Mac Pro vs. iMac
At one point when the Mac Pro first came out, I drafted an article about why the Mac Pro was a better deal than the iMac for the poweruser home consumer. Yes, of course Mac Pros are worth it for professionals, but for the home user–even one who likes to really put his computer through its paces–is a Mac Pro worth the added investment?
Half-way through the article, I started realizing that it really may not be. Well, where’s the beef? What does a poweruser care about?
Processing power. Yes, the Mac Pro’s Xeon is better than the Intel Core 2 Duo. Now, forget about the 8-core Mac Pro. Unless money is immaterial to you, its ridiculous price tag makes the Mac Pro irrelevant for a consumer purchase discussion. That said, the Mac Pro has 4 cores, whereas the iMac has 2 cores. Nevertheless, a 2.66GHz Mac Pro’s overall benchmark of 299 competes with 2.16GHz iMac getting an overall benchmark of 245 and a 2.33GHz iMac at 259.
That seems significant, doesn’t it? Maybe. The zip archive benchmark took 2:01 on the Mac Pro, 2:15 and 2:22 on the iMacs; an MP3 encoding took 0:48 on the Mac Pro, 0:56 and 1:03 on the iMacs; the game ran at 91FPS on the Mac Pro, 74FPS and 83FPS on the iMacs. Those are certainly real differences. But be realistic. The zip took all 3 Macs two minutes. The encoding took all 3 Macs about a minute. We’re obsessing over seconds. And both computers played the game at over 60FPS. Many would argue that the magical 60FPS mark is all that really matters.
Disagree? Well, bear with me until we get to pricing.
Graphics Card. The Mac Pro comes standard with the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT 256MB. This is the same card in the high-end 24-inch iMac (albeit 128MB), and the mid-range iMacs have the decent ATI Radeon X1600. If you’re BIG into gaming, I suppose this would matter a bit. If you are a casual gamer or don’t do the amazing absolute latest and greatest games (I raise my hand on both counts), then the iMacs are absolutely adequate. But if it does matter to you, both cards let you upgrade to their 256MB equivalents.
Memory. Both Macs come with 1GB standard. The iMac maxes at 3GB. I’m sorry, that is more than adequate for a home consumer, even a poweruser. A home consumer buying a machine that can do 16GB of RAM but only using 1GB-3GB is like buying a mansion and never using 75% of the rooms. Furthermore, the Mac Pro RAM is more costly. Upgrading to 2GB costs $299 on a Mac Pro but only $175 on the iMac.
Storage. I used to think this was a big point. The Mac Pro’s four internal SATA bays, with drive mirroring, means fast fast FAST! I was discussing this with a person I work with, and he mentioned that he was mirroring some external drives for the same purpose. Okay. So a couple external drives take a bit of desk space, but so does a huge Mac Pro tower.
Misc. Time for each opponent to pull out his unique powerup. Mac Pros have PCI Express slots. But most home users never use them. Both come with a standard keyboard and mouse, but the iMac comes with Wi-fi and Bluetooth as a standard option whereas the Mac Pro tacks on another $79 for those features.
So, let’s do the cage match. In one corner, we have the 2.66GHz Mac Pro (bench 299), with 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, Wi-fi/Bluetooth, and a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. In the other corner, a 24-inch 2.16GHz iMac (bench 245), with 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, Wi-fi/Bluetooth. To be fair, we’ll upgrade the graphics card to 256MB ($125) to match the Mac Pro.
What’s the final “score”? The 24-inch 2.16GHz iMac weighs in at $2,299. The 2.66GHz Mac Pro with 23-inch display weighs in at a whopping $3,776. How valuable are those few extra seconds for MP3 encoding now? Are they worth $1,477 dollars?
Do you feel like I skewed the numbers a bit in favor of my point? Well, there is some wiggle room. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
In favor of the Mac Pro:
- I could save a few hundred dollars on a non-Apple monitor, to save some money on the Mac Pro. But to be fair, pick a high-quality model. Perhaps the Dell 24″ LCD. Pricegrabber is currently showing $585 which shaves $315 from the Mac Pro price.
- You can upgrade the iMac to 2.33GHz for an additional $250. This brings the iMac and Mac Pro to a slightly closer speed comparison.
It is only fair to note a discrepancy in the iMac arrangement:
- Very likely, you may not care about the 256MB upgrade for the iMac’s video card. Axe it. That saves us $125.
- You could argue that getting a smaller LCD would significantly lower the price of the Mac Pro. But the same is true for the iMac: Going from 24-inch to 20-inch drops the iMac price $500 dollars! This probably gives the iMac a slight advantage, because you won’t find a quality 20-inch monitor for the Mac Pro for that much less. But the iMac is going to be generous and just consider the smaller-monitor argument disqualified.
My favorable Mac Pro adjustments closed the gap by $565, but the iMac savings opened it by $125 again. That makes the Mac Pro expense sit at $1,037 ahead of the iMac.
