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Next Apple machine ?

I just don't think the new Mac Pro is a good fit for any photographer. It's more suited for editing high rez video and doing rendering in 3D applications.
Yeah. $6000 for a computer with a 256GB SSD seems on the excessive side for photography. I'm sure some will rationalize it though. I guess if you have already splashed $50,000 for a IQ4150, what's another $10,000 or so.
 

Bernard

Member
Are we at the point that a maxed out Macbook Pro connected to an external display and RAID arrays is faster than the Mac Pro 2013?

I am curious to hear from people who know about this stuff...I know the kind of performance I want, but I do not know the best way to get it with a non-iMac Mac these days...
Stuart,

barefeats.com will provide the answer. They test Macs and Mac accessories under different professional workloads (photo, video, audio, animation, etc).

There's tons of information on the site, but you can probably start here:

https://barefeats.com/macbook_pro_2018_geekbench.html

..and then move-on to articles that dig deeper into different configurations for the models that interest you.
 

Stuart Richardson

Active member
Thanks Bernard,

I had come across it once or twice. It is a bit hard to navigate, but there is indeed a lot of information there! It seems like the most sensible thing for the moment is to wait. My Mac Pro is still working adequately for what I am doing, there are still options for upgrades (adding more internal storage, for example, though most of mine is external RAID). Meanwhile, I am pretty reliant on FlexColor and Hasselblad just confirmed that they have discontinued the X series scanners and will not update the software to 32 bit, so either way, I am kind of stuck with Mojave for the moment. The new Mac Pros or newer macs will prevent that from working, which would mean I will need a dedicated scanning workstation...something I had hoped to avoid.
 

Bernard

Member
Yeah. $6000 for a computer with a 256GB SSD seems on the excessive side for photography. I'm sure some will rationalize it though. I guess if you have already splashed $50,000 for a IQ4150, what's another $10,000 or so.
It is probably overkill for an owner/operator kind of shop, but it wouldn't be if you spent all day retouching or doing catalogue work.
You wouldn't run that from local storage, so the dual 10Gb Ethernet will come-in handy.

The $6,000 configuration is confusing a lot of people. Nobody will buy it like that, just like nobody ever buys a pickup truck with no options. You will either add more CPU, or more memory, or more storage, or more GPU, etc, depending on your requirements.

I'm not a Mac person, but I ordered a new Linux workstation a few months back. The process was exactly the same (as was the price). Vendors start with a "base" configuration that does nothing particularly well, and then you upgrade the CPU, GPU, memory, etc, until you get what you want. In my case, I knew that GPU memory was critical (for video work), but CPU wasn't. On-board storage wasn't critical either. I run everything off-of a NAS.
 

hcubell

Well-known member
On a related topic, will a 2013 Mac Pro or a new Mac Mini be compatible with the new Mac Pro Display XDR? My 2013 Mac Pro shipped with two AMD D300 GPUs. Not sure if the video is upgradable.
Any disadvantage to doing photo editing with a 6k monitor?
Thanks.
 
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