[Leica] OT: different Apple desktops

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 7:57 PM +0100 3/12/08, Nathan Wajsman wrote:
>Thanks to the many who have sent helpful replies. Just to clarify: 
>my current Mac is a Powerbook G4 laptop with 1.25 GB of memory (and 
>no, I did not waste money by buying the additional memory from 
>Apple...). It runs PS and Lightroom just fine, but of course when 
>investing in a desktop, I will want more headroom.
>
>I have checked the Apple site, and the iMac is indeed shown as 
>supporting only up to 4 GB. The brochure I was looking at was not 
>from Apple but from Digital Depot, a store in the UK. They do say 
>the top iMac can support up to 16 GB, but I think Apple is a more 
>authoritative source on this ;-)
>
>Given that, I will not get the iMac. It would be fine today but I 
>want the ability to go beyond 4 GB, so it will a Mac Pro for 
>me--when I can justify the outlay.
>
>Thanks again to everyone.
>
>Nathan

Nathan, I have a last gen G5 quad with 12Gb of RAM and some fast hard 
drives, and I have a one year old Macbook Pro 15" with 3Gb of RAM and 
a 7200rpm drive. Previously I had a 12" Powerbook G4 with 1.25Gb of 
RAM.

For most purposes the G5 and the MacBook Pro are equal in speed, with 
some of the newer programs faster on the MacBook. Lightroom really 
didn't work on the G4 Powerbook and Photoshop was also a slug, but 
workable to some degree. A couple of people I work with have new 24" 
iMacs, and they are somewhat faster than my MacBook Pro. Lightroom is 
great on the MacBook Pro.

I use mainly USB secondary drives now, but have some FW 400 and 800 
and an internal RAID on the G5 for Photoshop scratch disk space. In 
total I have about 8-10 Tb of disks.

Probably I will get a MacPro box at some time, mostly for 3D 
rendering, but at present the MacBook Pro does all I need it to; it 
drives additional large screens in a couple of different locations, 
it has between 1 and 6 additional drives attached and it runs the 
latest software.

I've had a tower and laptop combination ever since the Powerbook 170 
came out about 15 years ago, and I've found that while the towers are 
more expandable, they lose their overall usefulness for me at about 
the same rate as the laptops (somewhere around 4 years most of the 
time). This time frame is of course quite personal, and also depends 
on how much you have to exchange files with others.

If you get a high end MacPro and fill it up with enhancements, it 
will be a fair bit faster at many things than an iMac. It will also 
cost anywhere from 2 to 10 times as much. In 2 years, new iMacs might 
well be as fast as the current MacPro and in 4 years iMacs will 
almost certainly be faster.

Unless you have a specific need that requires the expandability of 
the MacPro, or you know that you will need up to 32Gb of RAM right 
now, I would think the iMac would be the better choice.

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
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