Hoping to get an r-iMac

[marty1990]

4 years on and the base 13" MacBook Pro I bought in university is struggling. It was bought to run CS5.5, and it's just too slow nowadays, so I'm hoping to get a Retina iMac to replace it. Don't need the portability as much and want to be future proof.

Checked them out, the 21" Retinas seem okay price wise, but having looked into them, they appear to be under specced compared to the 27" ones.

I'm looking at the mid 27" iMac, the first one with the Fusion Drive, and the Radeon R9 M390. That just about fits into my budget, and am hoping I'll get a few years out of it.

So it'll be used for Creative Cloud or whatever. Mainly AI and PS, some InDesign, and I may dual boot Windows on there too. I realise I can upgrade the RAM on the 27" model, but am I going on the right direction on buying a 4K+ machine that'll still be half decent in say 4 years?

 

[Samuelsan2001]

4 years on and the base 13" MacBook Pro I bought in university is struggling. It was bought to run CS5.5, and it's just too slow nowadays, so I'm hoping to get a Retina iMac to replace it. Don't need the portability as much and want to be future proof.

Checked them out, the 21" Retinas seem okay price wise, but having looked into them, they appear to be under specced compared to the 27" ones.

I'm looking at the mid 27" iMac, the first one with the Fusion Drive, and the Radeon R9 M390. That just about fits into my budget, and am hoping I'll get a few years out of it.

So it'll be used for Creative Cloud or whatever. Mainly AI and PS, some InDesign, and I may dual boot Windows on there too. I realise I can upgrade the RAM on the 27" model, but am I going on the right direction on buying a 4K+ machine that'll still be half decent in say 4 years?

Just a quick note on fusion, the latest imacs only have 24GB of SSD flash storage on the 1TB fusion drive just enough to run your OS and few smaller apps, if you want the full 128GB SSD then you now have to stump up for the 2TB fusion drive, I usually understand (and mostly agree) with apples decisions on these things but this is the worst sort of penny pinching in my opinion.

 

[maflynn]

Checked them out, the 21" Retinas seem okay price wise, but having looked into them, they appear to be under specced compared to the 27" ones.

They are under specced and I think you'll be better off with the 27" iMac. You'll be getting a Skylake machine with a dGPU. I think that model as a better chance of lasting for 4 years under your stated usage.

I read the Ars Technica review and they mentioned the iGPU as an issue in some circumstances, and I think if you're pushing the machine with Adobe products you may be better off with a dGPU equipped machine.