Apple has two professional level Macs on the market: the iMac with 5K Retina display and the Mac Pro. The former is an all-in-one desktop with impressive display capabilities, the latter a mini-tower with immense graphics potential.
A Mac desktop is your best option if you’re looking for a larger screen and increased power, both of which you can’t get from a Mac laptop. Apple has a few outstanding choices for real professional. Let us discuss various attributes of the iMac and Mac Pro and determine which is perfect for your needs.
iMac
The iMac comes in sizes of 21.5 and 27-inch, but for pro applications, we will suggest sticking with the 27-inch size as it offers a better 5120 x 2880 resolution. For the 14.7 million colour display of the iMac, Apple has developed its very own customised timing controller to make the screen function properly. It makes use of the full DCI-P3 colour space, which is the same as that used in digital movie theatres, and its 25% wider than the preceding generation of the sRGB scale.
The Retina 5K display is intended for creators of digital content and other professionals that work with very high-resolution and high-definition material. For instance, you could edit a 4K film on the Retina 5k iMac at full resolution using Final Cut Pro and have sufficient space to view clips, timeline, and tools.
The Retina 5k iMac has built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It also comes with headphone port, four USB 3 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, two Thunderbolt 2 ports and an SDXC card slot and is a product that’s ideally suited for the pro market.
Mac Pro
The latest model of Mac Pro has launched at the end of 2013. Its processor is much faster than the iMac. However, it has no built-in screen display or keyboard and comes with a CPU only. The turbine-like shape of the Mac Pro was designed with principal heat-generating constituents that face interiorly so that the internal fans could propel the heated air over the top to cool the interior.
The Mac Pro from its tiniest component to its largest was manufactured for speed. It has no moving parts inside apart from the fans; every other thing is a solid state! The system is furnished with only Flash storage; it has no internal hard disk drive.
The Mac Pro possesses six Thunderbolt 2 ports, an HDMI port, four USB 3 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet connectors, headphone jack, combined optical, audio, digital, output/analogue line out-mini-jack. 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 are also inbuilt.
The two newly updated Mac Pro configurations are: (i) A 6-core system with speeds of 3.7 GHz, dual AMD D500 graphics processors and 16 GB RAM. (ii) A 3.5 8-core system with 16 GB RAM and dual AMD D700 graphics processors. Both configurations come with 256 GB of Flash storage.
iMac vs. Mac Pro: Budget
Before every purchasing decision, it is imperative that the first thing you do is to outline your budget, your needs, and requirements. It isn’t wise to purchase a device that’s too expensive and has extensive capabilities and features that are more than you need. On the other hand, you also won’t want to buy a cheaper device that can’t cope with your demands six months down the line.
The golden rule is to take it slow and take the time to decide exactly what you need from the machine and to spend only according to your budgetary capacity.
Who should purchase the 5K iMac?
The iMac is a spectacular work of engineering. It’s fast and sleek and has the most awesome-looking display of any Mac ever designed. Below the surface, it possesses the right equilibrium of both performance and power that can undertake anything you want, be it editing of videos in 4K, photo editing, working with iWork or Microsoft Office or maybe just playing a video game.
The Mac Pro is in a league of its own with its distinctive and very exceptional design, and it’s also the first Mac that’s capable of displaying 5K videos. It’s not for everyone. Most professionals are better off purchasing a cheaper but still exceptionally capable iMac system that can satisfy all their computing needs.
Author Bio:
Varun is the Editor-in-Chief & Digital Strategist at Applesutra. When he isn’t busy devouring Apple blogs & podcasts, Varun spends his time following tennis (Vamos Rafa!), watching movies (superhero or super scary) or reading books (Audible/Kindle/old school).
