Hello all,
In anticipation of a 2012 refresh I've been perusing the forums since December in the hopes of any news or insight. Nothing much has come up, as you all know, and an Ivy Bridge release isn't even set in stone, so I really don't expect a refresh to be ready until May. I believe I've concluded that that's too long to wait, but I'd like to open a theoretical dialog based on a few assumptions/logic.
Now, I'm aware that no one is privy to, or can accurately predict what is going to go into the next iMacs, and I'm certainly not here to open that can of worms debate because anything is possible, but I'll start with some background. I am a long time PC technician, but long time Apple fan. I even worked at Apple as a Creative for a time. I've always wanted an iMac for music production, but the price tag has kept me away. I absolutely fell in love with them as an employee, and I knew one day I'd eventually migrate from PC to Mac for my production needs.
I finally have enough money to do so, and of course we're smack dab in the twilight zone. At first I was convinced that I should wait because I fell under the foolish notion that the $1,199 iMac option didn't support more than 8gb of ram (silly Apple website wording). I don't need a bigger internal hard drive, because good practice says I'll be dumping my audio on to an external Firewire 800 drive*, and I don't care about graphics performance as I do have a PC with dual 6870s. Here's where we enter in to a little bit of discussion, and maybe some of you in similar situations can help me out;
First off, you have the 21.5" base/upgrade CPU difference. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but both CPUs are i5 2400S models. The only difference seems to be a 200mhz clock difference, which I assume is set by Apple in some weird marketing ploy. I don't really care if this is changeable, but with Turbo Boost I believe both hit around the 3ghz mark in top clock speed, and even if they didn't, CPU isn't really going to be my bottleneck in Logic or Pro Tools is it? I plan on going with 12gb of RAM, for reference, and have an MBOX 2 as my interface.
Second area of discussion as it pertains to waiting for a refresh, let's say hypothetically Ivy Bridge is put into the new iMacs. I expect them to keep the equivalent Ivy Bridge i5s are your standard option, meaning we probably won't see a clock speed increase, and maybe push that 'performance gain' 5-10%? Like I said, I don't need bigger internal storage nor better GPU performance, so I don't think I'm too off-base here considering a current gen iMac am I?
tl;dr - Planning on getting an iMac for Logic 9/Pro Tools (probably just Logic, unless someone can tell me that Pro Tools, even under a 32bit restriction outperforms Logic on a Mac?), and I don't think waiting for the refresh will make a huge difference vs. time spent waiting (I don't care about SSD or ram/gpu/bigger hdd sizes). Any thoughts and insight are greatly appreciated, planning on buying Friday
In anticipation of a 2012 refresh I've been perusing the forums since December in the hopes of any news or insight. Nothing much has come up, as you all know, and an Ivy Bridge release isn't even set in stone, so I really don't expect a refresh to be ready until May. I believe I've concluded that that's too long to wait, but I'd like to open a theoretical dialog based on a few assumptions/logic.
Now, I'm aware that no one is privy to, or can accurately predict what is going to go into the next iMacs, and I'm certainly not here to open that can of worms debate because anything is possible, but I'll start with some background. I am a long time PC technician, but long time Apple fan. I even worked at Apple as a Creative for a time. I've always wanted an iMac for music production, but the price tag has kept me away. I absolutely fell in love with them as an employee, and I knew one day I'd eventually migrate from PC to Mac for my production needs.
I finally have enough money to do so, and of course we're smack dab in the twilight zone. At first I was convinced that I should wait because I fell under the foolish notion that the $1,199 iMac option didn't support more than 8gb of ram (silly Apple website wording). I don't need a bigger internal hard drive, because good practice says I'll be dumping my audio on to an external Firewire 800 drive*, and I don't care about graphics performance as I do have a PC with dual 6870s. Here's where we enter in to a little bit of discussion, and maybe some of you in similar situations can help me out;
First off, you have the 21.5" base/upgrade CPU difference. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but both CPUs are i5 2400S models. The only difference seems to be a 200mhz clock difference, which I assume is set by Apple in some weird marketing ploy. I don't really care if this is changeable, but with Turbo Boost I believe both hit around the 3ghz mark in top clock speed, and even if they didn't, CPU isn't really going to be my bottleneck in Logic or Pro Tools is it? I plan on going with 12gb of RAM, for reference, and have an MBOX 2 as my interface.
Second area of discussion as it pertains to waiting for a refresh, let's say hypothetically Ivy Bridge is put into the new iMacs. I expect them to keep the equivalent Ivy Bridge i5s are your standard option, meaning we probably won't see a clock speed increase, and maybe push that 'performance gain' 5-10%? Like I said, I don't need bigger internal storage nor better GPU performance, so I don't think I'm too off-base here considering a current gen iMac am I?
tl;dr - Planning on getting an iMac for Logic 9/Pro Tools (probably just Logic, unless someone can tell me that Pro Tools, even under a 32bit restriction outperforms Logic on a Mac?), and I don't think waiting for the refresh will make a huge difference vs. time spent waiting (I don't care about SSD or ram/gpu/bigger hdd sizes). Any thoughts and insight are greatly appreciated, planning on buying Friday
