Mac purchase in progress - advice?

Good Evening All,

Completely new to the forum here, so I am sure that similar questions have been asked previously. Hoping someone could help me as I still haven’t quite found the answer I am looking for and my experience with Apple desktops/laptops is extremly limited.

Decided to take the plunge on a Mac and abandon Windows after 23 years of growing up with error messages and annoying updates! As my next device will be quite an investment financially, I would be grateful if you could advise me on which of the following will be best for my needs. Please feel free to make other suggestions if you have them:

Primary usage:

• Browsing and Video/Music Streaming (Netflix etc).
• Gaming – I use a PS4 for all of my primary gaming. The only game I will be playing is Football Manager 2014, but I understand this is quite taxing/database driven?
• Ripping and Encoding all purchased DVD’s to an MP4 format for streaming through Plex. Storage is not an issue as I have a home media server to which movies/photos/music will be transferred.
• Office Productivity.
• Multitasking between the above.

Whilst satisfied with the reliability my 5 year old HP Touchsmart AIO, I have lost patience in waiting 3-4 hours to convert a DVD. My favourite game (Football Manager) is also very sluggish and I can only utilise a small number of leagues. Both issues which are down to its ageing Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 / 2.0 GHz.

Therefore, I require something that is far snappier doing the above, but also don’t want to pay for performance that I won’t use or benefit from. Portability is desirable but not essential - I would not like to sacrifice its ability to get the heavy jobs done just so I can move from one room to another.

At the moment, I have considered the following:


iMac 27’’ Inch
3.2 GHz i5 (turbo to 3.6 GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M with 1GB video memory
256GB Flash Storage
8 GB Ram – Cheaper for me to update this myself at a later date to 32GB
Total - £1759

MacBook Pro 13 Inch
2.4GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5 (turbo to 2.9GHz)
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
128GB Flash Storage
Total - £1339

Mac Mini
2.3GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
4GB Ram - Cheaper for me to update this myself at a later date to 16GB
256GB Solid-State Drive
+ Apple Keyboard
+ Apple Magic Mouse
Total - £937.99 + EST £150 for a decent monitor = £1087.99

Thanks to everyone in advance and I look forward to hearing your opinions on what is the best option!

Dan

 

Thanks for that

One possible option I considered was purchasing a monitor for connection with the MBP when at home. Just concerned about how much performance I would lose by opting for it over the iMac (full desktop unit)

 

Thanks, so it seems that a desktop is the best way forward.

Any votes for a quad core i7 Mac Mini? Quite a saving over the iMac so I would be interested to hear anybody's experiences!

 

Anybody???