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2014 Cheaper iMac Vs. 13 inch Macbook Air
- Thread starter MartinAppleGuy
- Start date
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Like I said in my post, there are use scenarios where storage and RAM are more important than an SSD, but that is never the case for a consumer system. I hate using absolutes, but having an SSD is ultimately important for a consumer. There is more to an SSD than boot times and opening programs.
The dogma of computer balancing before the advent of the consumer SSD was all about RAM. If your computer ran slowly, you had to upgrade your RAM. The HDD was terribly slow, so the RAM had to compensate by caching commonly used programs and commands. The issue with this system was that the HDD compensated for the RAM as well. Once RAM filled up completely, the programs paged over to the HDD, locking up the computer as tasks piled up.
You could not purchase anything other than a spinning platter hard drive, so RAM was the only solution. The SDD is not just some gimmick that boots your computer in 15 seconds and makes programs pop up. It is the solution to an antiquated system of shoving as much RAM into your system to save it from the horrible HDD. RAM is a bandaid that covers up the underlying problem, and 3-4 years from now the MBA will be a much more solid computer than the new iMac.
If your friend is looking into purchasing a new computer, I would recommend him to get the new MBA, an external 1 TB HDD USB 3.0 enclosure, and the screen of his choice. If he really needs more than 4 GB of RAM, then the new iMac is not the computer to buy.
Matt
Hi.
I do totally agree with you on the fact the for a consumer, an SSD is very important. For me, the order is GPU, CPU, SSD, RAM. I really need a powerful GPU for my work and a CPU upgrade can also speed up rendering... and I love my iMac (HDD included). I know SSD's are faster (and more importantly more responsive), but for me a HDD is perfectly fine. For the year I have had my iMac, I have loved every second of it
As for my friend (she is a she by the way
), she is looking into a refurbished Macbook Air (13", 1.4Ghz i5, 4Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD) for the following:Photo Editing (Photoshop)
Video Editing (iMovie, basic Premiere Pro)
dreamweaver and Flash...
Web broswing...
She is on a budget, so the 700-800 pounds is really as high as she can go. With the SSD being so low, she was looking into getting a 1Tb HDD for things that she is not currently working on as well as Backups.
The price for that Macbook Air (a 2013 instead of a 2014) is £680 as well as £80 for an external 1Tb HDD so that adds up to £760. There is no room in the budget for an external monitor by the way.
I thought that this iMac would be better for her as it has 8Gb of RAM instead of 4Gb, and 500Gb of storage instead of 128Gb (so she wouldn't have to buy an external HDD).
What do you think?
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And a better GPU.
Why bother with Apple's ridiculously expensive PCI-based SSDs for a consumer product when one can simply pull the hard drive in favor of an inexpensive SATA SSD?
Or slap the above in a USB3 enclosure and Velcro that to the back if squeamish about opening the case.
Or slap the above in a USB3 enclosure and Velcro that to the back if squeamish about opening the case.
This is a very flawed comparison. The air's, as with ultrabooks, typically have lower spec's and the draw is the portability. The macbook pro's do not even have these spec's, the ultra thin's portability makes up for the low spec's. A desktop having these spec's really bad and there's no portability at all.
If you like it then buy it, but come on. Comparing it to something that's whole draw is not on spec's but thinness? THAT'S what brings the price, not the internals.
Try comparing it to a macbook pro of the same price. Even with that it's a DESKTOP, not a laptop.
If you like it then buy it, but come on. Comparing it to something that's whole draw is not on spec's but thinness? THAT'S what brings the price, not the internals.
Try comparing it to a macbook pro of the same price. Even with that it's a DESKTOP, not a laptop.
Because SATA3 is far slower than PCIe, even if it's not noticeable.
And it's impossible to achieve full SATA3 speeds over USB 3, and TRIM can't be enabled either.
Of course that's the point really. Sure if the current price is your limit that's fine go with what you you can get. But surely they could've sped this thing up a bit or introduced it with a better price. And while I'm at it why not put the board into the mini to show it some love. I'm sure people might have grudgingly accepted that as an upgrade instead of it floating off in some ivy bridge / Intel 4000 limbo where the mini is currently at.
