Jud asks me the question, why not an iMac instead of a MacPro? I started answering in a comment, but I’ll just make it another post.

There are a couple of huge differences between the iMac and the MacPro. Well, more than a couple, but the (configurable) ones that affect me the most are, video card, RAM, and options for disk drives. Also, of course, the machine is just faster. Faster bus. More cores. Blah blah blah.

The video card has a direct affect on how fast Aperture, Photoshop, etc., can process a huge photo, so the digital work flow is going to be much faster with a high end video card. Also, the MacPro has many bays for hard drives so you can throw in a RAID card and stripe 4 huge drives for speed. And of course you can stuff it to the gills with RAM. All these things speed up the digital workflow, which right now is bordering on frustrating slow on my MacBook Pro. This is why professionals use the MacPros, not the iMacs (though the iMacs are killer machines, imo, just not for photo or video editing).

Think about previewing hundreds of photos back to back. A single photo from my camera is about 15 megs, so it takes a while to load and render each one. Typically, I make several passes through all the photos, rating them, weeding out the bad ones, adding keywords, and all of this is very slow on the MBP. It would definately be faster on a current iMac, but not fast enough.

It’s all about the digital workflow. In my experience, I spend much more time processing the photos I’ve taken, than taking them. It’s too slow. Far too slow. Some of this is my inexperience. But some is definately down to the hardware. I want to spend as little time processing photos as I can. This is why I want a killer machine. I spend hours. Days. Processing photos. That’s time I could be doing something else. Something useful. Like watching Bounty Hunter crush school buses in HD.