Hi, I'm getting an Imac next month, any tips on where to buy and what to add on.
I'm going to get the 24" model and I plan to get 4g ram installed. Do I need the bigger hard drive? Is it worth getting the 1 terrabyte hard drive or is the 750g one enough?
Thanks for your input.

[jzamora]

I bought my 24" iMac from the Apple Store but refurbished. Everything works great and it came delivered looking just like a new machine. Original Price was $1800 and i only paid $1400. Great savings in my opinion. I suggest getting the least amount of RAM you can and upgrading it yourself, much cheaper this way. Crucial.com is the place to go. It is really easy to upgrade yourself. A medium size hard drive should be fine (320GB or 500GB) because if you are shooting a lot of pictures you are going to eventually end up with external storage anyway. Hope this helps.
--JZ

[skinja]

I bought my 24" iMac from the Apple Store but refurbished. Everything works great and it came delivered looking just like a new machine. Original Price was $1800 and i only paid $1400. Great savings in my opinion. I suggest getting the least amount of RAM you can and upgrading it yourself, much cheaper this way. Crucial.com is the place to go. It is really easy to upgrade yourself. A medium size hard drive should be fine (320GB or 500GB) because if you are shooting a lot of pictures you are going to eventually end up with external storage anyway. Hope this helps.
--JZ

I am looking at the same thing, I love that 24" mac. If it were me and soon should be, 1 meg of ram to start, I think that is a single stick(re sale) but I'm not positive I also think that it will take 2 - 2 meg sticks to fill, much cheaper from crucial, and easy to install.

Between you and jimbo, I'm either going to be devoriced or broke or both. The boss gave me the thumbs up to buy the 70 - 200 before our trip, now I just need to find one. Imac next.

Good luck on that.

John

[WJW]

I bought my 24" iMac from the Apple Store but refurbished. Everything works great and it came delivered looking just like a new machine.

I'm going to second the idea of buying a refurb from the Apple online store. Over the last 10 years we have purchased 5 different units and all have looked new and had no unusual problems. I did have one CD-Rom failure on an eMac (under warranty) and it was fixed promptly.

Never buy extra memory from Apple. The prices are silly and you can find good memory lots of places. OWC is one good place to buy memory but there are many others. I have always purchased my systems with the base memory and ordered extra memory from somewhere else at the same time.

Jeff

P.S. Refurbs purchased: G4/450 Sawtooth, 1.25GHz G4 eMac, iBook G4/800, MacBook Core Duo, Mac Mini C2D 1.83

[petenick]

Having 7 Macs over the last few years, I recently bought and returned a 24" iMac. The 24"'s do have an S-IPS display which is great for viewing angles (much better than the 20" which has a TN display), but it is horribly lit! It is very very uneven, and much brighter on the left half than the right. Set the display on one in store to the lowest brightness (as this is what it will need to be for correct color reproduction in photos) and then to a white background and you will see what I mean. In store they have the brightness cranked up all the way making things vivid but not realistic. I had the Apple store open 5 others and try in store and they all had the same problem. I also saw bad backlight bleeding on them also. The corners and edges of the display when displaying black has gray and white light bleeding in. It was a fantastic machine, but the display had so many problems with it. The problems aren't as noticeable on a 20", but it does have a TN or twisted nematic display which can only display about 260,000 colors. The rest it displays thru dithering, making Apple's claim of millions of colors displayed sort of valid. I would definitely make sure the return policy will cover you if you buy one from an online retailer.

I bought from smalldog.com, as it came upgraded with 4gb RAM and was the cheapest place to buy from. They shipped fast, and when I called with my screen issues I was told I could either get a replacement which i didn't want, after seeing the stores 5 bad ones, or a full refund so I chose refund. Great people to deal with. I could go on and on about the screen issues and what models do and don't have them, but unless you are concerned with it I will leave it be. Currently I am looking at a used Mac Pro, and will probably use a nicer CRT until I can save enough for a good S-IPS 24" monitor to accompany it.

[Gooshin]

EDIT:

nvm, i thought this was about laptops.

[dopeytree]

it has been proven that solid state drives don't provide faster data access and they cost shite loads more so dont bother with that!

