iMac went POP :'( What new machine to get?

[lindsay40k]

I'm about to receive an inheritance and I intend to get a reasonably future-proof new machine. I guess playing a lot of Civ on a Core Duo 2GB machine with no proper GPU didn't do the old machine's lifespan any favours (though 7 years isn't bad).

I suppose it'll probably be best to put a Windows installation on the new machine, so as to run any mod without faffing about with virtual machines and suchlike.

Main thing I'm musing is whether to go iMac, or Retina MBP? My gaming partners are all about specs at any cost, and saying desktop machine every time. I'm not that bothered about maximum horsepower and kind of like portability, though if more specs for my money means an iMac will last longer than a MacBook before something important burns out, they may have a point.

Thoughts?

 

[z0wb13]

if you really want to future proof, get the 27" iMac with the core i7 and 2GB vram upgrades ($2350). also, i would pay apple the $250 to upgrade to a fusion drive (you'd only save yourself $50 installing it yourself, and trust me it's not worth it), but do the RAM yourself and you'll save at least half of what they charge. so you can keep the total cost under $3000

the only real drawback is that you won't be portable. for that, i would get a cheap* companion device, either an iPad or a linux or windows netbook. if you want to play civ4 on the couch, you can always use teamviewer.

to get a similarly spec'd macbook w/retina, costs over $3000. you would have to spend $200 for 8GB of extra RAM, which you could buy and install yourself on an iMac for maybe $50. you get a worse cpu, but pay $100 more for it. and you get a worse video card. you trade a gigabit ethernet port (iMac), for an HDMI out (retina macbook); a thunderbolt to ethernet adapter is $30, while a mini display port (thunderbolt) to dvi is $30. but a, knock off mini display port to HDMI adapter is like $15, so i think it's still advantage iMac.

as far as storage space and speed, a fusion drive is gong to feel like a solid state drive most, if not all, of the time. i've seen iMacs with fusion drives, and they boot up in 6 or 7 seconds. the top of the line retina macbook has 512GB of solid state storage, which is probably enough anyway, but it's $400 to upgrade this any further. either way, you might save $20 by only needing a 500GB external HD for backups. however, if you are the kind of person that has a humongous music or picture library, then having a whole TB in the iMac might mean you only need 1 xHD for a backup, instead of 2. it really depends on how much data you have.

anyways, i'm not sure if it is a good idea to future proof a computer. let's say my perfect iMac lasts 7-8 years, and i spent $2900 on it. that's about $400 a year. i saw a core i5 lenovo laptop for $479 at office depot. and let's say i only keep the cheap* piece of crap for 2 years. it's only costing me less than $250 per year. and you can play civ4 on an i5 just as well as on an i7, just using integrated graphics. of course, you'd be playing it on windows 8, which is a buggy/crashy piece of garbage.

but,... the cost of extra software on windows is going to add up fast, depending on what you are doing with it. OSX comes with iPhoto and Preview, which is way better than Paint and whatever Photos does (i've only ever seen it crash to the "start" screen after minimal use). in fact, windows doesn't come with anything like preview. textedit is better than wordpad. safari is WAY better than IE. it goes on and on. the opensource programs for OSX are generally better, imho. you don't need to spend $140 for word when all you need is pages for $20.

the real drawback of using mac is the lack of "productivity" software. things like quicken and quickbooks. but that's only if you must use these programs; there is mac productivity software out there. you've just never heard of it.

*cheap is a relative term. i'm assuming for the sake of argument is that money is no object, but also that we aren't just spending money on junk or useless upgrades.

 

[lindsay40k]

Yeah, slumming it on a long-term lend of a Win7 laptop, I'm missing all sorts of stuff that came with Snow Leopard. A Windows machine really isn't an option. If there's not much lag and it could work on a Wifi LAN, that Teamviewer and a Linux notebook could be just the thing I need to fill the portability gap in a big ****-off iMac.

Course, my windfall will be coming after WDC. Who knows, maybe they'll reboot the Mac Pro line and I'll be able to get de facto futureproofing of a tower with the OSX features I need outside of Civ!

...wishlisting, I know.

 

[UK_Brad]

@z0wb13 I want to get a MacBook Pro -- the 13'' i7 8g. Anything I should know about it -- or anything I could do to get more out of it? Doing Civ playing, sound editing (for my podcast & rap album [haha]) and YouTube videos. It can run Civ 5 easily right? Civ 6 too? (When it happens)

 

[lindsay40k]

I can tell you MacRumors are expecting a new MBP lineup in Q2. I'm waiting until WDC before getting anything new.

If you're gonna game, I know enough to say a model with a proper GPU is a good bet.

 

[UK_Brad]

I can tell you MacRumors are expecting a new MBP lineup in Q2. I'm waiting until WDC before getting anything new.

When would they announce? I wonder if they will cater to gaming a bit more with a model.

