Back in '12 or '14 or something, when they slashed prices on the base iMac, I convinced the wife that it was a good time to pick up a family computer, replacing the hand-built from leftover parts Windows system from the early 2000's that we were still using. We were already pretty good on the way to being tied into the Apple ecosystem, and with 2 kids just reaching the age of using computers, I wanted the ease of use of going Mac. So we picked up 2 of the base model iMacs from that year, one that's for the 'family' and one that's in my home office.
The one in the home office runs all the 'infrastructure' like Movies, Music (i.e the old iTunes), Photos, etc... for home sharing across the network. It's got a 4TB external USB 3.0 WD hanging off it to handle the storage needs for those various libraries that but generally drives the rest off the internal hard drive. In recent years, with the addition of some Roku's to the house, it's also picked up the duties of being a PLEX server, serving up all the same libraries (excluding any DRM'd Movies via some curated .plexignore settings). This iMac is wired right to the network to provide the most stable bandwidth for those server related duties.. It's also the one I use daily for day to day non-work activities, browsing, mail, etc, as my work computer is mandated for work related tasks only. The 'family' iMac sitting in the living room is just connected wirelessly, and mostly serves the kids needs, like school research, projects, gaming, etc...
They're both getting pretty long in the tooth now, and while they still run, they're being pretty taxed. Some game my son wanted installed to play against his friends chokes the system, and locks it up so bad the screen saver can't even run. Reboots take like a good 1/2 hour before everything settles down. Even mail, browsing, etc.. can sometimes feel like a chore.
Depending on how tax return season goes, I'm hoping to be able to swing a couple of new machines. The 'family' one will probably just be a near base model iMac again by going with the base Retina iMac. The home office desktop/server one I'm not sure on how I should replace it. I like the idea of the lower power consumption of the Mac Mini for the machine that's always on, but it gets up there in price pretty fast once you spec it as close as you can to the base Retina iMac, mostly due to the fact that the Mini only has SSD options for the hard drive, and the iMac allows larger storage on slower spinning drives. You take base Mac Mini, bump it to 1TB to match the base storage of the iMac, add a new mouse and keyboard, and it's coming up as slightly more than the iMac, with the same specs, also with a 1TB drive, has the mouse and keyboard included, and I wouldn't have to repurpose one of my monitors for it.
But the Mac Mini might do a better job in its server duties than keeping an iMac running all the time (like I am now) so I'm torn about which way to go. Considering that money IS a factor, what's the general recommendation for our needs? I know non-Mac is probably the cheapest options, but I'd like to stick in the Apple ecosystem for it's ease of compatibility with the way I've already got everything working.
The one in the home office runs all the 'infrastructure' like Movies, Music (i.e the old iTunes), Photos, etc... for home sharing across the network. It's got a 4TB external USB 3.0 WD hanging off it to handle the storage needs for those various libraries that but generally drives the rest off the internal hard drive. In recent years, with the addition of some Roku's to the house, it's also picked up the duties of being a PLEX server, serving up all the same libraries (excluding any DRM'd Movies via some curated .plexignore settings). This iMac is wired right to the network to provide the most stable bandwidth for those server related duties.. It's also the one I use daily for day to day non-work activities, browsing, mail, etc, as my work computer is mandated for work related tasks only. The 'family' iMac sitting in the living room is just connected wirelessly, and mostly serves the kids needs, like school research, projects, gaming, etc...
They're both getting pretty long in the tooth now, and while they still run, they're being pretty taxed. Some game my son wanted installed to play against his friends chokes the system, and locks it up so bad the screen saver can't even run. Reboots take like a good 1/2 hour before everything settles down. Even mail, browsing, etc.. can sometimes feel like a chore.
Depending on how tax return season goes, I'm hoping to be able to swing a couple of new machines. The 'family' one will probably just be a near base model iMac again by going with the base Retina iMac. The home office desktop/server one I'm not sure on how I should replace it. I like the idea of the lower power consumption of the Mac Mini for the machine that's always on, but it gets up there in price pretty fast once you spec it as close as you can to the base Retina iMac, mostly due to the fact that the Mini only has SSD options for the hard drive, and the iMac allows larger storage on slower spinning drives. You take base Mac Mini, bump it to 1TB to match the base storage of the iMac, add a new mouse and keyboard, and it's coming up as slightly more than the iMac, with the same specs, also with a 1TB drive, has the mouse and keyboard included, and I wouldn't have to repurpose one of my monitors for it.
But the Mac Mini might do a better job in its server duties than keeping an iMac running all the time (like I am now) so I'm torn about which way to go. Considering that money IS a factor, what's the general recommendation for our needs? I know non-Mac is probably the cheapest options, but I'd like to stick in the Apple ecosystem for it's ease of compatibility with the way I've already got everything working.
Obviously there's just some general performance differences in the machine, but these current gen Macs with TB3 with a TB3/NVMe PCIe drive have spectacular external performance.
