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Looking for powerful iMac or Macbook Pro!

M

marcusmacman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 9, 2010
1
0
Hi all,

Im looking at buying an imac or a Macbook pro but i need to make sure its powerful enough to run all my music/movies/tv shows. Currently i have approx 200,000 tracks and about 500 movies/tv shows on external hard drives.

I would like to know if it is possible to get an imac or macbook pro that is powerful enough to run all of this in itunes without being slow and sluggish?

I know it is possible to buy a mac pro but these are very expensive.
Is it possible to purchase a imac or Macbook pro that could run this for me.

Cheers.
 
Any current Mac, or Core2Duo Mac from 2007 onwards (and even the Macs before that, I have an iBook from 2004 able to play music and movies), is able to play video and music, unless you want to play the 500 movies at once or the 200,000 music titles at once, then even a Mac Pro will explode.

You can get the entry level iMac, MacBook and even Mac mini to do what you want to do.

http://www.apple.com/why-mac/compare/
 
spinnerlys said:
Any current Mac ... unless you want to play the 500 movies at once or the 200,000 music titles at once
Click to expand...
Agreed. There's no difference between being able to play one movie or song, or playing millions. It's the same process, just repeated. The size of your movie or music library is irrelevant.
 
Might want to get an SSD though as that will help with that sort of iTunes library processing...
 
tooobe said:
Might want to get an SSD though as that will help with that sort of iTunes library processing...
Click to expand...

Only if you store the contents to the SSD. You would need ridiculously big SSD though. 200 000 songs is a lot, if they are roughly 4MB each, that would be 800GB. Movies and TV shows can easily be up to 1GB each, depends what format they use, so we would be looking at +1TB of data.
 
Any of the current Apple computer line up would do this easily, but you need to ask yourself what you want from your setup. Do you need the portability of a Macbook? Do you plan on just using it as a media server for other devices? If you don't need portability an iMac is far more bang for your buck. If you're on a budget and already have keyboard, mouse, screen an Mac Mini is also a good option.
 
I would personally go for iMac because you get a nicer display and you can leave the hard drives plugged in. With a laptop you'd have to take them out every time you move the laptop.

Up to you to decide in the end though.
 
GGJstudios said:
Why do you find that hard to believe? I'm at about 30,000.
Click to expand...

Not that I don't believe the OP, but 170,000 tracks is still a LOT.

As for the topic, any Mac is powerful enough to support that (not simuntaneously as stated of course). I would go for an iMac as you are going to need a lot of hardrives, and the 2TB internal option seems to be the obvious choice for you.
 
Hisdem said:
Not that I don't believe the OP, but 170,000 tracks is still a LOT.
Click to expand...
I agree it's more than I've heard of anyone having, but I've heard of collections of 50-80k tracks. I only buy what I like, and my tastes may not be quite as diverse as some others.
 
atticus18244fsa said:
I'm at 12000. The difference between us and 200,000 is quite a lot
Click to expand...

True, the difference is quite a bit. However, if the OP says he has that many we have to give him advice based on that figure. Is it unlikely that he has 200,000 tracks? Sure. But it is possible? Of course.

To answer the question, as others have said, any "modern" Mac will handle your media, OP. I would suggest a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM, model in-exclusive.
 
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