Hi.
I do totally agree with you on the fact the for a consumer, an SSD is very important. For me, the order is GPU, CPU, SSD, RAM. I really need a powerful GPU for my work and a CPU upgrade can also speed up rendering... and I love my iMac (HDD included). I know SSD's are faster (and more importantly more responsive), but for me a HDD is perfectly fine. For the year I have had my iMac, I have loved every second of it
As for my friend (she is a she by the way
Photo Editing (Photoshop)
Video Editing (iMovie, basic Premiere Pro)
dreamweaver and Flash...
Web broswing...
She is on a budget, so the 700-800 pounds is really as high as she can go. With the SSD being so low, she was looking into getting a 1Tb HDD for things that she is not currently working on as well as Backups.
The price for that Macbook Air (a 2013 instead of a 2014) is £680 as well as £80 for an external 1Tb HDD so that adds up to £760. There is no room in the budget for an external monitor by the way.
I thought that this iMac would be better for her as it has 8Gb of RAM instead of 4Gb, and 500Gb of storage instead of 128Gb (so she wouldn't have to buy an external HDD).
What do you think?
Ah ok, sorry for the gender mix up. A 21" 1080p IPS monitor should cost around £80, which is about the quality of the 21" iMac monitor. This would make her total £840. I think that for the work she is doing, she could survive without an SSD, but the CPU and GPU on the new iMac are just not worth the price.
Here is what I would recommend:
If she really cannot afford £840, then look into getting a refurbished baseline Mac Mini. With some upgrades, you can get 8 GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, a 500GB HDD, 2.5 GHz IvyBridge dual-core, and HD 4000 graphics. It will be a perfect middle ground, matching the performance of the iMac, and cost £660.
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FD387B/A/refurbished-mac-mini-25ghz-dual-core-Intel-Core-i5
You can upgrade the RAM and the HDD in this system to 8 GB and 256 GB for £140 total. Get an external 21-24" monitor for around £80. You can put the HDD in an external case for extra storage for about £20. The system will be much faster than the iMac, more compact, have more storage, and will be upgradable in the future. The graphics and the CPU aren't great, but it is still about as good as the iMac. If you really think she would benefit from a better CPU, look for a used quad-core system. It won't come with the 1 year warranty, but it should still cost around £420-500, and you can do the same upgrades.
I personally think it would be a much better choice than the new iMac, and it would cost less. Honestly, I think everyone should have an SSD just because it makes computing so much more enjoyable. She could put the OS and some of her most important programs/projects on the SSD, then store old projects on the external drive. Just look into it. I think all Apple products are great, so if she really wants the iMac then she should get it. I personally think almost any other Apple product will have better performance per pound, but again, that is just my opinion.
Best of luck,
Matt
Great idea (and thank you for the help) but the only issue with that it is the GPU. I missed out one more thing she may be doing and that it 3D (Maya). I know the 4000 can edit very well (I have seen it in action), but can it handle advanced rendering?
The HD 5000 had some really solid gains over the 4000, at least based on synthetic benchmarks. Neither of these cards even begins to compare to a discrete GPU, or even a mGPU though.
If she is doing that type of work, a desktop PC will serve her much better. I'm not saying the iMac would not work, but I think it is an unbalanced, overpriced system for what you get. When she has such a tight budget, especially for professional work, I think it has reached the point where the enjoyability/personal preference for OSX is eating into her ability to have a useful machine. For £800, you could buy a really nice, reliable, powerful PC.
Oh, or just get one of these two:
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FE087B/A/refurbished-215-inch-imac-29ghz-quad-core-Intel-Core-i5
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FD094B/A/refurbished-215-inch-imac-29ghz-quad-core-Intel-Core-i5
It is about as good as you can get. The 2013 model is 50 more, but it is much more powerful. It doesn't have an SSD, which I cannot stand, but it should be a near perfect computer for her if she can afford it. The issue with Apple products is that they have a huge premium on the brand name, and reasonably priced CPU/GPU upgrades. RAM/SSD is terrible, but you aren't looking to upgrade those anyways.
