Just another amateurish dudebro who uses a Mac and wishes that he could have done something more professional with his life than be a lead concept artist for the Metroid Prime series. Does he even know what RAM is for?
Yep, as I said, no one should buy a MacPro, so of course the iMac looks pretty good in comparison. At least the $2,500 base model MacPro no longer has 3GB RAM standard, but none the less, paying that much for 2010 hardware in 2013 is mighty stupid. An iMac, with a decent monitor built in is a steal in comparison. It's still a sacrifice though, so if you value how long your purchase will stay technically capable of the job and what hardware it offers for the money, it's not the best option - just an easy one. These people are clearly talented, am I missing something though? Why does that automatically mean they made the best purchase for the job? Maybe for them they can justify throwing around a bit of extra money to have a halfway decent out of box experience. There's advantages to that, it's easy, buy another, it works the same right out of the box (depending how picky you are). It's easy, but it's not the best they could have got for their money. That's fine, different people and companies have different priorities. My recommendation of an iMac to amateur to mid-level professionals is based on the ease of setup and use for the general 'design' crowd. Whatever some professional's reason may be for using an iMac I don't share it. I decided on an iMac for my work for three reasons 1) not to be difficult, it doesn't help you get your job done potentially having to argue with 90% of the people you deal with, 2) It was the cheapest way to get a decent screen and 3) I wouldn't consider my work too demanding on hardware. I regretted that decision a little, but now with more RAM it's at an acceptable level at least. Would I buy one for home or starting my own business? No. Because I could buy a 27" Samsung PLS monitor, Core i7 3770k, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2TB HDD, GTX 580 and a decent case and PSU for the same price as the high end 27" iMac and have it stay a quick machine for years after you're ready to throw the iMac in the bin for being too slow. But that's me in my situation, it's not going to apply to everyone... personally I just think professionals should know what they're buying for their money a bit better. I guess they often have the disposable income not to have to care. Or "it's just the ways it's always been" for them.
The do-it-yourself system in your post could easily cost $2300 (the creative oriented Series 9 monitor from Samsung would be $1,000 by itself). A top-end iMac that was upgraded to a 3.4 Ghz Core i7 quad, 16 GB RAM (8 GB of that from third party), and a 3 TB Fusion Drive would cost $2649. So you would save about $350 doing it yourself, and you'd have a higher end gaming style GPU...is that supposed to be a deal breaker for a professional who uses the system on a daily basis to make their money? I really don't see it myself. That's not an extravagant difference for a system that would have a better resale value and saves desk space with the all-in-one design. You could expect a system like that to be just fine speed wise for 5 years or more. $500 a year is a nominal professional expense considering that smartphones are typically about $1,000 per year on contract.
Since it was what I would do, I went off local prices I would pay. The Samsung 970 is $850 here, I don't know why it isn't that cheap elsewhere since the 'higher end' 30" monitors do cost a lot more here than in the US, the situation for most 27" models seems to be reversed for whatever reason. The GTX580 is for CUDA implementation in CS6. It offers the best performance/$ of supported hardware on windows. I wouldn't choose such an outdated card for for gaming (which is not what this machine is for), and if they were supported properly (maybe in a while) I'd go for a 7970 for only a little more which should offer much better performance, and probably will in the future. The Nvidia GK104 and below based keplers are not compute orientated devices and aren't even supported under windows. They're supported under OS X as that's the best they could get in the iMac's, but even the expensive upgrade to a 680MX would net nowhere near the performance of a 580 in photoshop, after effects and premiere. So yes, that's a big blow on the iMac's performance/$. This is what I would build since it costs the same or less, is completely upgradeable, and gives a faster and overall better experience. Yes, it's not without downsides being a custom built machine, but it's undeniably a superior device.
resale value doesn't come into the question for a pc. a pc is pretty much re-used other than the mobo, proc and gpu... and maybe the ram... and only maybe the gpu since we're talking pro we may just even reuse the gpu again as well.
That is so wrong it's almost funny. Sure there are a lot of those people but they're hardly most of the YouTube community. I'm not sure if you're being ignorant or just saying stupid things to "get a rise out of people".
The GTX 680MX benchmarks are better than the desktop 580. Not by a huge margin (11%), but better. http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-680M.72679.0.html I see your point about the desktop version of the 680 vs. the mobile version for specific things like high end video editing and rendering, as the mobile version is under clocked, but then again you weren't being that specific when you first started talking about the iMac. As for Photoshop, it's not going to make much of a difference. Professional photographers, designers, and illustrators would all be just fine with the iMac vs. the Mac Pro.
I'd correct that to loudmouthed dudebros and narcisistic chicks. Pretty sure all chicks you meet in the public are loudmouthed to begin with lol. But yeah, if you were editing videos 10+ years ago before YT you'd have pretty much the same sentiments not saying you, Arma, aren't one of the minorities but there's not much going on in YT nowadays that's more than one step above America/ Britain's funniest home videos (or uploading music/ game runs/ etc.). Nothing wrong with it, just it is what it is is all. Sure there are creative types who do original work, there are creative types who remix copyrighted work I sure as hell don't mind as long as it's creative! There's college projects, informational videos. But most of them are game run (/walk) throughs/ blogs that are pretty worthless to the majority is all I'm saying.
