iMac or MacPro?

prepressdork

Well-known member
I am looking to replace several older Mac's with new ones. The MacPro offers quite a bit of horse power but the price is not very appealing (I am not opposed to buying them though). The Mac Mini while nicely priced doesn't seem to offer the higher performance that will likely be needed for a prepress environment. For price and performance, iMac seems like the way to go.

Your opinions?

Thanks,
pd
 
You might want to wait if you can and see what Apple comes out with in the fall. The Mini is way overdue to be improved, and they might have a new model in a few months, depending on the chip situation. One website has a new MacBookPro being delayed because of a shortage of Broadwell chips. I don't know what chip they're planning to use in the updated Mini.
 
The mini is only useable in my opinion if you buy a minimum i5 and replace the slow notebook HD with a SSD and max the memory, then it's decent. Also there a places like OWC and Mac of All Trades that sell very nice and usable used MacPro's that will get the job done nicely for years to come.
 
We recently replace our Mac G4 workstation(finally died) with OS Tiger to an iMac with OS Mountain Lion. The iMac seems to be operating fine. Our biggest issue was software, what's for PowerPC and what's compatible with Intel.

The one thing I've noticed with the current Mac/iMac's available is the spec's say upgrade to OS Maverick Max. So.....can these Mac's upgrade to Yosemite? I am not sure, I didn't followed up with it.

I agree with PG above. Wait if you can. See how things shake out with Yosemite.
 
any current mac will run Yosemite, without a question. I had a beta of Yosemite running on an old MacBook Pro C2D, and it ran it very well with an SSD. Thats a computer thats almost 5 years old. So unless you are running something really ancient, it will run Yosemite, which is a free upgrade.
 
We have one of the 2011 Mac Minis. It has the i5 processor, and 8GB of RAM. We use it for basic typesetting, and it does just fine. Yes the HD is slow, but for a lot of work it just doesn't matter. For our main OSX machines, we have Mac Pros from 2010 with the Xeon processors. I really can't see any reason to upgrade them yet. Sure the new ones are a little faster, but it isn't going to increase productivity enough to spend many thousands of dollars on two new machines.

I am interested in the next iMac and may buy it to replace one of our Mac Pros, since they are rumored to have 4k monitors.

I remember back in the 90s, when you always needed more power, more storage, more RAM. That just doesn't seem to be the case today, at least for our needs.
 
Do you use server based “workflow” software?

Server/client based software has reduced the need for a beefy workstation (fat client) for all users. One can now use lesser hardware (thin client) as the server is doing all of the heavy lifting. That being said, for tasks that are not handled by the workflow server, the local workstation may need more grunt (fat client).


Stephen Marsh
 
Last edited:

PressWise

A 30-day Fix for Managed Chaos

As any print professional knows, printing can be managed chaos. Software that solves multiple problems and provides measurable and monetizable value has a direct impact on the bottom-line.

“We reduced order entry costs by about 40%.” Significant savings in a shop that turns about 500 jobs a month.


Learn how…….

   
Back
Top