New iMac With The Retina Display Is The Choice Over Mac Pro For Most Users (Video)

Apple has unveiled their new iMac with a high definition Retina display. Now more than ever, the iMac appears to be the computer of choice for power users.

In days gone by, the Mac Pro, despite its name, was a good value for power users as well as professionals engaged in high end video editing and other graphics tasks, but Apple’s redesign of the Mac Pro a year ago priced many power users out of that market and sent them to the iMac. With the iMac, you get a computer with a built in display, keyboard, and mouse. Everything you need to get down to business, right out the box. Older Mac Pros came with everything except the monitor. But when you buy a new Mac Pro, all that is in the box is the Mac Pro. That’s just the first advantage of the iMac.

Extreme Tech ponders the choice between the new iMac and the Mac Pro, and comes down on the side of the Mac Pro — but not before building a good case for purchasing an iMac. The new 5K Retina screen is one big selling point for the new iMac, but so is the price.

“Upgrade the iMac to a Core i7-4790K (4GHz base, 4.4GHz Turbo), 16GB of DDR3-1600, a 512GB SSD, and the as-yet unknown R9 M295X, the total bill is just $3500. The Mac Pro, in contrast, is $4300 for a six-core 3.5GHz Xeon CPU, 16GB of DDR3-1866, a 512GB PCIe SSD, and a brace of AMD D500 GPUs. As blogger and programmer Marco Arment points out, these two configs are closely matched in Geekbench, with the iMac beating out the Xeon in single-core and losing… modestly in multi-core programming.”

Mac experts were touting the iMac over the Mac Pro long before the new Retina iMacs were announced. MacWorld’s Dan Frakes was one of the first to say that the choice for most users is the iMac in December 2013.

“While older Mac Pro models were appealing to a broad range of demanding users, the 2013 Mac Pro focuses almost entirely on the things true professional users need: multi-core performance, workstation-class GPUs and GPU computing, fast I/O, and the like. Say what you will about the new Mac Pro’s lack of options for internal expansion, but Apple doesn’t appear to have spared much expense when it comes to the components it did include. The result is that the new Mac Pro is the first Mac in a long time that’s clearly—and almost exclusively—for actual professional users.”

Though I certainly wouldn’t refuse a new Mac Pro if Macworld’s IT staff placed one on my desk, if I was given $3000 to spend on a desktop Mac, I’d be hard-pressed to pick the entry-level Mac Pro instead of a 27-inch iMac with 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, a 3TB Fusion Drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M GPU. Given my daily computing needs, the iMac would be competitive in performance, would include a great 27-inch display, and would occupy even less space on my desk than a Mac Pro with a separate display.

iMacs have occupied the desktops in many small companies for several years now. Adding the new Retina display will make the iMac even more useful for businesses engaged in graphic design and similar endeavors. For a small business on a budget, the iMac price tag is much easier to take than putting out somewhere around $4000-5000 each for new Mac Pros and all the required accessories.

As previously reported in The Inquisitr, some Apple fans were disappointed when Apple’s recent announcements didn’t include a Retina display version of the Macbook Air. But iMac fans, and desktop computing fans in general, can rejoice. The new iMac appears to be a solid winner.

[Image via MacWorld UK]