Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I fell in love with the Apple Screen. Can we buy them some place other than Apple?

pjhender

You can't go wrong with either setup so don't beat yourself up. I have Both Systems so here's what I think: I have an iMac Pro I bought for my office in June running a 14 core Xeon, 64 GB DDR4 ECC Ram, Radeon Pro Vega 64X Graphics card, 4TB SSD. The cost was $9,168 not counting the Final Cut Pro software that my editor uses. At Home I finished a new build for my home office where I do a lot of editing using my preferred software Adobe Premier Pro, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.. My new PC build is running the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 3.0 GHz 32 Core w/ the X399 Taichi TR4 ATX AMD Motherboard, Two GeForce RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra Dual-Fan 11GB GDDR6 PCIe Video Cards (SLI),Crystal Series 680X RGB ATX High Airflow Glass Smart Case, Two 2TB M.2 SSD's on the board plus a 6TB HDD and a 4TB 2.5" SSD, and the Hydro H115i Platinum 280mm RGB Water Cooler. A bit of an overkill on the PC build but I can fill up a TB every 2-3 weeks plus as a private pilot I do some VR flight sim work to keep my Instrument flying approach skills sharp, thus the dual video cards. The cost of my super build PC came in just under $6,200 and took me a day to put together. Running Cinebench and real world rendering tests of 4K 60p footage, the PC outperforms the iMac Pro by 4 to 12 % in my very unscientific tests (YMMV). Both are extremely great systems and you would not likely notice much of difference if any in many applications. The PC build will save you $3,000, however the iMac Pro comes with the Monitor built in. If you paid someone to build my system for you it would cost about $250 and the 4K Monitor I use is spectacular and cost me $490 2 years ago. Figuring that into the equation, you're saving closer to $2,300 and you have a killer Visual "masterpiece" to look at with the PC and it's RGB lighting, glass panels, extra memory and ports, expand-ability, and an ultimate gaming/VR PC on top of it. Of course on the other hand the iMac Pro is super-elegant, takes up only 25% of the total real estate a PC would on your desk, and the display is equally as stunning and makes my editor super happy (worth the price of 2 iMac Pros!). If you're looking for the fun-factor and are a Premier user I would build an Ultimate PC within your budget, and if you're a Final Cut user and don't care about swooning over your computer desktop, and just want an amazing computer with a killer display and a small form factor, then get the nicest iMac you can afford with the best processor and video card you can squeeze into your budget as well.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Good story. Sounds like you run a video business. Most who use both platforms daily will agree that Premiere Pro is not as well optimized for Mac OS as it is for Windows. However, Apple wrote Final Cut Pro specifically for the Mac OS, and the two are tightly integrated. It's a joy to use, once you "unlearn" other systems. For me, it's a very direct, sensible way to edit.

Most PC users always tout the savings angle. For those who are computer literate and aren't afraid to build their own, that may be true.

Those who buy comparably-spec'd hardware on both platforms don't have quite the same experience. On the PC side, the major manufacturers often install a lot of junk software that gets in the way of speed. I gave up on Dells and HPs, because they came with a ton of crapware. By the time I added all the anti-virus, -malware, -adware, and anti-WTF packages AND put up with Microsoft's constant updates, I had very slow Windows computers.

Solution: In 2008, I bought a copy of Windows Professional and a copy of Parallels Desktop, and installed Windows on my MacBook Pro. There's no crapware. In the last few years, I've found anti-everything packages that don't bog down as much as the corporate crap I used to have to deal with. I'm not a gamer, so I don't care that Parallels-emulated Windows isn't much of a gaming machine. It's fine for nearly all other tasks that work with two cores.

For most of us who've tried both platforms (or used them for decades as I have), we don't overlook the very significant fact that the Apple ecosystem is a very practical and helpful environment. iPhones and iPads and Macs are automatically linked via iCloud, so files created on one device are available on all your other devices. Third party software tends to work more uniformly from application to application. Most Mac users are pretty self-sufficient, and those who aren't tell Consumer Reports they love Apple Support — For years, Apple has had the highest user support ratings in a magazine that really doesn't like Apple products.

There ARE distinct advantages and disadvantages to using each platform. That's why I use both systems, but on one computer. The Mid-2010 Mac Mini and the Late 2013 iMac I have been using since 2015 are the most reliable machines I've ever used. When I need another computer, it will be tough to decide between a MacBook Pro and an iMac.

Kaib795 Loc: Maryland, USA

I can relate to this as when I worked in Commercial Printing we rebooted our Mac's at the start of every shift to keep them from locking up. If you remembered to do so you were fine, if you forgot you loose your work and start over ... after the reboot.

Kaib795 Loc: Maryland, USA

Yes, I think having the most RAM you can afford is King on the Mac's. Ever sense I try to put ample RAM in all my computers. In the old days of printing they only put in the minimum to run everything to save on costs as RAM used to be very, very expensive. This isn't so now days.

Kaib795 Loc: Maryland, USA

I agree totally with you. Get RAID 0 if you need it but today's m.2"s are so fast that there is no need ... unless you are a programmer and compiling code to software that can take 8 hours even with fast computers. My Brother does just this and had a custom laptop made to his order with dual m.2 drives ... it boots in 3 seconds and gets that 8 hour work done in half time. But I regress, we don't need this and new PC Z370 mother boards carry two to three m.2 cards! I use m.2 NVMe drives and they are the King in computing right now but they do get hot. The new mother boards have heat sinks and some even have add on fans just over the drives. They are what is typically in thin laptops. I use SSD's in my laptops and it's good enough and very affordable. If you try and upgrade your computer remember that the bus may not support through put that matches your new SSD or m.2 and there are different Gen versions that double in speed as the Gen # goes up. My photo editing computer is a home build with two m.2 drives. One as the home drive and the other as a cache drive for Photoshop. The speeds are fantastic but I'm using a new ASUS ROG Maximus Hero Z370 mother board which supports the lastest devices. A word of warning, m.2 SATA drives do not operate at NVMe speeds so I would buy the NVMe. At one time I had 8 SCSI drives in RAID 0 used for video work on a old G4 Mac. It was fast at writing and opening work but the bottleneck was the computer bus. Boy did that rig make noise, enjoying the lack of there of in my new computers.

Bill P

I have a friend who owns a commercial photo lab. He does very high en work for busiensses and professional photographers, little or no wedding/portrait/vacation photos and the like. He has a computer network throughout his lab with both PC's and Macs on it. When I was thinking about buying a new computer I asked him what were the differences. He said that they were basically equal, one had certain problems, and the other had another kind of problems. Neither were longer lasting or trouble free.

Semi-Amateur Loc: Central Indiana

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