Mac Pro or iMac? A Buyers Guide

This week I very happily took possession of my new darling: a new Mac Pro.  It is replacing my old iMac, which is a late 2006 20.5″ model with an upgraded CPU to a 2.66 Core2Duo processor.  This week, I upgraded to a Mac Pro 2009 model with an upgraded 2.93 Ghz Quad core Xeon processor, 3 GB of RAM (for now, I’ll be upping that soon), a 1Tb hard drive and an upgraded NVIDIA GT285 1Gb graphics card.

The last five months have been pretty hard on my old computer, and I was very relieved when I was finally able to upgrade.  The amount of workload I have been placing on my old machine has been close to outstripping its capabilities.  Plus, I have been making some sacrifices to make the tasks fit my computer.  My computer was a company purchase for me, so I was able to set my sights a little differently than if I had purchased this on my own (although, strangely, not much higher.  The iMac I was comparing this to would have only saved me $500).  I thought I’d post a little comparison to help anyone else trying to decide if they want to purchase a Mac Pro or an iMac, like I was.

An iMac is a computer.  A Mac Pro is a workstation. I didn’t notice this one until I actually got the computer home.  But it says it on the box.  An iMac is a “desktop computer.”  A Mac Pro is a workstation.  Know what a workstation is?  It is the part of a mainframe supercomputer that you can interact with.  Basically, if you need horsepower, you need a Mac Pro.  If not, you will get along just fine with an iMac.  I’ll mention more about this as I go along, but one of my main reasons for deciding on a Mac Pro instead of an iMac was I need to be able to run Windows and OS X simultaneously, and there are times when I need them both to be running at full speed.  I’ve been a VMWare Fusion user for almost three years and it works very well.  As long as you don’t mind severe performance degradation on both OS’s.  I use it daily on my Macbook, and if I want Windows to run with any kind of efficiency, I don’t use the OS X side.  When I’m done with Windows, I shut down Windows and go back to Mac for full speed.  I had to do the same when I ran them both at the same time on my old iMac.  It is a compromise I need to make on my laptop, due to the nature of what I use my laptop for, but I was unwilling to settle for that on my main desktop computer.  Now I do not have to.

Do you need to expand your system? The biggest advantage of the iMac is it contains everything you need to get it going within its own shell.  Disk drive?  Check.  Hard Drive?  Check.  Monitor?  Check.  Wireless card?  Check.  Everything the average computer user needs is built right in to the iMac.  The problem?  Suppose you want to go further than what comes built in?  I wanted a second hard drive to act as my Windows machine (I have always used Boot Camp as a way to run windows on my desktop.  I still will on the Mac Pro when I game).  For a second drive, I needed to place an external hard disk on my desk.  I wanted another hard drive to hold my music collection.  I placed another external hard drive on my desk.  I wanted another drive for a weekly full backup of my computer.  I added another hard drive to my desk.  About two years ago, PC games outstripped the capabilities of the graphics card built into the iMac.  Tough luck.  Firewire doubled in speed since I purchased the iMac.  Tough luck, the new connectors are incompatible with the old ones.  The DVD drive on the iMac is wearing out.  Tough luck, add an external to replace it.  The monitor on the iMac is starting to discolor.  Sorry, can’t help you there.

As you can guess, my desk got pretty filled with computer components.  That isn’t the case with the Mac Pro.  I added a second, larger faster hard drive to the Mac Pro, turned that into my main drive and used the Apple-supplied drive as the second disk for Windows.  And I still have two hard drive bays to spare!  Before I got the computer, I purchased an upgrade video card for the machine so I’m now probably good on graphics for at least two years, maybe more.  I can, of course, run games, but not only that, the upgraded card is helping me run two operating systems at full capacity.  And speaking of graphics, I have really weird eyesight.  Not the greatest peripheral vision, but decent.  I found that I can’t see a very large monitor very well.  With the iMac, they have 2 flavors: a 21.5″ monitor and a 27″ monitor.  The 21″ would have been fine, except they wouldn’t allow me to get the computer configuration I wanted.  The 27″ would have, but 27″ is too large a monitor for me to effectively look at.  So I would have had to compromise something somewhere for that to work.  And if I wear out the monitor on this machine, I can just get a new one without spending another couple thousand on a whole new computer.

