Aperture on a 24" iMac

[colorspace]

I have a significant Aperture library on my iMac Core Duo 2ghz. 18,000 images, about 50% RAW images. This drags quite a bit on my machine. Would I be significantly better off on a 24" C2D or should I bite the very painful bullet and get a tower, or perhaps wait for new gen iMac?

Thanks

 

[atari1356]

I'm in the same boat, although I don't have quite that many images.

I'm torn between getting a new iMac (on August 7th? ) - or waiting until the next Mac Pro revision. I'm not making any money from my photography yet - so I'm not sure I can justify the extra expense of the Mac Pro.

Are you doing photography professionally, or as a hobby?

 

[CPPhoto]

im in the same boat too...

i had a 20" Core Duo with aperture and about 20,000 images mostly in raw form

i sold that months ago, and have been waiting for new iMacs or Mac Pros to come out


im going with a mac pro...due to upgradeability and expandability!

 

[ChrisA]

I have a significant Aperture library on my iMac Core Duo 2ghz. 18,000 images, about 50% RAW images. This drags quite a bit on my machine. Would I be significantly better off on a 24" C2D or should I bite the very painful bullet and get a tower, or perhaps wait for new gen iMac?

Thanks

First off no one should buy either an iMac or a Mac Pro before August 7th. Apple has a media event scheduled for that date that is thought to be imac related

In my experience you have to double the proessing power before a user sees results at the keyboard. Buying a 50% faster iMac (if you could) would not help much. The other problem is that you can't install much more RAM in an iMac. and the GPU is not upgradeable. Replacing an iMac with a slightly newer and bigger iMac is only incremental and will not buy much in terms of Aperture. And you library will not get smaller.

You don't say if you use the machine professionally or if this is a hobby. If you are making a living off this then look at ROI, three year straight line depreciation and so on.
Or look at leasing so you can expense it.

 

[colorspace]

You guys are absolutely right -- I should have specified.

I'm a pretty serious amateur, so a new machine would not be expected to be part of a money making machine. I guess that should also add that I'm not wealthy enough to just on a whim get the best - getting a Mac Pro would be doable but painful.

PS - you can see my photography HERE

 

[Mr. B]

Wait wait wait... why don't you just get a large well made external hardrive with a firewire 800 cord and some more ram?

If it's just space that you need there's really no need to get a new mac...

 

[Aperture]

Wait wait wait... why don't you just get a large well made external hardrive with a firewire 800 cord and some more ram?

If it's just space that you need there's really no need to get a new mac...

Yep, Aperture loves RAM. (Not as much as graphics cards, though) Rather than buying a whole new machine, (as Mr. B said) buy some more RAM & a nice external HD. I've found Aperture works faster if you take some of your older photos and you relocate their masters to the external HD. (So you are referencing them and they are not stored in the Aperture Library)

 

[Gav]

I'd wait for the next revision at least (even if it isn't a new design).

As it stands, the MacBook Pro is better than the iMac 24".

The 3GB bottleneck on the iMac could be a bit of an issue if you have to load a lot of large photographs into memory.

 

[iBunny]

I run aperture on my C2D 2.4GHz MBP with 4GB Ram and 256MB 8600 GPU and it runs like a charm. The only slow down I expirance is when I first open it up, for about 3 seconds until all my images load up in there. Im thinking this first 3 seconds is because I only have a 5400 rpm HDD...

Its all good tho, and yes. It loves RAM.