Anybody out there running CS2 on a 24-inch iMac?
Is it stable?
Is 2GB going to be enough?
InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop all constantly crash on my Mac Pro. I seem to remember CS2 being rock solid on my CD iMac, and I'm left wondering if C2D iMac will be the same.
The Mac Pros seem a little 'quirky'.
Is 2GB going to be enough?
InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop all constantly crash on my Mac Pro. I seem to remember CS2 being rock solid on my CD iMac, and I'm left wondering if C2D iMac will be the same.
The Mac Pros seem a little 'quirky'.
Comments
The Mac Pros seem a little 'quirky'.
How's that?
If you need the computer now, get it. If you don't, wait until CS3.
How's that?
Well, I've been having a few problems with my Mac Pro since I received it a few weeks ago.
The Mac Pro runs universal applications like a dream. It's a real belter of a machine.
Having run CS2 on an iMac and a MacBook for some time, I expected the Mac Pro to offer the same level of stability and be faster. However, early on InDesign quit on me and that's when I realised that it's been a long time since I've seen the spinning-ball-of-death or have an application full-on crash.
Whereas on my iMac (2GB) and MacBook (2GB) I can launch Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop and then proceed to copy and paste between all three, on the Mac Pro I'm lucky if I can get two of the applications to run at the same time. 9 times out of 10 I'll select a placed Illustrator or Photoshop file in InDesign and select 'Edit Original'. Illustrator or Photoshop will then launch fine, but InDesign will then die in the background.
I originally put it down to having only 1GB of RAM installed. As soon as I could afford it (FB DIMMs are expensive aren't they), I purchased another 1GB making sure that the DIMMs were identical to those already in the machine. This gave me 4x identical 512MB DIMMs, and therefore 2GB of quad channel memory. The performance boost was noticeable, but CS2 still didn't want to play ball, and surprisingly the Mac Pro still insisted on swapping-out to disc a hell of a lot. I've never been aware of my iMac or MacBook having to swap-out as much when they are running all three of the major CS2 apps.
Also, if crashing every hour or so wasn't enough, the Adobe apps keeps changing the numerical values you enter from a nice round number to an odd recurring number. For instance, you'll ask for type to be 9.25pt and you'll get 9.2442442442442pt, and 0mm appears as -0mm for some strange reason. This means that working on vector files in Illustrator, which are largely numerical in nature (and have to be spot on) is a waste of time.
So I phoned the technical support department of the reseller that sold me the Mac Pro, and the helpfull lady said she would look in to it and get back to me. I didn't hold out much hope, but true to her word the lady got back to me and explained that she had contacted Apple, and done a little digging herself, and that 'the forums were full of people with Mac Pros experiencing numerous problems' and that they had had a number of customers coming back to them with 'strange problems'.
I also know that whilst installing Boot Camp on an iMac is fairly straightforward, there are issues with the Mac Pro an it's of implementation of SATA. Taking all of this in to account this is why I use the word 'quirky'.
I'm sure that if you are upgrading from an early G5 to a Mac Pro, or you are working in a busy studio, the Mac Pro will feel just as fast as your old machine and you probably wouldn't hear the constant swapping-out of the drives. You would however notice the numerical anomalies in Illustrator at least.
So I'm wondering if the 24" iMac will be as stable as my existing 20" iMac Core Duo and MacBook, or if there are 'quirks' like those of the Mac Pro I have...
There is absolutely no reason why the iMac would run it faster or more stably than the Mac Pro. None. At. All. It's goign to be equally unstable and probably slower: the instability is a result of it being run in Rosetta, not the hardware it's on.
My understanding is that the Mac Pro has a slightly different implementation of OpenGL than the other Intel-based machines.
I'm sure if the Mac Pro is the first of a new generation of Intel-based machines that will have this implementation of OpenGL, or if it is a one off. With the 24" iMac being released after the Mac Pro, it could go either way...
... but the point is that the Mac Pro IS slightly different to the other Intel-based machines. Perhaps there are other differences as well?
My understanding is that the Mac Pro has a slightly different implementation of OpenGL than the other Intel-based machines.
Not any more as of 10.4.8.
It is very, very usual of Apple to equip new machines with newer builds of an OS release than what is actually available for other machines, and to deploy new features for this.
Consider, as another example, two-finger right-click through the trackpad, which was initially available exclusively on the MacBooks and 17-inch MacBook Pros, but curiously not on 15-inch MacBook Pros. The reason was that those were older, and thus, unlike the MBs/17MBPs, did not ship with a post-10.4.6 build. 10.4.7, then, brought the feature to 15MBPs.
I'm sure if the Mac Pro is the first of a new generation of Intel-based machines that will have this implementation of OpenGL, or if it is a one off. With the 24" iMac being released after the Mac Pro, it could go either way...
This exact implementation is now available for all Macs, thanks to 10.4.8.