 

[z0wb13]

lindsay40k I can tell you MacRumors are expecting a new MBP lineup in Q2. I'm waiting until WDC before getting anything new.

only apple "knows" when something new is going to be released. look at the imac rollout by thanksgiving '12, then december, and it wasn't until halfway thru january that they became readily available. now i still think they are the coolest computer around, but i think apple was overly exuberant about how much of a money maker it was going to be; they underestimated how hard it is to cram a graphics station into a 5mm (on the edge) thick objet d'art.

If you're gonna game, I know enough to say a model with a proper GPU is a good bet.

second.

@z0wb13 I want to get a MacBook Pro -- the 13'' i7 8g. Anything I should know about it -- or anything I could do to get more out of it? Doing Civ playing, sound editing (for my podcast & rap album [haha]) and YouTube videos. It can run Civ 5 easily right? Civ 6 too? (When it happens)

it has a slow hard drive. i can't understand why, unless maybe it has something to due with heat or power supply. i would put in a few hundred extra dollars for the 128GB SSD plus 2*1TB externals. and i understand that it's a lot (+20%) extra to get 2 external hdd's, but it makes sense. hear me out:

swap in a 128GB hdd instead of a 750GB (5400rpm) hdd. cost: $100.
get a couple of 1TB usb3 xhd. cost: $200

keep your system (8GB) civ4 (8GB with awesome mods) sound editor (60GB idk?) and youtube (0GB) on the 128GB ssd, with a bunch of scratch space (~50GB) left over for audio files. that's your work disk, and any tracks you are working on stays on that disk so they boot up fast.

the pair of USB3 xhd are for your (time machine) backup, and also you can keep all of your music, crap, etc. on them, and mirror each other for backup. sort of like a poor man's raid. not that it would be easy to maintain. for that you need an actual raid, which is at least $600, and more like $800~$3000.

lest i be accused of ssd fanboy-dom. it's all true. ssd are super fast, and you are bottle-necking that i7 without one.

your other option is replacing the DVD drive with an ssd, and hacking a fusion drive. but, you will need to to burn CD's, because you said that you are doing music. so i wouldn't. 128GB is plenty of space to keep your tracks and games on; if you travel a lot you can still burn a copy of whatever for whoever, and then when you get back to your home base you've got your library waiting for you.

 

[UK_Brad]

@z0wb13 I never thought of the hard drive bottling necking that sweet i7. Now you really got me thinking about it. I would hate to not get the full use out of the processor. I am a little nervous about storage though. Having the external hard drive isn't that annoying is it? Pretty fast transfer speeds?

 

[lindsay40k]

It is of course all speculation that new MBP's are coming at the end of Q2. But if it's the case, WDC is where they'd be likely to be coming to light. I'm holding out as I really don't want a first gen Retina machine, had my fingers burnt before with early adoption.

 

[UK_Brad]

How great do you think the Retina display is? I read that you only notice when they are side by side with a non-retina display.

I totally get your concern with jumping too soon, technology is random like that. You know what it is like to have money wanting to get spent though, right? I probably can't stave off much longer

 

[lindsay40k]

It looked pretty rad in the store. I notice a difference in eye comfort between Retina iPhone and a 'standard' HD laptop...

 

[z0wb13]

@z0wb13 I never thought of the hard drive bottling necking that sweet i7. Now you really got me thinking about it. I would hate to not get the full use out of the processor. I am a little nervous about storage though. Having the external hard drive isn't that annoying is it? Pretty fast transfer speeds?

with traditional hard drives, you are looking at a maximum of ~120 MB/sec, and that's being very optimistic. my speeds are more in the 40-80 MB/sec range. either way, USB gives you a 5GB/sec data pipe, so it's not like it will slow you down by having a hard drive hooked up through USB versus SATA (like and internal drive).

as far as how annoying it will be, you will have to make your own determination. but i would say it would be somewhat annoying. that said, laptops are always going to be making compromises. you can have a big battery for all day use (8hrs), but you need somewhere to put it, and an ultrabook form factor won't work (despite all of the marketing, ultrabooks might only get you can extra hour of battery life; they might run 5-6 hrs or so, still not "all day"). you can have a big screen, but with that comes additional weight. a good laptop will balance all of these factors as best as possible, but you can't just cram a couple of extra hard drives like you can in a desktop for when you need more space, or upgrade the graphics card when something better comes out.

also, i said that the hard drive would bottleneck the processor. that's not exactly true. once your program is loaded into RAM, the hard drive speeds won't matter, and an i7 will be just as fast with or without a ssd. that said, you will sit around wasting processor cycles while the HD is searching. basically, SSD have much lower latency, so the processor can get to work much more quickly, and the system will "feel" more "responsive".

 

[lindsay40k]

The only thing that wound me up about external HDDs on my Snow Leopard iMac was if I didn't access them every few minutes, they'd go to sleep. Whenever I accessed them 'cold', they'd take a few seconds to spin up.

Which was a double annoyance when I was saving a file on the internal storage, as the save dialog would spin up every connected HDD.

It's gonna be awesome in a decade or so when SSD storage is cheaper than HDD is today...