Matt
Apple is where she is going due to all of the free apps (like iMovie, iLife...), as well as there being no anti virus needed, as well as specify cost being much lower. Do you think that if she needs portability in the end, that the 128Gb, 4Gb ram 13" MBA with an external HDD would suffice?
It will not perform any worse than the baseline iMac. Based on the work she is doing, I would highly recommend a used or refurbished quad-core iMac with a discrete graphics card. Check out the links I provided. One of those systems will be about 1.5x as powerful CPU wise and 4-5x GPU wise. It is 2:00 AM where I live, and I am falling asleep, so I will take a while to get back. Look into a higher end iMac though, it seems like she would benefit from one.
Matt
Thanks. I have the higher iMac that you speak of (2.9-3.6Ghz Quad Core i5, Nvidia GeForce GT 750m 1Gb GDDR5 VRAM) and it is great for all of the work I do (as well as what my friend will be doing).
I feel that the highest she could justify would be the 2.7Ghz i5 iMac with Iris Pro.
maya craps out easily with iris pro, because of lack of VRAM. Many features are not available and others just crash the application.
You also need a proper cpu if she does animation or even some basic simulations.
i7 is more than recommended for rendering animation jobs as it will cut out several minutes of rendertime per frame, and also allow multi tasking (rendering with an i5 means you cannot use that machine until the render job is done, no photoshop, no itunes, no safari, nothing).
Otherwise the i5 is good enough for still renders. (the 2,9 i5 might be a decent solution because of the L3 cache).
SSD is not required for maya, but it helps on very big scenes with loads of referenced files and textures. 8 GB of ram should be enough if dedicated gpu is present. But mind this, if you start swapping on the hdd during a render there's no way in hell you can get a job done in time. 16GB is the "no worries" option
And for last you want a mac capable of running mountain lion for rendering purposes (can't do batch render jobs on mavericks at the moment, or use "older" versions of maya).
in short for maya:
-gpu minimum: 750M with 1 GB of vram
-CPU minimum: i5 2,7
-RAM minimum: 8gb
-HDD: user preference
-ability to run Mountain lion
maya craps out easily with iris pro, because of lack of VRAM. Many features are not available and others just crash the application.
You also need a proper cpu if she does animation or even some basic simulations.
i7 is more than recommended for rendering animation jobs as it will cut out several minutes of rendertime per frame, and also allow multi tasking (rendering with an i5 means you cannot use that machine until the render job is done, no photoshop, no itunes, no safari, nothing).
Otherwise the i5 is good enough for still renders. (the 2,9 i5 might be a decent solution because of the L3 cache).
SSD is not required for maya, but it helps on very big scenes with loads of referenced files and textures. 8 GB of ram should be enough if dedicated gpu is present. But mind this, if you start swapping on the hdd during a render there's no way in hell you can get a job done in time. 16GB is the "no worries" option
And for last you want a mac capable of running mountain lion for rendering purposes (can't do batch render jobs on mavericks at the moment, or use "older" versions of maya).
in short for maya:
-gpu minimum: 750M with 1 GB of vram
-CPU minimum: i5 2,7
-RAM minimum: 8gb
-HDD: user preference
-ability to run Mountain lion
I have found my 750m with 1Gb of GDDR5 VRAM do tear through Maya with complicated scenes with a lot of Ray Tracing as well as using Mental Ray (and I'm using the 2015 edition). I will have to see if she will be using it though. Really appreciate the help
nVidia cards are much better suited for 3D work. If you cannot afford the 750m, get the 2012 650m version.
I already own an imac with the 750m. We are talking about a friend of mine. Thanks for the input though, I will see what they run for, but it looks like the MacBook Air is still going to be the option for her.
Sorry, I meant her, not you. I still think she should get the 650m version. She can get it for £949 on the refurbished store. Or she can get the 750m version for £999 on the refurbished store. The 750m is worth the upgrade if she can afford the extra £50.
Matt