My wife and I are planning to buy a Mac home computer, and have $1500 to spend. I want it to be good for photography (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.), and my wife needs it to be adequate as a grade school teacher. I shoot fine art, sports, and portrait and wedding photography. What model Mac do you guys reccomend?
We've got several machines for the same sort of thing. The latest machine is one of the new iMacs, i've actually got some work being run through lightroom on it as we speak. its a great little machine. i would max out the ram though. they're a little sluggish at 1gb, but if you go to transintl.com you can get 4gb for them for 96.00. we also have a MacBook Pro and two G5s. In your price range, i would say the iMac is your best bet.
Get a used MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz with 3GB of RAM and the Apple Care plan. There are tons of these floating around at $1500 or less because many are upgrading to the new LED versions of the MacBook Pro. There are like three on the St. Louis Craig's List site now.
The above recommendation was based on the wife needing to take the computer to school etc.
If the computer does not have to be portable, Purchase a used MacPro 2.66Ghz with 4-6GB of RAM and 3 year Apple Care. You might have to kick in another $300 but will be well worth it.
Duncan_Staples wrote:
If the computer does not have to be portable, Purchase a used MacPro 2.66Ghz with 4-6GB of RAM and 3 year Apple Care. You might have to kick in another $300 but will be well worth it.
Duncan
Thanks, but i need to get a monitor as well for it, so that makes this one too expensive.
Wait until next week. Apple will be releasing some new products or updates to existing products next week.
You are probably going to end up with an iMac or MacBook Pro. The iMac is good, but not ideal for professional use. Why?
-20" uses a TN panel....not great color accuracy
-one hard drive internally, you will need an external scratch drive (FW800 or PS will run slow because FW400 can't feed PS data fast enough)
-one hard drive internally, you will need more storage for all those files (150GB is VERY small these days...even a 500GB would fill up fast considering at 50% capacity they start to slow down)
The MacBook Pro has all the same cons, but adds the ability to be portable.
I still like the old iMac core2duo (white bezel version). They used S-IPS panels (better color) and are not much slower. Much cheaper now too. So for $1500 you could get the older iMac and a big external hard drive to use for scratch/storage (FW800).