I would wait a month maybe because apple are set to update in a few weeks!

Make sure you have 2gb ram and around 500gb-1000gb of space in on disk then buy an external disk to be a back up (so the same size!) so you can use superduper to keep a fully bootable backup if case the worst happens

I would also advise updating the ram yourself!

I upgraded my macbook pro to 3gb ram and 500gb harddisk for less than £200 apple would have been about £450!!!

Send me a message when you get your mac and ill link you to some uttility apps you'll need/want

[Gooshin]

it has been proven that solid state drives don't provide faster data access and they cost shite loads more so dont bother with that!

dont provide faster data access compared to WHAT?

also, there are benefits of size, weight, and heat and longevity, in which solid state wins, also you dont have to worry about laptop orientation.

(again tho, for some reason i thought we were talking about laptops, this is less of an issue with a desktop, for which i would still chose standard HD's)

[skinja]

it has been proven that solid state drives don't provide faster data access and they cost shite loads more so dont bother with that!

I would wait a month maybe because apple are set to update in a few weeks!

Make sure you have 2gb ram and around 500gb-1000gb of space in on disk then buy an external disk to be a back up (so the same size!) so you can use superduper to keep a fully bootable backup if case the worst happens

I would also advise updating the ram yourself!

I upgraded my macbook pro to 3gb ram and 500gb harddisk for less than £200 apple would have been about £450!!!

Send me a message when you get your mac and ill link you to some uttility apps you'll need/want

Hey I'd be interested to see what utility apps your talking about.

[dopeytree]

I remember reading some tests on the macbook air the solid state hardisk vs the ordinary one. The speed and battery were around the same.

But yeah they are probably more reliable but we're talking about a computer for photography here so hes going to need loads of space and i think sshd cop out around 100GB whereas you can get 1TB (1000GB) single convential hardisk.

If your loaded then yead maybe sshd but for the ordiay i'd go for the 1TB or 750GB HD in your imac.

For more info check Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About check the forums section

[Gooshin]

HD space for storage and HD space for operation are two different things.

lightroom i only like a 300 megabyte program, why would you need a terrabyte to run it?

and lets be realistic here, do you REALLY need to have 20 thousand photographs accessable right there on the spot?

[dopeytree]

MacBook Air 1.6GHz HDD 1.8GHz SSD
CPU 79.98 99.61
Thread Test 148.81 134.99
Memory Test 140.42 148.00
Quartz Graphics Test 96.89 107.74
Open GL 17.26 18.27
User Interface 105.81 113.53
Disk Test 24.05 47.26
Sequential 42.21 40.82
Uncached Write 30.96 MB/s 20.83 MB/s [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 31.19 MB/s 26.32 MB/s [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 7.27 MB/s 7.97 MB/s [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 30.42 MB/s 48.75 MB/s [256K blocks]
Random 16.81 56.13
Uncached Write 0.57 MB/s 2.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 18.35 MB/s 16.92 MB/s [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 0.35 MB/s 7.02 MB/s [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 13.28 MB/s 48.24 MB/s [256K blocks]


http://stateless.geek.nz/2008/02/05/macbook-air-16ghz-hdd-vs-18ghz-ssd-benchmarks/

Look at the read/write speeds

[Gooshin]

dude, i'm not talking about write speeds

its all the other stuff thats beneficial.

[dopeytree]

Leapard is around 12GB alone then add yours apps about 4GB and music maybe 15-20GB and it all starts to dissappear.


Lightroom is about 150MB

But when you start shooting raw filling up your 2GB or 4GB card each time you take photos it all adds up. soon you have 30-40GB

With macs you need around 20% miimum for it to function properly due to the nature of the way macs are partishioned...they self heal unlike windows with framgmentations etc

Basically the more space the quicker it will run.

And its much easier to get 1TB installed when ordering. Its such a pain to upgrade, have you ever tried to open a new imac? or a macbook pro?

The most important thing though is the ram!

2gb minimum.

[dopeytree]

I'd get the third one along on the apple site:

then upgrade the ram to 4GB and the HD to 1TB:

2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1 GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO w/256MB GDDR3