New imac owners - now that you see the nMP did you make the right choice?

[propower]

For me (audio production in serious project studio) --

I think so! Not until we hit the Hex nMP is there a big gain and so far the 3.5 27" i7 imac is taking all my stuff with gobs of headroom. But this is my first imac! Ask me in a few months... LOL

Another day of recording with the new imac and this thing is GREAT! I use ProTools HD Native hardware and with this machine I run at high sample rate and the lowest buffer and am barely stressing the machine at all. My former 2.6 MacMini was nowhere near up to the task! THe PCIe HD is super fast - 16G of ram is a nice start (will up to 32 as soon as I see a need)... Everything is running cool and quiet to boot...

 

[SteelBlueTJ]

Definitely. The new Mac Pro is very nice, but way overkill for my needs. I don't need dual GPUs. Not to mention the high price tag and that doesn't include a display. With my iMac I have all the power I need plus a beautiful 27" display all in one. No regrets.

 

[nicegoogly]

Mine is shipping today. I was considering what I was getting for quite some time. I bought two TB Displays over the last few months that have been hooked up to my MBP. I thought if it started at $2,000 and I had to add extras, I can live with that. But I had a feeling it would be considerably higher for a monster machine, but not a lot of space to run it. I have 650 gb of junk that I want to transfer over (music and digital copy, my photos are on an external). I shoot in RAW, but for the initial import, I like to use the main hard drive until I am done and send it to a back up. My way is not the best way, but my OCD forbids doing anything else another way.

I started playing with the iMac pecs and got a hot machine with a fusion drive for $3,000.00. Now I will have three 27" monitors and I am psyched. I have an external blu ray burner and a super drive I got when I bought the first MacBook Air so I luck out with the add a drive situation.

I am more of a prosumer, so as cool as the Mac Pro is, I just feel you should get a little more for a little less given apple specs are always a little behind.

 

[Sam2lucky13]

very happy with my choice....the baseline Mac Pro just starting at $3,000 would not be a good buy for me.

one upgrade to the size of flash I wanted and Id already be at the price I paid for my maxed out iMac.

And Id still have a quad core, with 4gb of video memory, but with only 12gb of ram.

Id still have a new display, keyboard and trackpad, memory, and a host of other things yet to buy.

I was very interested in the specs and price point of the nMP now that I've seen them Im very satisfied.

 

[Danboard]

I wanted to get the nMP but my decision to get the iMac was based on availability; I desperately needed a replacement for my Early-2008 MacPro. I was hoping my current workstation can last until the nMP becomes available, but it just couldn't hang on much longer.

I was actually hoping that Apple would release the nMP much earlier than what was announced. After watching the recent Keynote, I felt relief that I got the iMac instead.

The base $3000 of the nMP also would have meant that I had to spend more for peripherals such as a new display whereas with that price I was able to get the "ultimate" 27" iMac from our local Apple Store.

All-in-all, very satisfied with my decision. The iMac has been performing admirably as my new Workstation.

 

[jordanm86]

I considered the nMP but could not wait until december to order (my MBP is on its' last legs... shut itself down randomly today and came up with a warning message on restart :S) and also, it would probably be overdoing it for what I need.

That said, before I went freelance, I worked for a startup and as the only designer managing about 12 sites and I was happy to be working on a Mac Pro (the old one) - it had dual Quad Core Xeons, 8GB of RAM and can't remember the graphics but it never lagged... I would just sleep it and perhaps reboot it once every two months!

It was truly amazing... it would always have photoshop, illustrator, inDesign, Premiere Pro and Flash open and it was just running perfectly all the time!

On Tuesday I ordered a maxed out iMac (except 512GB SSD not 1TB and I will upgrade the RAM myself but am going all out on 32GB Kingston HyperX CL9).

I'm hoping it's going to bring back those days of me being able to work of zero lag.

 

[KaraH]

I originally wanted the old MP, just with new whistles and bells like modern components and connectors. While the iMac was fast enough I wanted the ability to add drives and boards.

Then we got the trashcan. Suddenly all of that stuff would need to be external, just like on the iMac. The sole difference was TB2 or TB (well, also more ports, but at the moment I do not have many TB devices anyway) and anything less than a raid for drives does not use TB2 speed.

More speed than the iMac meant nada to me. Internal expansion was everything. So faced with two options more or less equal for my purposes I just went with the cheeper one. I was even able to get it fully decked out (including some third party stuff) for less than a low end trashcan.

 

[d0nK]

As music creators, we want a good CPU, large RAM and fast storage but mega graphics cards we do not need, and it's the two very expensive graphics cards in this Mac Pro that make it so expensive!

The Mac Pro is pointed away from people who don't require these uber-graphics cards. We'd be paying out-the-nose for mis-specced hardware.

 

[trickness]

Feh! nMp

I waited literally years for the nMP, I've always had MP machines. Had every intention of buying one, was really psyched for Tuesday to watch the keynote. After I did, I bought a maxed out 27" iMac (minus the ram which is just stupid expensive).

It's obviously geared towards people doing high end video editing, 4K type stuff, which is great, but as I fiddle sometimes with 1080P, certainly not on a "pro" level. So the dual video cards would be wasted on me.

Then I thought: why did I always get the Mac Pro in the past? It was because i could get inside it, replace drives, cards, ram, and keep all the wires inside. I liked to tinker with it, like an old sportscar, maybe because that's the way I was brought up using computers.

Apple under Cook has turned into a company that makes disposable, highly environmentally irresponsible products - all their language about being green doesn't mean crap when your whole product philosophy is planned obsolescence on a 1-2 year timetable. They don't want you or anyone else tweaking them, so they make them difficult or impossible to work on (iPad, iPhone, iMac and now nMP). They want you to have a tired old box in four years that you either sell or throw away. Just retired my old 2004 MacPro last year which was on internet duty at my folk's house; worked perfectly but couldn't run newer versions of flash and other programs.

