cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I am NOT a big fan of fusion drives. Better to get an SSD! Pay attention to Trix and check OWC for info @ memory upgrades. Best of luck.

mackolb

Before you "pull the trigger," I recommend checking your local Apple Store to learn when their "Today at Apple" sessions are offered for Product Skills Mac Part 1 and Part 2 – each 90-minute free session will give you an idea how to use the Mac and navigate the Mac interface, productivity and organizational capabilities to be more efficient and get more done with less effort. I am an Apple Creative and I'm one of the team of certified Apple Trainers at all Apple Stores throughout the world whose mission is to bring the magic of our products to our users. You can find sessions available (although during our holiday hours, sessions are not as frequent), at apple.com/today or on your iOS device using the Apple Store App and tapping the Sessions tab at the bottom center of the screen.
While we do our demo training on Mac notebooks, the MacOS is the same and the interface is the same. The only difference is the form-factor of the device you're using.
While at the store, you can certainly play with all the Macs and explore for yourself.
Additionally, I highly recommend buying AppleCare+ to protect your investment and give you three years of unlimited toll-free 24/7 technical and "how-to" support for the hardware, MacOS and built-in Apple software from the comfort of your home or office.
And, one more thing: get an external hard drive, any drive with at least a two-year warranty and more capacity than what you're including inside your new Mac, to be your TimeMachine backup. The nice folks at the Apple Store or at Apple Support can walk you through the process of setting it up and using it to backup and protect all your data, including your images and videos.
I spent the entire day today at my store, delivering training for Apple Watch, iPhone and Mac and now, it's time to turn out the lights, readying myself for another stimulating day tomorrow helping our customers "discover the magic."
Good luck and remember, "once you go Mac, you'll never go back!"
Please, no flaming. If you love yours and hate mine, don't bother sharing. Just move on . . .

aikiboy

Thank you! Wonderful idea, there is an Apple store about 30 miles form me, and knowing the interface would help a lot.

Dossile

Despite what the hardware parameters may look like when comparing PC and Apple computers, it is like comparing a mango to an Orange. For photography, a PC is inherently less desirable to an Apple because it runs Windows. Over time, when comparing performance and not simply parameters, Apple wins every time because of the way the hardware and software integrate. It’s not even close to a fair fight. As someone who was once immersed in Windows, learning Apple is relatively intuitive and the internet and Apple store courses are wonderful. Good luck, I think you’ll enjoy the journey.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

IMHO I would forget the fusion drive and just go for the speed of a pure SSD drive. A 2 TB SSD would be better.

In my experience 8 GB RAM will leave you with a bitter taste. 16 is a minimum. In this case "more is better" is, in fact, true!

Paaflyer Loc: Kansas City, MO

Just for my iMac in March. Only the 21.5-inch model. Best decision I ever made. The monitor picture is fantastic. Just couldn't justify the 27". With a little help from Adobe and Apple, I got all my photos imported just fine. My old computer was getting ready to give up the ghost. Got my photos and Quicken data and other data all backed up to a 1TB external hard drive just in time so I was able to just import the photos using Lightroom. I was able to get better organized too since it gave me the opportunity to import with my new photo import organization plan. By all means, get the fusion drive. Combo of a flash drive and regular spinning disk. Plus iMacs have a built-in backup system where you plug in an external HD that constantly backs up the full main drive so a restore is always available. Its called Time Machine. Hooks up with USB cable. It will be a learning experience since Ios is so different from Windows but you WILL LOVE IT eventually. Plus it coordinates with all my other IOS devices. iPhone and iPad. They all talk to each other via iCloud. I took photos on my iPhone a couple of nights ago at a party. They were already on my iMac the next morning in the photos area and in Lightroom mobile. Edits made on my ipad were already there on the other devices.

Paaflyer Loc: Kansas City, MO

All you SSD flash drive fans be aware they too will fail someday. Research it.

eadler

Nothing lives forever. That's why Mac users should do a Time Machine backup regularly as well as a secondary external backup drive and or cloud backup. PC users have similar options

mackolb

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

All drives will fail SOMEDAY (just like you)

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I can’t find consistent data or benchmarks to support the idea that MacOS will run a given application on similar HW such as PS or Lightroom any faster than a Windows machine. In fact, what I did consistently find is that $ for $, the PC wins every time. One recent test matched a 4k$ IMac against a 4k$ custom build PC, and the PC won for a given task every time. For many users though, the question is how much performance can they buy for their budget, and if for example, you have 2K$ to spend, there’s no comparison - the PC wins that one easily.