Again: Are a few extra seconds of encoding or zipping, or a few extra FPS, worth $1,000? Bear in mind that both of these configurations would produce super-fast, deluxe systems bearing 24-inch monitors. You are paying a thousand bucks for the capability of extensive future expansion. Expansion that you likely will not need within the life of your Mac, especially if you apply the $1,000 toward replacing your iMac with a newer model sooner than you would be able to replace your Mac Pro.
The obvious skewing factor is if you already have a great, large LCD. However, even if you have a display currently but would like to upgrade to a nicer one, the iMac seems to be a real powerhouse that could double as a fine time to make that display upgrade for an incredibly competitive price/performance ratio in comparison to the hefty Mac Pro.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:05 pm
It used to be that technology was at the level where for people like us to be satisfied with the machine, we had to get the pro level hardware. Now, technology has advanced to where even the consumer level products will satisfy what used to be the “prosumer”.
I have no doubt that I would have been content with the performance from a MacBook versus my MacBook Pro. Maybe that’s just me talking already having the Pro, but I can’t help but thinking that I have a lot of power in this machine that I am not utilising – I might as well have gotten the MB and saved a few hundred bucks.
Conversely, the MacBook Pro was the only machine to come in over 13″, which I do not regret – I love my 15″ of space.
Too to consider is how frequently you buy machines. Yes, you would be fine with an iMac, but what of people who buy machines only once every five years? Perhaps they do need that expandability of the Mac Pro (RAM, for instance, or higher end gfx, or the PCI slots – remember the parents actually used two of those for expansion when technology advanced and they needed the card to give the larger hard drive size capability) to carry them when technology advanced even (unbelievably) further.
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:32 pm
At the moment I am looking to buy a new computer. My current ibook G4 has served me well but I am looking to make 3D games/animations/HD renderings and at 933MHz my ibook just doesn’t cut it.
I also agree with Jennifer, for those of us who don’t or can’t get a new computer every month we need a computer that can be upgraded. On another note just the design of the mac pro seems safer, what if something happens to the imac’s insides and you can’t afford coverage for it? with the mac pro you would at least have a slim chance of fixing it yourself.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
James, unfortunately, the price difference between the Mac Pro and the iMac is just too huge to have “saving money by upgrading it in the future” work out. If you do the math, you can probably buy and sell an iMac 3 times over for the total cost of a Mac Pro. That is, of course, factoring in the benefit of reselling your iMac on, say, eBay, and Apple computers in general get a good price on eBay, for their age, in comparison to other tech.
So that means you can have a whole new computer 3 times for the same amount of money.. and its spread out over numerous years! You benefit all around.
As far as maintenance concerns for the iMacs.. Apple has the technology behind the compact nature of the iMac down real good.
Just thoughts. Obviously, my viewpoint is just one side of the coin.
March 18th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
So far everyone who has replied has a name that starts with the letter J. So I decided to end the trend by throwing in a D. I like macs…
March 18th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
LOL! Thanks, Derek.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Well I am in the same position here at the moment. I could settle for a pro, or change my current setup (iMac at 2,16ghz) meaning that I add a nice 24″ Dell.
The difference is seconds. Exporting videos to your phone was never that fast. Image rendering takes, let’s be optimistic, 10 seconds less. I don’t think it’s worth shelling the 2200 € here in my place. I always wanted to have that silver beast of a machine, but thinking about it, I can’t just shell away that much.
Thanks for the article. I am stopping myself now every day from walking out of the store with a huge box. Gee.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Probably beating a dead horse at this point, I just cant help myself… It all depends on what you plan on doing. Does snow leopard take advantage of the additional cores? You betcha. Do you ever plan on upgrading components? You cant with the iMac (besides 2 memory dimms and a hard drive) I am a huge fan of my apple products…One thing that always bothered me was that I could never “upgrade” components like I could on non-apple hardware.
Sure, I could max out my 1st generation macbook pro to a whopping 2GB of RAM and replace the tired 100GB 5400 RPM with a much larger 7200RPM version… but that is it. No CPU upgrades, no additional RAM supported. I cant buy a logic board that will fit the chassis, the processors are soldered…you see my point? Hard drive and RAM are the only things you can replace. At least with a mac pro, you CAN replace the entire logic board if you want, you can pop in newer processors, you can continue to upgrade RAM beyond what is considered sufficient the year you bought it. Lets face it, a prosumer doesnt just play video games and encode audio. They use software that is RAM intensive (photoshop for example), they have many programs running simultanesously and you are comparing apples to oranges.
This prosumer would take a shiny new mac pro and probably skimp on a monitor until my rebate check came in. One makes a wonderful all-in-one home office computer and the other is a professional computer.
October 4th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Norm: Differing viewpoints are always welcome!
First, recognize that this article was written way before Snow Leopard (in fact, I think it was written when Tiger was out). We are only just beginning to benefit from multicore computing in a large way.
