new Mac Pro or 27" iMac
I apologize in advance for the length but I need some help in making a decision.
SITUATION:
I run a small business and currently have a Late 2012 21.5" iMac and two 23" monitors (3 screens total for running multiple applications and copy/pasting). My day-to-day includes always having 4-8 browser tabs open running external sites that I input order information into, a huge multi-thousand line Excel Spreadsheet (2008 MS Office for Mac), Google Voice tab open for phone calls/texts, Skype always open to talk to my technical team, Calendar, Notifications, Mail, etc... I keep most all emails because I have to search and refer to previous emails for customer issues, etc... so I have more than 10,000 emails in Mail. I take screenshots and screenvideos for our Help library at times as well. All day long I'm pretty much copying and pasting information to and from my spreadsheet to these other applications to process orders and using most of these applications simultaneously. I'm also backing up all data via Time Machine and Dropbox. Due to the volume or orders I process each day, I need my computer to be FAST!!!!
ISSUE:
My 21.5" iMac only has 8GB of RAM and is not user upgradable. I've had this iMac less than a year and I'm seeing the "colorwheel of death a lot", usually when copying and pasting, but sometimes other places as well. I think I need a more robust computer for reasons listed below, plus my wife's 7 year old iMac is on it's last leg so I'm planning on giving the 21.5" iMac to her and upgrading for my business.
Not that it happens all the time, but quite often an application will stop functioning and I have to Force Quit the application and reopen.
Each time I copy data from a cell in Excel it takes at least 5 seconds for the dotted line to appear around the cell indicating it's copied, so I have to be very careful not to paste the wrong data. This did not used to be the case. It would respond as fast as I could copy then paste. Excel and Word also take a lot longer to open and close than other programs.
When scrolling in various applications, sometimes the computer seems to stall then all of a sudden catch up and the page quickly scrolls to catch up.
I've run the Activity Monitor (which I know little about) and seen that I'm running normally 6.5-8GB of Memory Used. On the "DISK" tab often times my "Reads In" is higher than my "Reads Out" which I don't know if that's normal or not.
QUESTION:
I would like to know what you guys recommend for my situation.
Should I purchase a "beefed-up" 27" iMac with 16-32GB RAM or should I purchase one of the new Mac Pro models?
If Mac Pro, should I go with the 12GB Quad-Core or the 16GB Six-Core? (I realize I would have to purchase another monitor and microphone for phone calls).
I don't mind spending the money, but moreso I'm trying to get the right machine for my application without wasting money.
Thank you for your time and help to make this decision.
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