When I got the Mac Pro this week, the first thing I did was open it up and change around the computer components.  Something you absolutely cannot do on an iMac unless you want to void your warranty.  While I was swapping out components, I had some flashbacks from twenty years ago when I was doing the same stuff to my Apple //e and Apple //GS.  I have fond memories of opening up the shell of my //e (I still have it, by the way) and installing a mouse expansion card (that’s right, you needed to expand the computer back then to make it read a mouse).  Or removing a printer port card and installing another printer port card on the Apple //GS because the old printer died and when you got a new one, you needed a new card to make the computer see it (or you had a parallel printer and replaced it with a serial printer.  That also required a new card.)  That’s what I did this week.  It is a hell of a lot harder to do on the Mac Pro than it was on the Apple //GS, but the memories are still there.  If you don’t mind opening up the guts of your new $3,000+ machine and swapping out components, then a Mac Pro is just fine.  If the thought of touching the guts of such a delicately balanced piece of hardware makes you sick, stick to the iMac.

Is all that power really necessary? I’m not necessarily talking about CPU power.  Even a cheap $500 notebook has more than enough CPU power for most computing tasks.  Here’s what you need to know: if you just browse the web, check your email, look at and transfer photos, share video files, watch internet TV or videos, run a couple of other simple programs, whatever you have is going to be more than adequate for your needs.  Hell, whatever you had back in 2005 would have been more than adequate for your needs even today.  Your CPU has been fast enough for a very long time.  My iPhone is fast enough to run most of what you would use on a computer today.  So why are things so slow?  It isn’t the CPU.  Your CPU spends most of its time waiting.  Your CPU may be at 2.9 Ghz, but your RAM speed might only be 800 Mhz.  Your hard drive might transfer data at only 1 Ghz, your graphics processor (if your computer has one) might only reference its own memory at 1 Ghz.  And don’t get me started on USB.  Anything you have that’s external and connected to the computer, crawls compared to your processor’s speed.  All of these things are running at least half the speed of your computer’s CPU.  So the brains of your computer are actually spending twice as much time (at minimum) waiting for the data it needs to continue working than it is itself using.  This is the real reason your computer is slow most of the time.  With my Mac Pro, I was able to upgrade the components and make the computer’s extremities work a little bit faster.  Faster RAM, faster hard drive, faster RAM in the hard drive, faster graphics speed.  USB unfortunately is what it is, for now.  All this has a measured effect on the things I do with my machine, but most of you won’t need this.

The “pro” kind of says it all. The beauty and the curse of any Apple product is the same: simplicity.  When you buy Apple, you get what they give you.  It is good salesmanship, because despite what everybody thinks about themselves, 95% don’t really know what they want.  So Apple tells them and people are happy.  It is that final 5% of people that really need a Mac Pro.  And the truth of it is, if you know what you are sacrificing by not getting a Mac Pro and you don’t like that sacrifice, then you need a Mac Pro.  Tech journalists often bitch about what a product doesn’t have and why they hate it because it doesn’t have this or that.  They are not the majority of you.  They’re the people who would be happiest with a Mac Pro, because if a Mac Pro doesn’t have it, you can add it.  This is the one Apple product I can think of that has a full range of aftermarket customization options.  If you just need something fast, efficient, and simple, save some money and get an iMac.  Do not feel as if you will be missing something by getting an iMac instead of a Mac Pro.  You won’t.  There’s a very specific set of people who this computer is ideal for, and you already know if you are that person.  Most of you are not.  An iMac will do just as good for you.  I do not regret this purchase.  As I mentioned earlier, the wait times have gotten longer, the more I use my computer (and it was dying anyway, the CPU temp had gotten noticeably higher in recent months).  My work space had gotten cluttered with all the extras I’ve had to add on to the iMac.  And a couple of the components were starting to fail from constant use.  I’m betting this computer, while slightly more expensive, will last me longer than the four years of my iMac.

Stay tuned for the plans I have for how my overworked, geriatric iMac will be spending its retirement years.

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