In games and synthetic tests, both of which hold absolutely zero bearing on the discussion we are having. Kepler GK104 is a midrange card in Nvidia's traditional sense (hence the code name). It cuts down on compute potential to maximise game performance for the die area. This is why it does so well against the 580 and AMD 7900 series in gaming, because both are compute orientated designs which happen to be good at gaming, but at the cost of more transistors and consequently more power use and heat. Basically, anything that uses CUDA or OpenCL (adobe suite) will perform poorly on these gaming-only orientated cards with a large double precision floating point deficite. I think GK104 is 1:16 or 1:32 where as Fermi GF100/110 and AMD Tahiti 7900 are both 1:3 rate. Big difference. It's not going to be a big deal for everyone which is why my recommendation stands for professionals or those like me who research hardware options and like to get the best for their money (and just prefer Windows for productivity, again, not everyone feels this way, especially the less tech-aware). Yes, the mobile GPU's you find in iMac will never match the compute orientated GPU's you can get in desktop. If you want the best of the best, buy a quadro.... 99% of 'designers' can save $4000 by not doing that with no detriment. Others who do need the performance but can't justify that cash can currently meet half way with a GTX580, only on windows though, with Mac Pro being limited to the hardly supported and dated 5870 or very rare and even more dated GTX 285. Both are not ideal, so the very steeply priced Quadro range is pretty much it. So yeah, I think my recommendation for professionals to stick to PC makes a hell of a lot of sense considering they can have a machine cheaper and faster than an iMac, and MUCH cheaper and potentially faster than a Mac Pro.
Your recommendation applies to a specialized subset of creative professionals. It doesn't really apply to a generalized range of creative uses, which is what you started out saying. The GTX 680MX has the same number of CUDA cores as the desktop 680, it's just under clocked. That will make a noticeable difference for certain types of higher end video editing and rendering uses, but not for the vast majority of photographers, designers, and illustrators OR for many standard professional video editing uses. As for your "cheaper" comments, it's only cheaper on the front end...and with the iMac it's a fairly negligible difference for a professional. Do-it-yourself PCs don't have the resale value of either iMacs or Mac Pros, which can easily sell for more than 50% of their retail price years later. The cost to own really isn't as high as you make it out to be. Also, once you get beyond tiny sized operations, most companies are not going to bother with do-it-yourself options for desktops.
My wife needs a new notebook. We've been looking at ultrabooks and ultrabook convertibles but I can't say that I'm thrilled with what I've seen. What scares me about them is that despite being really thin and light, they appear to be built like cheap throwaways. By that I mean the ram and SSD/HDD are soldered onto the motherboard and not accessible to the user, and the screen and hinges look like they'd be nightmarish if not impossible to replace. So pretty much all of the big failure points for notebooks can't be easily repaired and these things cost $1000+. I've tried to steer her in the direction of business notebooks like the Dell Latitudes and Lenovo Thinkpads because of the rugged build quality and repairability, but she thinks they're ugly.
Intel is getting into the ultrabook game later this year if she's willing to wait. It's going to be using their new haswell line. They showed some reference design model at CES. Very promising. http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/7/3848358/intels-detachable-windows-8-reference-design-for-haswell-hands-on
Lenovo's are the best value in computers at the moment. But they take 60-90 days to ship. I just can't wait that long. Although, I've now waited 60 days laptop-less since skipping their Black Friday deal finding something comparable. So maybe I'm the fool.
I won't be buying for a while myself, but I'm finding it hard to find an ultrabook that doesn't have some major drawback. They are getting better though, they actually have pretty nice screens now in the newer models and the keyboards/trackpads are getting decent. That was my main two concerns with the prices they go for, I couldn't skimp on those two things for that price range. I'm potentially look at a convertable myself, but if you just want a traditional laptop in ultrabook form, I'm liking the new Samsungs shown at CES. No idea when they'll be out, but they seem to cover most bases very well. Just get enough RAM from the get go and with being a samsung you know the SSD is going to be good.
That's nice, except I already said the GTX 680 is really only strong at gaming and general OpenGL stuff, so a mobile version clocked 30% lower is certainly underwhelming especially when you're paying $150 for the honour of having an upgrade to it in your iMac. I don't think you really understand that not all products are aimed at the same market. You cant just look up general games and media reviews for a video card if you're buying a workstation and assume the performance will carry over. That's like buying a prius over a truck because it gets the best Mpg. Sometimes there are products which work great for gaming and compute yet carry the gaming price tag. Right now, that would be the 580GTX and in the future hopefully the Radeon 7900 series. Of course, it's not for everyone and you can buy OEM workstation PC's if you need something MacPro like (but not old and limited to only certain video cards). Compared to an iMac, an upgradable PC definitely makes up for the resale price issue - being able to upgrade just the core components. The monitor will be good for 5-7 years and so should the power supply and case. Cost isn't the big issue, it's just a factor on top of getting more performance and a better experience. I'm going to leave it at that. The whole problem here is that most people shop for a platform first, not hardware. People on both sides believe that the hardware is one of the supporting reasons for why their platform is better, but the fact of the matter is that with Windows you have a choice and access to all the latest tech. So if you care about performance, it's the obvious choice. If you are comfortable with OS X and do demanding work, cool, you either put up with an underpowered machine (while paying more, still) or pay out the nose for an outdated one. I wouldn't recommend doing either and I stand by that recommendation. It's their loss if they're not adaptable enough to work on both platforms. They can work with the handicapp they've imposed on themself by being stubborn and falling for misinformation.
$499 ASUS Zenbook UX32A-DB31 13.3" Ultrabook - New Egg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=OiQTnmUaEeK75XrE6lFVEwnS42_4QbP3_0_0_0&AID=10440897&PID=1225267&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16834230466