What's on Your Desktop?

[MatthewSchenker]

Hey Everyone,

I am currently searching for my next desktop system to replace my 2007 iMac. Since people here are all using our systems for similar purposes, opinions here are valuable...

My two main competitors are...

Option 1: 27" iMac

Option 2: Mac Mini with Dell 27" monitor

I was all set to get the new iMac, but then I compared specs and realized I can get a supercharged Mac Mini for hundreds less (saving about $600 by getting a Dell monitor). But are there internals with the iMac that make it better, especially when running Adobe's suite? After all, it seems like every design studio I glimpse at these days is using iMacs!

Both systems lack a CD drive, which I find bonkers. But let's leave that aside.

I have a MS PC already set up, so for this particular station I am only looking at Apple stuff.

Opinions?

Thanks,

Matthew

[Luis]

I'm using the 2012 MacMini in the Office with an 27" Monitor.

i5 with 4gb of RAM.

If u choose the Mini, upgrade the RAM.

Adobe suite is a bit slow on mine.

But all in all i'm feeling contended with the Mini.

[MatthewSchenker]

Hey Luis,

It's so easy to just go with the iMac, but it's hard to ignore that you can get what seems like a stronger system with a Mac Mini.

The one thing I am not sure about is the idea of shared versus dedicated graphics memory. The Mac Mini has shared and the iMac has dedicated. Does this really matter for Web work?

Another issue is upgradability. Apple has pushed "elegance" about as far as you can go in 2012, but the new iMacs are hermetically sealed systems, whereas the Mac Mini is designed for internal access.

Thanks,

Matthew

[Luis]

Well, 90% of what i´m doing on the Mini is coding.

For this workload the mini is just fine, i´m developing in Aptana Studio and in the background there running instances of Opera Browser, Mamp, Inet Radio and Mail.

If I need to do some gfx I open Adobe Fireworks, at this point I notice the little Memory, so if I upgrade the memory to 8gb, I think everything would work perfect, but there is no need for me.

[Nico Knoll]

I've got a MacBook Pro 15" and a Dell 21" monitor. So I can take my Laptop with me and if I'm at home I just connect the monitor and don't use the laptop ones. It's faster then a MacMini I guess..

[yellowled]

My setup's pretty similar to Nico's. Since I'm travelling quite a bit, I went for a 13" MacBook Air recently. Since I don't run Creative Suite or similar apps and do most of my work in a text editor these days, its performance is more than sufficient.

Excellent keyboard and trackpad for my taste, I don't even use external ones at home. I do have a larger monitor there (24" Samsung), which I prefer to use in multi-monitor mode. However, that really gets the MBA's fan running after a few hours.

[panictree]

I would go for the 27'' iMac. It's a beautiful piece of hardware and the screen is simply gorgeous. It's not a retina display but it comes pretty darn close. I don't think you'll get this quality on a Dell display unless you're prepared to fork out some serious cash. As for upgradeability, you can easily upgrade the RAM yourself to up to 32GB. If at a later stage you feel the need for more speed, you could simply buy an external SSD drive with thunderbolt connectivity and load the OS off of it.

If you won't be playing games, doing 3D renderings or stuff like that, you shouldn't worry about not having a dedicated graphics unit. For web design/development work, it's much more important to have a powerful amount of RAM and a fast hard drive (read SSD).

Claudio

[netcarver]

Here's the box on my "desk"*. Still hanging in there.

* Actually a salvaged door.

[Pete]

Here's the box on my desk. Still hanging in there.

Oh my word The poor thing!

[ryan]

I'd probably go for the 27" iMac too. It would just make everything feel better as it's kind of like adding a work of art to the room. A 15" Macbook Pro with Retina screen might also be worth considering.

I use a 2008 Mac Pro with 30-inch + 24-inch Dell screens. The main benefit of the Mac Pro is that it's extremely upgradable and lets you get another few years out of the system that you might not be able to get out of Apple's other offerings. But I wish Apple was continuing to update the MacPro line more consistently, as the one they are selling today (4 years later) is not that much different than the one I have. it's kind of hard to justify a Mac Pro now. But I think this system will keep me going for another 2-3 years. If Apple ever puts a retina screen in the iMac at a good price point (as I'm guessing they will), that would be ideal.

[onjegolders]

I'd find it hard to part with my MacBook Pro. It's portable so I don't have to worry about not having my work with me wherever I go.

I started having thoughts about an upgrade 12 months ago but I invested in an SSD and it made my computer run about 417,167 times faster . It's still on Core2duo but for webwork and day-to-day use it's superb.

I have an older iMac and they are beautiful things but I'm always worried about keeping multiple systems on the same page.

[onjegolders]

I've got a MacBook Pro 15" and a Dell 21" monitor. So I can take my Laptop with me and if I'm at home I just connect the monitor and don't use the laptop ones. It's faster then a MacMini I guess..

Hi Nico, as my iMac is older and slower than my MacBook Pro, I'm thinking of going the way you do.

Was just interested how you get sound? Or do you not?

[joshuag]

+ 1 for the iMac. You can't beat the apple display on that thing. I have had a couple minis and am on my 5th MBP, but my next one will be the new iMac for sure. 

[Joss]

Very Mac orientated round this forum!

I have three systems - two windows and one Ubuntu

My normal everday desk top is just an old quad core running 32 bit win7 - part of the reason for that is that I am trying to rescue some old archive material from Logic 5.5 and I cant get that to run on a 64bit system. But it suits me fine, has two big but cheap monitors and a very large comfy office chair - that is the most important bit.

My music computer is an i7 system with 32gig ram, 3 TB of hard disks and some bits. That will, I hope, be upgraded this year to a completely SSD system (4 x 500gb), dual Xeons, 64 gig ram, and backup external USB3 hard drives run as a library. I run 3 large monitors on the system which I will keep.

It is interesting that despite Macs having a big impact on the music world, more and more of my co-workers are moving over to windows because of compatibility issues with some devices. Also, on Cubase and Nuendo, which I use, I almost never get crashes where as my Mac loving friends get them rather a lot.  But there is also a cost issue. I upgrade more often than most people, so I need to keep that manageable. 

OH, I forgot, I still have an Atari Mega 4 in working order which I turn on about once a year to retrieve some ancient track or other - I wrote a ton of music for British Pathé News on that!

[diogo]

Josh's  post encouraged me to tell what I have

Laptop is a Dell Inspiron with 15'' display, and when at home I dual screen it with a 21'' Samsung monitor.

The OS is the very new Fedora 18 Beta (I'm living on the edge ) with Gnome graphical user interface.

When people know I'm a designer and I show up with something that is not a Mac, they say "YOU DON'T HAVE A MAC???"

[Pete]

I've got a custom built PC with Windows 8 and a 24" monitor.

The only reason it's custom built is that I like building PCs and get to build half a dozen or so a year or more (not for me!). It's nice when you can pick quality parts and put them in a slick, quiet case.

I also carry a DELL XPS 17" but it's a bit big for my needs nowadays and I want to move to a Windows Surface at some point when the Intel versions are out so I can have my entire web dev environment on a tablet that I can then plug a monitor and keyboard into when I want or use as a tablet again when showing off work. I can see that really working well for me and it would totally remove the need for a laptop. It would also cause me less backache versus carrying that beast of a laptop around

[Joss]

Interestingly enough, we have just retired one of the kids PCs as she now has a laptop. It is a basic intel dual core dell with 2 mb ram and windows vista. It is about 3 years old and cost £250. It is nice to have a spare machine around, so I have done the MS cheap upgrade offer to windows 8 pro and ran it as a clean install.

It went very smoothly and then I restarted it.

5 seconds boot up.

I nearly fainted!!!!

So I tried again - yep, 5 seconds. I hit the power button, sit up at the desk and it is all ready. NONE of my machines boot that fast!! Even my huge music computer.

Goodness knows what I have done wrong, or right ...!

[Pete]

It's Windows 8 - much faster boot times, which makes you wonder what they'd done wrong before for so many years.

*waits for the jokes from the Mac crowd*

[Joss]

*waits for the jokes from the Mac crowd*

Hey, I can make it worse - the slowest most plodding machine I have is .........

LINUX!!!!!

*runs and hides behind sofa*

[onjegolders]

Any of you guys running with an external monitor have any tips to get any audio off of it?

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings Again,

While we're on the subject of what's on your desktop... Let's talk storage/backup now.

I'm thinking about getting a RAID system (Thunderbolt), both as a working drive for my project files, and to do backups via RAID 1 mirroring.  Can anyone recommend a RAID 1 system?

Thanks,

Matthew

[netcarver]

Hi Matthew, do you want an "off-the-shelf" solution or are you willing to put something together yourself?

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

To netcarver: I'm open to either!  Tell me your ideas!

At the moment, I have all work files on my iMac, and I do automatic backups to a Time Capsule, as well as nightly backups to a separate networked drive.  I like the idea of physical separation of drives.

The one thing I question (wonder) about RAID: even though the drives are separate, they are in the same enclosure.  If there was some weird occurrence, aren't the two drives at risk because they are in the same enclosure?

Thanks,

Matthew

[netcarver]

Hi Matthew, sorry for the delay in replying. I have little experience with off-the-shelf solutions but know some people who like things like the drobo but I've never used it. Actually, it sounds like you are doing about 200% better with your current backup strategy than most people, probably myself included (currently I do a regular backup to an external, removable HDD and most of my development work goes onto github, if public, or bitbucket if private.)

In the past I have setup RAID-1 arrays using FreeNAS on cheap-and-cheerful old boxes. I'd have the OS (which is FreeBSD based) running off a memory stick on an internal USB port and 2 matching sata drives hooked up directly to the motherboard. These boxes actually serve as a file server with backups handled onto external drives. There are, however, plenty of other products in the same arena (like UnRaid and NAS4Free.) FreeNAS works great and is pretty easy to configure, supporting many network storage options and even allowing ZFS if the box is powerful enough.

There's always the possibility of failures in RAID but it comes down to managing risk vs the costs of not doing so. If you want to look at things like distributed storage then there are products like Gluster which allows having different storage nodes (one of multiple How-Tos courtesy of HowToForge.)

For off-site storage there are multiple services to choose from starting off with a roll-your-own solution (like rsync to your own off-site server somewhere) to more bespoke products like Carbonite, JungleDisk and, more up my street, Tarsnap. You could even use dropbox if you didn't care a hoot about security.

[typ9]

Hi guys! Working on a 17inch-MacBook Pro - so glad i got the last generation of the big fella, now that Apple got rid of the 17ers... In the office there is a 27inch TFT from NEC. Since we are three people in our small design office, there is an old MacPro working as a server.

Why Mac? Well, got into print in 1996 and never looked back. Actually looked back from time to time, but not long enough to switch to windows or linux. Although I really like Win8-Style and the great karma of Linux.