Photoshop CS5 for MAC

[Frank Petronio]

Over on RFF a fellow was going to pop $3K for a loaded 27" iMac but then he found a refurbished Mac Pro and discovered the RAM and HDs for the big machines are less expensive, plus you have a choice of monitors. Seems like a good idea if you plan to run the box for a long time, since you can replace the monitor independently of the box and everything runs cooler and has more breathing room.

Of course it uses more electricity and isn't as elegant, there are always trade-offs.

Some moderate (i.e. sane) users actually use the Mac Mini in the same way, it keeps you from being tied to the monitor so if it fails you're not down for the count.

That said, I like the iMacs and would use external hard drives anyway. I would just buy third party RAM for sure.

[paulr]

I can understand why some people would choose the Mac Pro. Just saying that I have carefully considered the pros and cons and for my own work figure I am getting a lot more for the money with the iMAC.

All of these machines are like sci-fi fantasies compared with what was available just several years ago, so in a way we're splitting hairs. Not too long ago I was working on 500MB photoshop files on an imac g3, with 1 gig of ram and a 13 gig hard drive. It was slow, but photoshop never once crashed. I just got in the habit of hitting Go and then leaving for lunch. I only retired that machine after the monitor became uncalibrateable.

After that was a series of G4s. I didn't break down and get the mac pro until the final g4 blew up at an inopportune time. This was just a few weeks ago, so having a vaguely up-to-date computer is a matter of novelty for me.

What I like is that even though the machine is a couple of years old, I'm pretty much on the ground floor of its capabilities. Future version of Photoshop will likely use more of the processor cores. There's room for 32gigs of ram. And I can very easily put a solid state boot drive, a 2 disk striped raid for data, and a time machine backup into the machine. And have unlimited external possibilities for backup, archiving, etc. etc.. I think that since it's the first time that I spent anything like real money on a machine, I wanted to get off the obsolescence treadmill for as long as I could afford. That being said, if there was a brand new top of the line imac in front of me, I'm sure I wouldn't find anything to complain about.

[sanking]

All of these machines are like sci-fi fantasies compared with what was available just several years ago, so in a way we're splitting hairs. Not too long ago I was working on 500MB photoshop files on an imac g3, with 1 gig of ram and a 13 gig hard drive. It was slow, but photoshop never once crashed. I just got in the habit of hitting Go and then leaving for lunch. I only retired that machine after the monitor became uncalibrateable.

You are absolutely right about that. I worked with a G4 tower for many years, in fact still have it and use it as a dedicated computer for my two high end vintage scanners. I have it maxed out with 1.5 GB of RAM, and three internal hard drives, a USB 2 card, and some other goodies, and it is not half bad at processing smaller size files with CS.

So the bump up to even a last generation iMac or Mac Pro is light years away from the G4 configuration.

Sandy

[paulr]

I think I'd still be happy with the performance of my last G4, except it started getting marginalized by orphaned technologies. Things like flash became such a headache. I found myself chosing between new versions of things that performed badly, and old versions that were increasingly incompatible with the world.

Of course now I'm addicted to the performance of the new gizmo. HDR processing that took 40 minutes on the old machine takes 5 on the new one. And I typed this post in less 1/4 second.