As I’ve been taking on more and more film work, I’ve been needing more and more space to store all of this data. This problem has been easily fixed with external storage situations, and I’ve never really had a serious complaint about that setup.

The more work I did with the Canon 7d and other high definition captures, I came to realize that my current setup wasn’t cutting it. The macbookpro I was using had historically been a workhorse for me. I loved the face that I could do the bulk of my media work on this extremely powerful notebook. At the time, it was priced at $2799, and it has been well worth it. The sad fact is, uncompressed HD and unconverted ProRes files were a nightmare to edit on that machine. I had to upgrade.

Fast forward to more recent time. I had obviously been in the market for a mac pro. I had already acquired a 30inch Apple Cinema display, and I wanted to match it with the tower. When the new iMac line launched last fall, I wasn’t too excited. I feel as if pro users have been conditioned to believe the iMac wasn’t a serious machine to be doing loads and loads of production work on. Rather than write on and on about my debating process, let me throw down some facts about the current iMac line and the current mac pro line.

I love this image

With the i5 and i7 iMac sporting Intel’s new turbo boost, it’s almost a no brainer.

Now of course, this is not the case for everyone. There are certain setups that demand the fibre channel or raid card arrangement. In that case, the mac pro is obviously the setup for you. As a professional that relies on local/external storage solutions, the new iMac is doing wonders for me.

I’m going to lay out a few price comparisons. The quad core mac pro beings at $2499, while the 8-core beings at $3299. Let’s focus on the quad. The basic setup is a 2.66ghz nehalem processor, 3gb ram (three 1gb sticks), NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB, and a 640 gb HD. While on the other hand, the base iMac (sporting the quad core i7 Nehalem architecture) begins at $2,199. It comes with 4gb ram, 1tb HD, and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics with 512MB. Not the mention the entire machine is BUILT INTO A 27inch DISPLAY. You could go a tad thriftier and pick up the i5 machine and only pay $1,999. If we break this down, it’s almost as if you’re getting the computer half off. A 30inch display can cost anywhere between $1,000 and $2000, with the 30inch Apple Cinema Display selling for $1,799. This is the best display Apple has ever produced. Their heavy investment in the new LG display technologies have definitely paid off. This screen is gorgeous.

Not only does this iMac outperform the current mac pro, but it is priced incredibly better. To boot, it’s built into its own display, which means I can now dual screen with 2 large monitors. To quote James Galbraith from MacWorld, “With the new 2.66GHz Core i5 iMac and the 2.8GHz Core i7 iMac, Apple has not only blurred the line between consumer and professional systems, it’s darn near erased it. “

Let me reiterate, this isn’t the best option for every single setup. There is a host of different situations that demand different types of machine setups. You must also take into account the i9 technology that is rumored to be in the new mac pro lineup. This is an even more impressive performance boost over the i7 tech, but will most definitely be very costly (in comparison).

The current mac pro can most definitely be upgraded to kill the current i7 iMac, but that would cost double the current mac pro price. At the time, I paid $2799 for my workhorse of a notebook. That was ages ago it seems. For me, and for many others, this i7 iMac has given us the most bang for our buck. (and it’s damn pretty on my desk)