, but have you tried a web search to find some information on your current version under Lion? The thing is bugs can still follow you to new hardware, and this sounds like a bug, especially with the mentioned reviews.

Thanks hmm. We will look at the activity monitor, and investigate issues that may be with our version of iMovie. (again we have 8 gigs of ram) Didn't intend to highjack the hardware thread with software issues. If we a continue to have such questions we'll post over at software. Again Thanks.

Hi, was going to comment on your username but I'm sure you get enough ribs about that.

On a more serious note, honestly, I do not believe you need a Mac Pro.

Let's look at the hardware. For $1,899 you can get a 21" iMac.
2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512MB GDDR5

SSD (solid state drive) and RAM makes a ~massive~ difference. Even on my paltry Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz 13" MacBook Pro 2010 driving a 20" Apple Cinema Display, because I have an SSD and 8GB of RAM, last night I had a massive number of apps open, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Bridge, FTP, etc, with tons of windows open, as well as VMWare running Windows 7.

The above iMac with a suitable non-glossy external 25"+ monitor would be perfectly fine, I reckon.

What you would need to do is replace the hard disk with a dual-300+GB SSD with RAID for workstation-class speed, and use an external FW800 RAID storage for backup and possibly a scratch disk, depending on size of files.

Next, let's look at the software. iMovie is not really industrial strength. Final Cut Pro X or Premiere is probably better. Same for photos. If the Aperture workflow goes well, that's great, if not there's Adobe or other solutions.

Lion 10.7.3 seems fine, with almost all my apps and tons of Adobe CS4 apps I have no issues, including running Windows in the background.

It sounds like you have some system and software issues, and perhaps need to use more industrial-strength software.

Please feel free to post back here. You can post support questions in the Genius Bar section of this forum: http://forums.appleinsider.com/forumdisplay.php?f=8

All in all, I don't think it is a hardware issue, it's a system, solutions and software issue. Going to a PC would probably drive you mad.

If you had the right advice and someone understood your workflow, you could definitely do alright with the latest iMac, that's some pretty capable hardware. Maybe try a Apple Reseller that caters for pros in your area instead of the Apple Store.

Good luck.

Yup were screwed.

Highly doubtful.

I'd agree with Hmurchison, Tal' etc.

It's hard to beat value wise.

27 inch screen with a very high resolution. Decent LED screen.

Ram is dirt cheap right now. So buy 16 gigs (not from Apple...

SSD option for lightning fast boots.

Buy a decent TB external HD for back up.

The i7 quad running at 3.4 gig(?) is a very respectable performer.

Go for the 2 gig VRAM gpu option and you're set. A pretty decent GPU (historically speaking compared to previous iMacs...)

That is the kind of machine people sell their grannies for. :/

In fact, I'd wait for Ivy Bridge to hit and get the current top end iMac in a sale for a few hundred less.

Ivy Bridge won't be 'all that' compared to the current top end iMac.

I'm thinking of doing that myself.

Good luck with what you decided.

Oh, one more thing. You may...possibly want to wait and see if the New Mac Pro hits...and is refactored in form or price. It's not looking good that it will after almost 10 ten years with the same design. But...

...you never can say never with Apple.

But I think the 27 inch top end i7 iMac is your best bet. It's a great all round computer at a great price (well, in the context of Apple prices.

Lemon Bon Bon.

(One happy iMac owner whose previous Mac was a Power Mac 200 Mhz Computer Warehouse Clone...)

Depends on what you do.

The Mac Mini smashes my first Tower. It's a sexy, diminutive desktop. But it's very potent for it's size.

If you pick the i7 options and bung it with ram then you have a respectable desktop.

If you can afford it, I'd go the 27 inch iMac route.

Lemon Bon Bon.