The nMP is a Tim Cook wet dream: very expensive and utterly disposable, with a life span far briefer than the product it supersedes, that isn't user serviceable. You can't get inside it if something goes bad; and God only knows how much it will be to fix once your Applecare runs out. I guess I'm old school, but for a "pro" machine, I want to be able to get inside it and change things out to extend it's lifespan. At 3K with a crappy 256gb ssd, and no monitor (total fail that they still haven't updated the Thunderbolt monitor with it's USB 2.0 inputs), not even a keyboard or mouse, I just really feel like Apple thinks we're all idiots. I'm not spending 4-5 K on a computer with perhaps half the lifespan of it's predecessor, with wires dangling all over the place, that I can't get inside.

An iMac for $2500 is perhaps more disposable, maybe 3-4 year lifespan, but it's half the cash once you add a decent sized ssd and a screen to the nMP. For Ableton, Logic, Aperture, FCPX, etc, it should be a great little machine. So for me, less is more.

Lastly, I was just pissed at how long they're taking to put the nMP out. It's been years since it was updated, it took less time to build the damned Empire State Building than it did these bozos to just get a new pro machine out. All the hype and fancy movies are just window dressing - deliver the product already, with an updated monitor, stop screwing around with iWatches and colored phones, how hard is it, it's a damned desktop computer, just put it onsale. The whole thing just turned me off.

 

[bp1000]

The gadget lover in me would try and justify the speed of the mP and how amazing it looks but really it's way more powerful than what i need for photo editing etc.

Lowest price for the spec i'd like i think will be £2,700 + i would need a good display.

I think it's a good price if you need that power but i love my BTO 27" iMac.

 

[cubivore]

i do pro audio work too and have been jamming on a 2008 macpro for 5 years now. i knew the nMP would be a mixed bag from its announcement, but now the details are finalized those video cards are like the nails in the coffin. however, i do a lot of ADR (dubbing) and always run at least two monitors - one for the main edit/timeline, and the other for video playback and script. i need thunderbolt for my protools hd native setup, and at this point i'm ready to pull the trigger on a 27" imac. my concern is with the mobile graphics card, and overall loudness. does anyone think it will run effectively for my setup and not sound like a wind tunnel or drop frames in playback?

my current setup is a 2008 macpro, 10gigs of ram, radeon 5770 1gig vram. it's hard to find comparisons to the 5770 and the imac 770m/780m.

 

[StephenCampbell]

In terms of the difference in power between the iMac and the Mac Pro, I definitely wish I could get the Mac Pro instead.

But given the price of the machine I would get, I don't regret having the iMac instead.

 

[propower]

my concern is with the mobile graphics card, and overall loudness. does anyone think it will run effectively for my setup and not sound like a wind tunnel or drop frames in playback?

I am a total stickler about computer noise!!!!!!!!!!!! I chose the 256SSD option and can tell you at the operator position I have 32.2dBA sitting in front of my new imac. My AVID 16x16 with Silenx fan in a rack six feet to my left is now the loudest thing in the room! I don't push video at all so can't help you there (I use an apple TV for my remote recording room (30 feet away) and it works flawlessly! At 70% total pro tools load - CPU temps are less than 85degC and fan on imac is still minimum! I do have a foam piece right in front of my machine just to take the last bit of reflected noise bouncing off the imac stand from getting to me. .... Does not block any of the air intake at the bottom of the imac - will clean up the look soon too.

14day return policy! I tried the store model - and followed with two BTO's before settling on the one I am keeping...

 

[MacsRgr8]

Definitely, especially reading Barefeats' comments:

Dual AMD FirePro GPUs on a faster PCIe 3.0 bus. Of the three models, the top D700 is on par with Radeon R7970 we tested but with more VRAM per card. Excellent OpenCL acceleration but until pro app developers get off their "CUDA only" kick, GPU acceleration will be lacking for apps like OctaneRender and After Effects ray-traced 3D.

I use OS X as an enthusiast:
- Lots of internet stuff (especially Macrumors.com )
- iLife (I make quite a lot of HD home movies etc.)
- Office stuff (use it for that kind of work too: iWork and Office)
- Games (not a hard-core gamer, but I play X-Plane 10 a lot!!)

X-Plane 10 with lots and lots of highly detail scenery and extra planes is hugely demanding of any system.
X-Plane is really CPU and GPU bound:
Got an older CPU but high-performance grfx card? Your performance will suffer.
Got an high-end CPU but a crappy grfx card? Your performance will suffer too.

So, the ideal Mac will be an xMac with i7, 32 GB RAM and nVidia Titan.
But alas....
One has to choose between an iMac and a Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro is a powerful beast, that's for sure. But regarding my demands (X-Plane 10) the Dual AMD-Pro grfx cards make it too expensive.

I would configure the new Mac Pro like this:
• Quad Core
• 32 GB RAM
• 1 TB flash (this will crank up the price somewhat...)
• Dual AMD D700 (...and this will make it too expensive)

• Added a 27" Thunderbolt Display

I would LOVE to own it, but I'm afraid the whole setup will cost me around $5500 or more...

So, I am very, very happy with my maxed out 27" iMac!

 

[Tjosansa]

Im happy with my brand new imac..
I dont know anything about the graphicchip in the macpro.
I want a really fast computer to handle games really well..
But imac comes with a great display and that is worth alot.

I might buy the pro also. Not decided yet..

 

[topmounter]

Maybe they'll take what they learn from building the Mac Pro and come up with a desktop design between the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini.