Right now I am using a 7 year old Dual 2.0 G5 Tower. It has served me well however it is beyond time to upgrade.
I program for iOS for a living and have been using an older 17" MacBook Pro for that but would like to switch over to my desktop when I buy it for obvious reasons. I would love a tower but it is just not in my budget right now.
Things important to me:
1) Screen real estate, the more the better.
2) Redundancy, I need to back everything up - I have never had a major drive failure in 15+ years of heavy usage so it is only a matter of time before murphy finds me.
3) Longevity of the system - I do not like to upgrade often as you can see. I prefer buying the max I can afford and living with it as long as feasible.
Right now I am thinking a 2.93 quad 17 iMac. It has a 27" screen and the ability to add on another 27" Cinema Display. Its performance should be very good for the price point (looks like I would have to jump to a 8 core tower to see much of a performance jump and that doubles the cost). It does not have tons of expandability but enough for me I think?
I would order it with the minimum ram config and then order 2x4gb chips from OWC (unless anyone has better recommendations). I would also order a 2TB external OWC Mercury drive and connect it via FW800 for time machine backup. Last but not least, a OWC 120GB internal SSD that I would use as the boot drive, and use the factory internal 1tb for music/photo storage.
Sounds reasonable? I have not bought a mac in a long time and this will be my 1st non-tower mac so I just wanted to make sure all of this was possible before i hit the purchase button.
I program for iOS for a living and have been using an older 17" MacBook Pro for that but would like to switch over to my desktop when I buy it for obvious reasons. I would love a tower but it is just not in my budget right now.
Things important to me:
1) Screen real estate, the more the better.
2) Redundancy, I need to back everything up - I have never had a major drive failure in 15+ years of heavy usage so it is only a matter of time before murphy finds me.
3) Longevity of the system - I do not like to upgrade often as you can see. I prefer buying the max I can afford and living with it as long as feasible.
Right now I am thinking a 2.93 quad 17 iMac. It has a 27" screen and the ability to add on another 27" Cinema Display. Its performance should be very good for the price point (looks like I would have to jump to a 8 core tower to see much of a performance jump and that doubles the cost). It does not have tons of expandability but enough for me I think?
I would order it with the minimum ram config and then order 2x4gb chips from OWC (unless anyone has better recommendations). I would also order a 2TB external OWC Mercury drive and connect it via FW800 for time machine backup. Last but not least, a OWC 120GB internal SSD that I would use as the boot drive, and use the factory internal 1tb for music/photo storage.
Sounds reasonable? I have not bought a mac in a long time and this will be my 1st non-tower mac so I just wanted to make sure all of this was possible before i hit the purchase button.
