iMac vs Macbook

haard · Post by **haard** » 2007-12-05 02:22pm

It's owning the TV receiver that you pay for, not the screen.

Nowadays I guess you pay for owning a digital decoder for groundbound transmissions, since the analogue network is being taken down.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2007-12-11 02:32am

Another question.

What about the Mac Pro, what reasons are there to get a Mac Pro as opposed to an iMac. I read that if you are planning on using photoshop to do a lot of graphics editing you should get a Mac Pro. I for one find this almost impossible to believe. The idea that you need a super graphics card and more than 1 gig of ram to run photoshop is almost ridiculous (and if true, speaks to the horrible and lazy programming by the photoshop developers.)

At the moment not really looking to seriously at the Mac Pro due to the high price tag.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2007-12-11 02:50am

Lord MJ wrote:What about the Mac Pro, what reasons are there to get a Mac Pro as opposed to an iMac. I read that if you are planning on using photoshop to do a lot of graphics editing you should get a Mac Pro. I for one find this almost impossible to believe.

Unless you need some seriously beefy graphics hardware, I don't think you need a Mac Pro. A Core 2 Duo iMac will run Photoshop quite well.

The idea that you need a super graphics card and more than 1 gig of ram to run photoshop is almost ridiculous (and if true, speaks to the horrible and lazy programming by the photoshop developers.)

The GPU is largely irrelevant for Photoshop. And the Adobe people aren't morons. They're doing what they can with a code base that's older than a lot of people on this board. There are business and marketing concerns that they have to deal with, like backwards compatibility, not breaking the interface, maintaining output accuracy, keeping the code portable between Windows and Mac OS X, etc ...

All of this makes it extremely difficult to make large-scale changes to Photoshop. Forget about using the GPU in any extensive way.

Braedley · Post by **Braedley** » 2007-12-11 07:18am

The Mac Pro is more for the video and sound editing capabilities than the Photoshop capabilities anyways. You're more concerned with the amount of RAM that you can shove in your rig than anything else.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2007-12-19 01:03am

A couple more questions

I was wondering what the difference in the graphics cards for the $1199 Imac and the $1499 Imac is.

I currently have a NVIDIA GeForce 5200, how do both of the imac cards stand up to my current graphics card.

I was also wondering whether a boxed Imac is something that would be safe to carry on to a flight or put in checked baggage with little risk of damage?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-12-19 01:18am

The 5200 is an absolute pile of shit budget card from ~4 years ago. Both ATI cards should be better, but the 2600XT is according to my research about twice as good as measured by gaming performance than the 2400XT. It's not really relevant to anything work-related at all, but if you wanted to Parallels games the 2600XT is a significant step up.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2007-12-19 01:29am

Ok, well I would be playing games like Rise of Nations and Civilization 4 and zsnes, unlikely anything more sophisticated then that.

One thing I would want to know is what exactly makes Parallels a better choice than VMWare for the Virtual Machine. I am currently running VMWare Workstation on my XP desktop, running Vista in the VM, and it is working fine. I know VMWare can consume a Parallel's VM, but I'm not sure if Parallels can run a VMWare VM.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-12-19 01:51am

They have different strengths. It just depends what you are going to use, and I've never tried anything insane like running a Windows game through an Apple laptop so it serves me well.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2007-12-19 04:39pm

Not really going to be gaming too often, most of the time I will be using it for office, dreamweaver and productivity applications.

Planning on getting it when I'm up north, but I'm trying to see the best way to get my mac back down to Atlanta without shipping via UPS.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-12-19 05:26pm

Doesn't the Apple store have free shipping in the US?

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2007-12-20 03:14am

Stark wrote:Doesn't the Apple store have free shipping in the US?

Yeah, but I'm going to be in NY for the holidays and want to start playing with my mac immediately

So I'm trying to see if a 20 inch iMac could be safely packed in luggage. Just want to avoid paying shipping.

If push comes to shove though, I'll just have it shipped to Georgia, and wait until I get back to start playing with my new toy.

Lisa · Post by **Lisa** » 2007-12-20 02:03pm

Well the boxes that the macs come in are nice for carrying them.

I don't see it mentioned anywhere but you can use the macbook as a desktop by plugging a keyboard, mouse and monitor into it.

LapsedPacifist · Post by **LapsedPacifist** » 2007-12-21 10:49am

Dude... It's a desktop. Don't take your desktop with you.

I understand wanting to play with something, I really really do. But you're going to need to check it, and then all bets are off. If you had a pelican case then maaaaaybe. But even then the airport guys are going to open it.

Dude.

LP