Second, I get the upgradeability mindset. You’re talking to someone who upgraded the heck out of a G4 QuickSilver (see here). But the G5 and Intel Mac Pros don’t seem to have as much upgrade potential in the community as the G4. I almost would rather build my tower and go the Hackintosh route if I was going to have a tower that could be tweaked to the max.
RAM is indeed becoming increasingly important for a variety of prosumer tasks, but I still see the iMac’s limits meeting those needs.
The Mac Pro rocks. My parents have one and I occasionally help them with it, and we’ve done some awesome things with it. I just feel the iMac has grown to the point that makes it much more difficult to justify “needing” to pay the Mac Pro’s hefty price tag.
Just differing thoughts. Thx for your comment!
October 31st, 2009 at 12:03 am
I have to go to the side of the iMac here. I personally just switched from the world of MS Windows to OSX. I am a web developer and many of my coherts were all using MacBook Pros. I have been doing this for about 15 years now and I just can’t develop and do graphics on a laptop. I tried and hated it. I also however didn’t want the clutter of a Mac Pro or any traditional desktop. I purchased a used Imac and maxed out the RAM to 6GB. I am very happy and feel very satifised with this purchase. When I am ready to go up then I can just sell this machine and put it towards the purchase of a new Mac. I will have to say I believe the iMac is more than sufficient for even a poweruser.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:22 am
Jonathon: Amen. Thanks for your comments. I’d like to add that the iMac has pushed the Mac Pro aside in an even greater way just this month of Oct ’09 with the advent of the quad-core iMac. Even the super-hungry poweruser can get quad-core satisfaction without having to give up the huge lump sum required for the Mac Pro.
November 16th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
i was incredibly lucky to find this conversation. we have to cps….and im pretty sure iv decided to replace the whole thing with a mac.
i want to keep the computer about 8 or more years.
unless i spend 1700 more on a screen (or use this eight year old one)i wont have a mac pro.
but its upgradable…it just seem tougher
than an imac with the 27 inch screen.
what do you guys think?
November 16th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
More upgradable, definitely. But you have to be putting some serious meat in your Mac Pro to make that extra money worth it. The advent of the 27″ iMac with quad-core just proves my point even more, like I said in my previous comment. You can get more than enough power and a great screen for much less than the Mac Pro route. When you’re ready to upgrade, put the iMac on eBay, recoup a chunk of your money (as Macs hold their value well on eBay), and get a new one! If you do the math, you’ll see you come out ahead with this approach.
Welcome to Macintosh, my friend…
November 24th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
[...] Cranky Bit » Mac Pro vs. iMac blog.crankybit.com/mac-pro-vs-imac – view page – cached At one point when the Mac Pro first came out, I drafted an article about why the Mac Pro was a better deal than the iMac for the poweruser home consumer. [...]
October 18th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
It used to be that technology was at the level where for people like us to be satisfied with the machine, we had to get the pro level hardware. Now, technology has advanced to where even the consumer level products will satisfy what used to be the “prosumer”.
I have no doubt that I would have been content with the performance from a MacBook versus my MacBook Pro. Maybe that’s just me talking already having the Pro, but I can’t help but thinking that I have a lot of power in this machine that I am not utilising – I might as well have gotten the MB and saved a few hundred bucks.
Conversely, the MacBook Pro was the only machine to come in over 13″, which I do not regret – I love my 15″ of space.
Too to consider is how frequently you buy machines. Yes, you would be fine with an iMac, but what of people who buy machines only once every five years? Perhaps they do need that expandability of the Mac Pro (RAM, for instance, or higher end gfx, or the PCI slots – remember the parents actually used two of those for expansion when technology advanced and they needed the card to give the larger hard drive size capability) to carry them when technology advanced even (unbelievably) further.
November 5th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
I’m still sticking with Mac Pro. It’s helped me put a whole movie together. I refuse to use anything else.
December 1st, 2010 at 1:50 pm
[...] vs. New: Real World Performance Over The Years – Computer Chips & Hardware Technology | Geek.com Cranky Bit » Mac Pro vs. iMac HP Compaq releases the cq 50 139wm – Cheap n cool! My reviews « Cafe Arjun – 15 [...]
December 5th, 2010 at 8:00 am
i dont quite agree with your points . but good post anyway
December 14th, 2010 at 12:05 am
iMac Ram‘s web site had a lot of good specs on the new iMacs… its worth giving it a look… the new love of my life is on there, the new Quad-Core Intel core i7 with 32GB…
January 18th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
I just love the Imac screen as you mentioned, its a super sweet design. I just love how it looks!! Very clean and compact!!
April 13th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
I think youve created some actually interesting points. Not too many people would in fact think about this the way you just did. Im seriously impressed that theres so significantly about this subject thats been uncovered and you did it so nicely, with so considerably class. Excellent one you, man! Really fantastic stuff here.
October 16th, 2011 at 8:43 am
I’m very interested in this question (Mac Pro or iMac) but the article is from May 2007. It’s October 2011 now and today’s Mac Pro and iMac models are totally different. How about an update of this article?