I’m pretty sure we won’t agree on this, so let me post something useful while researching this - a guide from Adobe on tuning your system (whether a Mac or PC) for max PS performance: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

aikiboy

Well, I am pretty clearly in in the below $2000 region, though I wouldn't mind being above it LOL! Thanks for the tuning link. Haven't had time to play with it but it sound like it will be helpful in at least 2 areas. I am taking into account the screen as well as the performance, which makes comparisons more difficult. The 5K screen is really beautiful! I just didn't want to find that actual performance didn't keep pace so that I spent a lot of time looking at the beautiful screen awaiting changes after making adjustments. I am pretty definitely going to attend the free Apple workshops in the meantime so that I can make a better decision after seeing and working with the OS.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The kind of speed that guy's talking about is not raw computer speed. It's about the human activity in interacting with the machine. Some tasks are simply easier to do with the Mac, and that makes it the choice for those tasks. The same is true for other tasks... They are easier done with Windows.

The two platforms are inherently different, but with many similarities. I'd much rather use a Windows box for FileMaker Pro database work, Excel, and Outlook, where those tools integrate better in a business environment with larger systems and various software utilities. If you're in the Microsoft environment, you simply need Windows. Even IBM, where about a third of its computers are Macs, they run Windows on many of those Macs, right along side the MacOS.

I'd rather use a Mac for creating manuals in Word, or editing sound in Garage Band or Audacity, and editing video in Final Cut Pro X. That's partly for all the built-in aids for screen captures, partly for the integration of other Apple apps with my main heavy lifters, and partly because Final Cut Pro X and Apple hardware are engineered and optimized to work in tandem. On newer Macs, the T2 chip handles a lot of FCPX processing that would be slower on other hardware.

As Adobe and others figure out how to use the Metal Graphics better, Mac speeds on their CC software will improve. In the past year, Premiere Pro has improved dramatically on the Mac platform. Previously, Premiere Pro was a lazy dog on the Mac. Be that as it may, Final Cut Pro X has a *workflow* that is much more efficient than most PC editors. Again, that is because it is designed to appeal to human factors. I find FCPX to be one of the most intuitive interfaces of any timeline editor I've ever seen. It's hard to quantify, other than to say it's like the differences between PageMaker and QuarkXPress back in the 1990s. If you knew nothing about graphic arts when you started, Quark made more sense. If you had a history of working with analog graphic arts tools, you wanted PageMaker, and Adobe pissed you off when they dropped PageMaker and introduced InDesign, a Quark wannabe.

From 1986 to 2008, I had a Mac and a PC on my desk. My compromise since 2008 is to run everything on a Mac, using Parallels Desktop to run a virtual copy of Windows and Windows apps in a separate partition. That allows the best of both worlds on one computer, and keeps me in the right environment for the ways I need to work. In my heavy training content development years of the late 2000s, I was using Mac utilities to do things with WinXP I simply couldn't do in Windows alone. I was able to develop FileMaker Pro databases on the Mac, then test them and tweak them on Windows, and integrate them with Windows utilities that wouldn't run on the Mac. The workflow advantages outweighed any speed reductions I encountered due to slower hardware and strained resources.

Dossile

Hopefully, the discussion is not to gain agreement, but to help another member make a good decision. My point is that it is not just the computer hardware you’re comparing and purchasing. Windows is a less desirable and more unstable platform. Right out of the gate, parameter to parameter, there may be real cost differences between computers, although when I was purchasing and looked on Dell they were relatively minor. But Windows requires maintenance to keep up the performance over time and Apple rarely does. If you’re paying an iT guy, that my be fine. The cost factor quickly diminishes as you upgrade software over a decade as well. It’s shocking what a short time has passed since Windows 2008. I don’t look at cost just as a purchase price, and think someone purchasing is smart to look at the entire picture. Too often, the hassle factor of Windows is immense. There is a reason professionals almost universally use Mac.

aikiboy

You are far more experienced than I! Mine is limited to the Windows environment both at home and at work, and, until I found myself developing an inexpensive (LOL) hobby with photography, my primary experience was using Word, surfing the web, and dealing with Epic (an enormous medical app that does everything from billing to managing imaging to accessing labs, scheduling, and then recording all your notes...the Swiss Army knife of medical software) to write consults and therapy notes. Mostly I used scheduling and notes. Kind of a limited end user experience. Your point regarding ease of use in a specific context and how humans interact with the machine is well taken, hence my desire to get a little experience at the Apple store.