bullethole

As a long term it professional and an avid amateur photographer. Memory is king. All the processor speed you buy gets lost if you are paging memory to disk ( yes, even solid state disk). I currently use a 1 year ole iMac with theni5 processor and 48g of ram and a 1 tb ssd. I've also run the same programs on a i7 Mac book pro with 16g of ram. Hands down the iMac is vastly faster with light room, and I can only think that Photoshop will be similar. You get the best use of cpu when everything is in memory. Muy brother does financial modeling and long ago I told him to go for ram over CPUs (large spreadsheets are memory pigs as are pohotos). Buy the i5 iMac and then buy after market memory (imacs are still customer upgradeable memory wise). My iMac never swaps when in loghtroom... My macbook pro SWAPO's looks crazy in light room.

Mary Kate Loc: NYC

I think his key statement was that he was over 80.

LoneRangeFinder Loc: Left field

It probably depends on where you live. At work we use PCs that are replaced on a 3-4 year cycle. We also use the MS Office suite and have the required upgrades whenever Bill needs a few more $s. The cost for these are astronomical-- and the improvements are seldom significant from a user perspective. We have a technical HelpDesk when issues arise.

My personal use is a 2010 MacBook Pro. For service, I have the local Genius Bar where I get charged zero for a seven year old computer. Typically the issues are my fault; the same cannot be said for my work environment--that is a controlled secure environment.

Bottom line is comfort level and how you work. The other factors are more the add-ons necessary to make the PC as functional as the MAC... again, personal choice....

ramblinmen Loc: Manassas, VA

Our iMac is one year old and was top end at the time. It doesnt sound like you need a speedy processor as much as you need built in storage. 25,000 photos now and more to (surely) come? Storage unless you want to pay$$$ for the cloud backup. You will have four USB connection ports to use but no built in dvd/cd player so you might want to get a $79.00 superdrive to go along with your new computer.

ramblinmen Loc: Manassas, VA

Our iMac is one year old and was top end at the time. It doesnt sound like you need a speedy processor as much as you need built in storage. 25,000 photos now and more to (surely) come? Storage unless you want to pay$$$ for the cloud backup. You will have four USB connection ports to use but no built in dvd/cd player so you might want to get a $79.00 superdrive to go along with your new computer.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

One thing. I seem to recall an online report that stated that memory for the smaller iMacs can not be upgraded by the user, whereas the 27" model can be upgraded. If the OP is planning on adding more memory in the future he/she might do well to consider this.

Bobgood1 Loc: Indianapolis, IN

Thanks for the info. BB

blackest Loc: Ireland

Yes Apple are doing some quite user unfriendly things in recent years. With the smaller iMacs the screen has to come out to be able to get to the main board and fit the ram, The 27" iMac has a cover that pops off and you can be upgraded in 5 minutes. The front display glass is held in place with double sided tape this requires heating to soften the glue. I've done this on a macbook pro and it isn't that easy, although I used a hair dryer. The screen i was replacing was cracked quite badly the domor screen was good but with a bad panel. The donor was pretty easy but the cracked one was pretty tough going. Then you need the right tape to fix the new one in place as well as removing the glue residue and being 100% dust and fingerprint free.

CD/DVD drives are pretty much a rare necessity these days. For most of my machines these days I either don't connect the drive or don't include one at all I have an external USB optical drive which i've had for around 7 years and that gets dragged out on the rare occasion I need to use a disk. Even on macbook pro's with drives I often need to use the external because it is tray loading not slot loading and the small cd's can not load in a slot loading dvd drive. Just like floppy drives at one time i used to mount a floppy drive backwards into a blank 3.5 slot in a pc tower, just in case i needed it and to be honest, I never did.

It looks like USB C is the standard of the future and everything that was done on the older ports can be done via a usb C adapter cable. Newer peripherals will come with usb C as standard. Then it will be just the one cable but until then there are adapter cables to give the legacy port.

We have been through this before with pcmcia cards I still have a few knocking around with ethernet , wireless G, Modem, Memory card slots and even a parallel port.

I do think apple are going a bit too far soldering in ram and ssd drives in the latest macbooks. It probably does increase reliability and reduce the cost of making them but it makes them hard to fix and upgrade. It limits the useful life of the machine and they are not cheap.

Maybe Apple will eventually license OSX for third parties to build Macs which can be upgraded. OSX needs a price if Apple can make the same sort of money selling a copy of osx to a third party as they do when they sell both the hardware and software it might happen.
Of course the third party machine will cost more than a similar mac but being upgradable it would have a greater value.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

Been there, done that. One of the last things tried by Apple before Steve Jobs returned to the company was to license their then-curent OS - OS 9 - to third party manufacturers. Several clones appeared soon thereafter. They didn't look like Macs, but they acted like them. I was employed by a newspaper, designing and prepping advertisements at the time, and as I arrived, there were four or five clones in use. They worked well enough, but one could see and feel the cheapness. They had neither the lasting power, nor the quality of Apple product. When Steve Jobs came back, among the first things he did was to scrap the clone program. I seriously doubt that Apple will wish to go through that again.

Wouldn't be at all surprised to see some sort of third-party software of the Boot Camp variety that will allow a PC to use MacOS.

blackest Loc: Ireland

That would amount to the same thing really, It's pretty well known there is a thing called a hackintosh If you select the right hardware it's quite easy to build a pretty much fully functioning mac clone. Laptops tend to be more tricky usually because the bios expects a particular wifi card so switching it out for an osx compatible one often doesn't work.

MrBob Loc: lookout Mtn. NE Alabama

Think about getting the 16 gig memory from the git go...it comes as (2) 8 gig cards, leaving you 2 slots free for a 32 gig ram later. If you start with 8 gigs, they will be on 4 gig cards. My system board fried on me and I have another IMac coming as we speak.

cambriaman Loc: Central CA Coast

I have an iMac27 (my second one) and have always "maxed out" the RAM to 32Gb. Both have also had the 2Tb hard drive version. Great for photos. I also backup my photo files to an external 2b LaCie drive for safety's sake.