[Editor1]

Mac Pro. But don't wait. Apple won't bother updating the Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Everything they have been doing points to removing the Mac Pro from their line-up. They are more concerned about consumers and professionals can connect all the peripherals they need via the Thunderbolt on a laptop. Before 2012 is done, there will be no more Mac Pro. (Dare I say before end of 2nd Qtr.?)

[lhudd]

As is sit here at my desk, i am waiting for the arduous process to replace the hard drive in my 27" iMac. The procedure to upgrade is a serious pain in the neck, booting from the reduce partition (fortunately THAT still works) to install OSX to the new HDD through a USB bridge... then booting to the new HDD so i can copy all my stuff from the old one to it, and then FINALLY the ridiculous amount of surgery required to disassembly the iMac and swap out the drives.

Yeah, right about now, i really wish i had purchased a MacPro for my work machine instead. Mind you, this is all time (and money invested in suction cups, torx drivers, and spudgers) consuming, but it's not all bad. Kudos to Apple for having the ability to transfer everything using their little program, etc. But they should have made accessing the HDD a lot easier on this thing. Or, at the very least, make the SSD a standard item and not a $500 option. I miss the days of my old G5 tower when i could just pull out a hard drive and pop in a new one.

[MissingHorse]

The IMac screens are not good enough for serious accarate colour viewing or retouching, even when calibrated and profiled. So is this is a need go for an MacPro and an high end screen.

[nolt4024]

n781lc, on 12 December 2011 - 02:31 PM, said:

3dguy, on 09 December 2011 - 01:13 PM, said:

Any suggestions for calibrating a mac display (I have last year's 27" model) and I can't get my Spyder3 to calibrate it at all!!!

I really like the i1Display Pro by xRite

I have used Pantone's recommended HueyPro by x-rite and have never had an issue with color reproduction on my 24" 3+ year old iMac. I am a designer, use it everyday and actually have a bag from iLugger that I carry it back and forth to work in. I've never had a problem the computer at all. I personally don't understand what all the hype is about the Matte screen thing either. I've used my machine now and previously a Lacie 21" color accurate matte LCD with the hood and all and cant really tell a difference to the point that it matters.

And by the way the rest of you designers who really care about this sort of thing and are working in the print world...If you're going to all this trouble and spending all this time talking about it on the web and not doing press proofs you're wasting your time and everyone else's on this forum, color matters all the way through the design/production process but it matters the most when you get to the press. And if all you do is convert you PDFs to the SWOP color gamut for export without ever checking the actual printed piece with a densitometer as its coming off the press, you're really wasting your time.

[Vuddha]

I am planning to get a NEW 27" IMAC [if they ever come out] and use Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop® 8 for Gamming.
I work with Photoshop, and Adobe Premier, After Effects and I play WoW on MAC and Star Wars Old Republic and other PC only games. I have a Synology DS212+ NAS for Data and Backup.

Going with:
27" 3.4GHz quad-core Intel core I7 with 8MB L3 cache
8GB Ram
Upgrade to 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 from OWC or Crucial
3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive Maybe
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX Graphic processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
AppleCare Protection Plan
Samsung SE-506AB Slim Portable Blu-ray Writer

As you see I was planning to get the 3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive.
Choices of drive 768GB SSD, 1T or 3T Fusion HHD, 1T or 3T HDD

The problem is with Bootcamp you need to partition your drive. You don't need a whole new drive. (Note - 3TB drives can't currently be partitioned for Bootcamp.) and I rather use Bootcamp than Parallels. This why I was looking for information like what you provided. I am confused as to what Drive setup I should get? Do you have any Ideas on the matter?

There must be a number of Gamers that are in the same quandary.

[whitedog]

Editor1, on 13 December 2011 - 11:38 AM, said:

Mac Pro. But don't wait. Apple won't bother updating the Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Everything they have been doing points to removing the Mac Pro from their line-up. They are more concerned about consumers and professionals can connect all the peripherals they need via the Thunderbolt on a laptop. Before 2012 is done, there will be no more Mac Pro. (Dare I say before end of 2nd Qtr.?)

And just what, exactly, is your source for that information? Or are we, as it seems, just dealing with your (cynical) opinion here?

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, has stated publicly that the Mac Pro is due for a refresh next year. So absent any hard evidence to the contrary, I'll discount your opinion as the baseless snark it appears to be.

[Chris Breen]

whitedog, on 18 November 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

Editor1, on 13 December 2011 - 11:38 AM, said:

Mac Pro. But don't wait. Apple won't bother updating the Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Everything they have been doing points to removing the Mac Pro from their line-up. They are more concerned about consumers and professionals can connect all the peripherals they need via the Thunderbolt on a laptop. Before 2012 is done, there will be no more Mac Pro. (Dare I say before end of 2nd Qtr.?)

And just what, exactly, is your source for that information? Or are we, as it seems, just dealing with your (cynical) opinion here?

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, has stated publicly that the Mac Pro is due for a refresh next year. So absent any hard evidence to the contrary, I'll discount your opinion as the baseless snark it appears to be.

To be fair, that post is nearly a year old, before Cook made the announcement about the Mac Pro's future.

[whitedog]

Vuddha, on 18 November 2012 - 07:42 AM, said:

I am planning to get a NEW 27" IMAC [if they ever come out] and use Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop® 8 for Gamming.
I work with Photoshop, and Adobe Premier, After Effects and I play WoW on MAC and Star Wars Old Republic and other PC only games. I have a Synology DS212+ NAS for Data and Backup.

