Hi, I thought this forum could point me in the right direction for selecting the right Mac for my workstation.
I need a Mac that can be fast when handling two or three open web browsers (using ad blocker) with a total of about 20-30 open tabs plus two or three open medium-sized spreadsheets (2-3MB files, 2000+ rows) on two displays, one of them at least a 2560 x 1440 display.
I usually have two or three desktops open on Mission Control with Mail (thousands of messages), Adium, Dropbox, Google Drive, Spotify or iTunes and a couple other apps always open at any given time.
My current mid-2011 Core i7 Mac Mini eventually runs slower and slower after half a day with 15+ GB virtual memory and some limited swapping on 8GB installed physical memory. I've had 16GB memory installed and it got slow as well and eventually corrupted over time. Numbers, Mail, Safari/Chrome seem to suck the most memory (~6GB) and CPU resources.
I also have a 4TB external drive connected which is set to spin down when necessary. Whenever the drive spins up, it causes the beach ball to spin for about 2-3 seconds.
Not sure where the bottleneck is, if it's the dual-core Core i7 cpu, the memory or the weak 256 MB AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics or something else.
I'd be open to an iMac or a Macbook or even another MacMini to go with the existing displays. MacPro seems unnecessary to me, but convince me
Appreciate any help I can get on this. Thanks!
I need a Mac that can be fast when handling two or three open web browsers (using ad blocker) with a total of about 20-30 open tabs plus two or three open medium-sized spreadsheets (2-3MB files, 2000+ rows) on two displays, one of them at least a 2560 x 1440 display.
I usually have two or three desktops open on Mission Control with Mail (thousands of messages), Adium, Dropbox, Google Drive, Spotify or iTunes and a couple other apps always open at any given time.
My current mid-2011 Core i7 Mac Mini eventually runs slower and slower after half a day with 15+ GB virtual memory and some limited swapping on 8GB installed physical memory. I've had 16GB memory installed and it got slow as well and eventually corrupted over time. Numbers, Mail, Safari/Chrome seem to suck the most memory (~6GB) and CPU resources.
I also have a 4TB external drive connected which is set to spin down when necessary. Whenever the drive spins up, it causes the beach ball to spin for about 2-3 seconds.
Not sure where the bottleneck is, if it's the dual-core Core i7 cpu, the memory or the weak 256 MB AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics or something else.
I'd be open to an iMac or a Macbook or even another MacMini to go with the existing displays. MacPro seems unnecessary to me, but convince me
Appreciate any help I can get on this. Thanks!
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