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2012 or 2013 model iMac

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biggiet4jets

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 30, 2013
55
0
I am very interested in buying a 27" iMac very very soon, and don't know if I should buy a refurb model from last year or this year. Im trying to save as much money I can because I am a college student so that is also a factor. Any help is appreciated! Thanks!
 
let everyone know what your plans are for the imac Video / photo editing or normal use etc
 
I apologize about that!

But I am a college student and basically do all my assignments on my 09 MBP now. I use VMWare to run windows 7 and m computer which has 4gb of ram can barely run so I want something that won't be slow when running VM.

I use pages, keynote, numbers, logic pro, iPhoto and use windows to run programming applications for school like notepad++ etc. I am a business administration student with a minor in information systems.

I am going on my second year of college so will want something that will last until I graduate at least.
 
I'm a student as well and I went with the i5 3.4 27 inch version with the 775m. It was really a great price 1699. I bought a usb3 dock and a samsung 840 pro ssd and use that as my boot drive and I get 400 read and write speeds on it. And I bought 16 gb ram from crucial and run with 24gb ram. The thing performs great and total cost out of pocket was less than 2000 because I traded 16gb of ram I had for the crucial. Overall not a bad package for the price.

I ran the machine for a week without any of the upgrades and for 1700 it is great. I'll tell you though that i really noticed the speed of using the external ssd so at minimum I would suggest a harddrive upgraded model. They had the i5 3.4 with fusion drive for 1869 on the refurb store.
 
Thanks for the suggestion! My budget is around $1500. I really don't want to go over that and will be using an external HDD for mostly storing everything I own, movies, music, files, pictures etc. since it will always be connected to my computer.

I wanted to go with a 27" model just so maybe next year I can upgrade the RAM if I needed more instead of having a iMac thats limited to 8GB.

I was very interested in the last years model, which runs on apples site for 1399 with 2.9ghz i5 ivy bridge processor, 8gb ram, 1tb 7200 hdd, and nvidia gtx660m graphics processor with 512mb of ddr5 memory.
 
Ya, thats what I was thinking plus its never going to use wireless straight ethernet connection since my router is going to be right next to where my iMac is going to go.

Thank You!

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Is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M with 512MB good enough for programming and logic pro?!
 
Ya I was looking at the performance and the 2012 model definitely has better performance than the 2013 model. It is a little more expensive so I might have to save up some more money before buying that model.
 
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