Going with:
27" 3.4GHz quad-core Intel core I7 with 8MB L3 cache
8GB Ram
Upgrade to 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 from OWC or Crucial
3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive Maybe
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX Graphic processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
AppleCare Protection Plan
Samsung SE-506AB Slim Portable Blu-ray Writer

As you see I was planning to get the 3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive.
Choices of drive 768GB SSD, 1T or 3T Fusion HHD, 1T or 3T HDD

The problem is with Bootcamp you need to partition your drive. You don't need a whole new drive. (Note - 3TB drives can't currently be partitioned for Bootcamp.) and I rather use Bootcamp than Parallels. This why I was looking for information like what you provided. I am confused as to what Drive setup I should get? Do you have any Ideas on the matter?

There must be a number of Gamers that are in the same quandary.

The first question I would ask is how badly do you need the 3TB drive? Since you already have a NAS for data and backup, a 1TB drive might do you just fine. It will depend, of course, on the capacity of the drives in you NAS. The simplest solution, it seems to me - if you do need the 3TB internal drive - would be to get an external hard drive for Bootcamp. If you want optimum performance, then an external Thunderbolt drive would be your best option, though USB 3 might do well enough. You're already planning to spend a boatload of money on this iMac anyway, so a little more for another external drive doesn't seem extreme.

[whitedog]

Chris Breen, on 18 November 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

whitedog, on 18 November 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

Editor1, on 13 December 2011 - 11:38 AM, said:

Mac Pro. But don't wait. Apple won't bother updating the Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Everything they have been doing points to removing the Mac Pro from their line-up. They are more concerned about consumers and professionals can connect all the peripherals they need via the Thunderbolt on a laptop. Before 2012 is done, there will be no more Mac Pro. (Dare I say before end of 2nd Qtr.?)

And just what, exactly, is your source for that information? Or are we, as it seems, just dealing with your (cynical) opinion here?

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, has stated publicly that the Mac Pro is due for a refresh next year. So absent any hard evidence to the contrary, I'll discount your opinion as the baseless snark it appears to be.

To be fair, that post is nearly a year old, before Cook made the announcement about the Mac Pro's future.

My qualified apologies then. I was bouncing around the thread looking for a recent message I wanted to answer and came across that jibe about Mac Pros. The e-mail notices I get from Macworld no longer reliably take me to the appropriate location - and page number links are no longer listed at the bottom of a blog page. I had to go back to the top to locate the latest page link in order to find the message I was looking for. Apropos of which, this has been a popular, long lived blog thread. iMacs have changed substantially since the original article was written. Mac Pros, unfortunately, have not. That doesn't bother me too much, though, since I can't afford a new one right now anyway. I've had to recondition my old Mac Pro with a new video card because the old one died. I also upgraded the RAM to 16GB. Of course, iMacs can now handle lots of RAM, but they can't begin to match a Mac Pro for other upgrades. Still, even with the new Video card, my Mac won't support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. I can only imagine how slow Mac Pro sales have become while people wait for the refresh. Given the number of changes in other Macs in Apple's lineup, I expect the new Mac Pros to be significantly different. Hopefully, most of the changes will be for the good. Given what Apple did to the new iMacs, I'm no longer as sanguine about the future of the Mac Pro as I once was. Apple has a well developed predisposition to make things harder on users than they have to be, elevating style over substance at every opportunity. While I'm not ready to migrate to Windows, I'm not as happy with Apple as I once was.

[Vuddha]

Quote

Vuddha said
I am planning to get a NEW 27" IMAC [if they ever come out] and use Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop® 8 for Gamming. I work with Photoshop, and Adobe Premier, After Effects and I play WoW on MAC and Star Wars Old Republic and other PC only games. I have a Synology DS212+ NAS for Data and Backup. Going with: 27" 3.4GHz quad-core Intel core I7 with 8MB L3 cache 8GB Ram Upgrade to 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 from OWC or Crucial 3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive Maybe NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX Graphic processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory AppleCare Protection Plan Samsung SE-506AB Slim Portable Blu-ray Writer As you see I was planning to get the 3TB 7200rpm Fusion Drive. Choices of drive 768GB SSD, 1T or 3T Fusion HHD, 1T or 3T HDD The problem is with Bootcamp you need to partition your drive. You don't need a whole new drive. (Note - 3TB drives can't currently be partitioned for Bootcamp.) and I rather use Bootcamp than Parallels. This why I was looking for information like what you provided. I am confused as to what Drive setup I should get? Do you have any Ideas on the matter? There must be a number of Gamers that are in the same quandary. The first question I would ask is how badly do you need the 3TB drive? Since you already have a NAS for data and backup, a 1TB drive might do you just fine. It will depend, of course, on the capacity of the drives in you NAS. The simplest solution, it seems to me - if you do need the 3TB internal drive - would be to get an external hard drive for Bootcamp. If you want optimum performance, then an external Thunderbolt drive would be your best option, though USB 3 might do well enough. You're already planning to spend a boatload of money on this iMac anyway, so a little more for another external drive doesn't seem extreme.

With Bootcamp you need to use internal Drive won't run on an external.

Most likely I will be going with the 1T Fusion and a Thunderbolt 3T External and use my 6T NAS as Backup for all. Thanks for your comments.