leaving windows forever! - switching to Apple/Mac purchasing new, heavy user, Mac Pro? iMac? Upgrade coming soon? Help!

The fact that you know the specs of your current machine leads me to the opinion that the Pro is your kind of Mac. I am a 'power user' but not a 'computer nerd' so I have an iMac. It just does what it does and I like it very much.

However, I wish I could upgrade the hard drive, and graphics board myself. I have delved into the guts of PCs over the years and it was interesting and easy, as well as replaced the HD in a Mac laptop. I guess if I had a better work area and a glass puller I could take the screen out and get at the guts of this iMac as well, but I don't. Oh well. The iMac is great. This is a 24 inch version and I have had the mother board replaced after the USB was fried. The USB is part of the the mother board, so the whole board had to be replaced. That causes the loss of the visible serial number and fan control. I doubt this would occur in a Pro.

If you like to customize or power up or modernize etc etc, then you have got to get the Pro. No choice. If you just want to use it and accept not upgrading the hardware, I recommend the iMac.

As to missing the next upgrade, you can never win that race. Just accept the fact that as soon as you buy a computer there will be one on sale with better specs within a week. But I say, get the best one you can afford and don't look at the greener grass next week!

Welcome to the world of Apple!

With the way computers are changing, sometimes it's best to not buy much more than you really need. Everytime you buy a computer a new and better one comes out. The iMac is very cheap compared to the Pro units. And then you need a monitor. If something new comes out and you broke the bank on the expensive unit, you might feel like you need to keep it for a long time. For the iMac, it's about the best bargain I see for the average computing needs.

I've personally opted away from the more expensive units and went to the basic iMac with only RAM upgraded. My last unit was the G6 tower unit and loved it, but it took up a lot of space and I never really did any upgrading. The biggest benifit with it for me was the option to add extra internal hard drives. I didn't see the value in adding anything else when the processor was falling so far behind. I've been happy with the iMac and just use an external hard drive for backup. In fact I loved it so much that I bought my wife one to replace the mini she had. I also love the fact of so much less cables and power cords. And for the price, I could just buy a newer unit that much more often.

If you need a lot of processing power, then the Pro may be the way to go.

But that's more of a personal issue based on how much money you have to spend, how much power you need, and how much upgradability you need.

And you can upgrade iMacs to a certain extent. At least changing the hard drive or basic components.

My only request for future iMacs would be the capability to add an additional hard drive, especially without having to dismantle the whole computer to do it like you can with the RAM.

After 30 years of being a hard nosed Windows user I too made the jump to Mac 12 months ago. Almost all of my PCs I'd build up myself with carefully selected components, so it was quite a leap of faith for me to buy my iMac which largely is not upgradable.

Now 12 months later I am just so pleased I went down this path. It is a true joy to have a machine that just works and I realise I feel a huge weight has been taken off my shoulders. No more wrangling with components that sometimes seem to conflict, despite best efforts.

Like you, I did want the Mac Pro but the price was prohibitibe for me at the time. As it turns out the iMac 27" is perfect for me so it turned out for the best.

Like Glenn's wish, yes it would be nice to be able to have a second internal HD but I'm pretty happy with the FireWire800 external I am using, so even that isn't so bad.

As Chinajon said, you can never win that race. If you try to you end up looking like the cartoon I saw of a man sitting in front of the first ever Mac, waiting the the next version to come out. 🙂

Whatever you get, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do mine.

not1lost wrote:

... I think my best bet for a machine to do what I want (I sometimes really push it - not always) would be a Mac Pro... although some other advice I have gotten was that an iMac would be better for me.

You can certainly upgrade the iMac's hard disk, and it has the option for an additional SSD within the enclosure. Taking apart the iMac is not a big deal - peruse YouTube to see how easy it is. Eventually you might want to install a bigger HD or even an SSD when they come down in price so rest assured that is possible.

However, you can't upgrade the iMac's GPU since it's an integral part of the motherboard like most laptops, and of course the monitor size you get is permanent. I don't have a Mac Pro but everything the iMac does it will do better. Deciding upon which is going to be a matter of personal preference. Either one will give you many years of service.

Overall the iMac is a very capable machine, especially the i7 version. I've run Geekbench stress tests on them and the CPU barely gets warm even after several hours of stress testing. Even after several hours of 100% CPU load the cooling fans never run above their idle speed - I was concerned about that until running Apple Hardware Test which exercises them, so I know they're working.

Your biggest problem migrating from Windows is losing your preconceived notions about how you believe a computer should work. At first this will frustrate you as you try to make the Mac work like Windows. My advice - don't. Forget everything you used to know. The Mac is so far ahead of Windows it might as well be in a different galaxy.

Macs are designed to get out of the way of your work, and as such, need almost zero maintenance. Even mundane tasks like backing up your hard disk is completely forgettable with Time Machine. You can forget about such tedium. If you are technically adept enough and motivated to peek "under the hood" though, you will absolutely love the control you have over these machines.

After a month or two of getting used to the Mac way of things, you will wonder how you ever put up with Windows.

No one can advise you on what machine to get unless you tell us what you'll be using it for, no?

It is true that if you get an iMac you are pretty much

stuck with what you have. There is however some future

possibilities. With the Thunderbolt port on the iMac a

whole realm of possibilities may open up for expansion.

Currently progress on devices for it is slow (Intel seems

pretty tight at the moment on who gets access to the

technology), but devices are coming out to add functionality.

In particular, is the slow arrival of PCI express card cages.

Whether the technology takes off or not remains to

be seen.

But if storage is needed, the Thunderbolt port will get you very

fast disk access. Several RAID enclosures are available which

can get throughput extremely high. Single drive access with

this technology will be limited only by the disk's speed.

If you want to assure yourself of expandability, the MacPro

is the way to go.

Before my 27" iMac, I had a PowerMac G5 (looks just like the MacPro), and before that other tower Macs. I just never used the full potential of the bigger tower Macs until they were at end of life and the world of CPU power had moved so far ahead that there was nothing I could have done to the units that would not have been more cost effective by replacing it (which is what I did).

To my way of thinking, if you have some very compute intensive tasks, very large memory tasks, or the need for a lot of very fast storage, then the MacPro is over kill, and an iMac might just suite your needs (my iMac mostly sits at onlly a couple % CPU usage).

Buy compute, memory, storage intensive I mean things like professional image or video editing, the system is a database or backup server while lots of transactions happening, etc...

As a bonus, when the iMac is too old to be useful, you can run a mini Display Port cable from another Mac to the iMac and use the iMac as a dumb monitor for the other Mac. This way you do not loose the usefulness of the display even if the CPU is too old to do much of anything.

But as others have said, this is something only you can decide.

Whatever you purchase, order it with the minimum RAM. Purchase your additional RAM from Crucial or OWC both trusted resources for Mac hardware.

What kinds of upgrades do you plan on making to this machine? A Mac Pro is substantially more expensive than the iMac. If you have $50,000 of video equipment you want to connect, the Mac Pro is your best choice. If not, you should really consider the iMac. The current Mac Pro machines are upgradeable, but they are upgradeable to current technology. When you need to upgrade years later, you might not be able to find anything. The iMac supports Thunderbolt whereas the Mac Pro does not.