What's so good about macs besides retina display?

absplastic wrote in post #17976835
Stock minis are absurdly bottlenecked by hard drive performance, to a "what was Apple thinking?" degree. The 5400 rpm drives are the slowest I've ever experienced, and the fusion drive is an improvement only for people manipulating lots of tiny files (mp3, web browsing, word docs, etc), but not for photo editing that is thrashing GB worth of data. The drives decay seriously over time, not just from becoming fragmented (which you can fix with a reformat and restore) but from remapping bad sectors to the innermost, slowest part of the drive platter. It's not uncommon for one of these machines to take several minutes to boot and show the self-diagnostic progress bar every time.

The good news is, a current (2015-2016) SSD makes these minis feel like completely different machines. You would not believe the difference it makes. They are in no way obsolete, they just need some new drive love.

Again, the fact that they put such a pathetic drive in a device costing $800 starting price is absurd. You seem to be simultaneously knocking Apple while defending them...

It was 2008.
My Toshiba laptop from college was on its last leg.
The battery held zero charge and required constantly power,just like a desktop.
Therefore, it had been stationary a while.

Researched desktops and Macs, never owned one before.
This was 2008 at the height of the "Vista is terrible!" reports and reviews.
Both online and from friends and family's personal experiences.

Bought a 21" iMac, and from day one I loved it.
No registry to check before booting.
No unknown disconnection from my same wifi source.

When it came time to get something mobile before moving to Japan in early 2013 I got the Air.
Same laptop I am typing this on today.

When it comes to batching photos, my dual core and 8gigs of ram do just fine.
Even while playing music.

If your goal is to benchmark, no one here will argue that you can get a faster PC for the same price. Or comparable processing power for less than the cost of a Mac.

If I saw a strong reason to get a PC, I would.
Until then, I'm quite happy here in 2012

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17976849
Again, the fact that they put such a pathetic drive in a device costing $800 starting price is absurd.

Agreed. My wife's 2013 Macbook had the same issue, only worse. It came with 4GB and a slow hard drive, and 16GB + SSD made it usable.

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17976849
You seem to be simultaneously knocking Apple while defending them...

I am. It's frustrating that their base configurations often have too little RAM and terrible cheap drives making them 10% of the machines they could be.

Not only that but making the RAM non-upgradable is making my next Mac purchase very iffy.

I totally agreed they are not without their faults. Yesterday I found a used 2011 Macbook Pro (5 years old)
For $300 I was hesitant to get it as a 'home' station. Reading the spec it only had 2gig of ram, USB 2.0 and a 160HDD
I was amazed how underpowered and small spec-ed this PRO base-model was. Needless to say I did not buy it.

FarmerTed1971 wrote in post #17976885
Not only that but making the RAM non-upgradable is making my next Mac purchase very iffy.

That's the biggest issue I have with Apple. It really ticks me off that they feel the need to handicap all their stuff and force you to buy upgrades through them, especially when they charge you 3x what the hardware costs you to source on your own. For instance, Apple wanted another $200 to upgrade my Mac Mini to 16gb of RAM... I bought my RAM separately for $60 and popped it in in less than a minute. How people refuse to admit that's absurd is beyond me... and now the new Mac Mini's have the RAM soldered in so you can't buy it separately or upgrade it later... really? People are OK with that?

I have a Late 2012 Mini and it runs PS and LR quite well still. I may get a larger/faster SSD and break the Fusion drive I have in there right now.

flowrider wrote in post #17976896
I have a Late 2012 Mini and it runs PS and LR quite well still. I may get a larger/faster SSD and break the Fusion drive I have in there right now.

And that's awesome that it works for you, and I did enjoy the form factor of my Mini, but the value per dollar is undeniably in favor of a PC. I have all in all around $900 invested in my PC and it has a water cooled and overclocked i7 Sandybridge CPU (8 threads) at 4.5ghz, 16gb of DDR3, 2 SSD's, an HDD, an R9 390 GPU and more USB 3.0 ports than I know what to do with... that's less than I paid for my Mac Mini, which to me, is insane.

The good thing about the Mac Mini was because I had the model prior to the soldered RAM it held it's value, I sold it at the beginning of the year for $600

What makes Macs especially popular with photographers is the turn-key system nature of them. You take the iMac out of the box, plug it in, and go. Nothing is a 100% success rate, of course, but it's basically true that you don't have to be a "computer guy". Many people, especially gamers like to build their own systems, and they can get as much or more powerful a system for less cash outflow. But don't discount the amount of work that goes into spec'ing parts, assembling, testing and troubleshooting.

Since we are making use of the car analogies today, I see a DIY PC as the "built not bought" option, like an Impreza that's been tuned, stock internals replaced, aftermarket exhaust, turbo, etc. Where as the Mac is like buying a stock Porsche and driving it as is. Both cars are fast and fun to drive, both get you to work, but one solution is for people that enjoy the project aspect of building and tuning, and one is for some one who just wants to drive. A pre-built PC (Dell, Gateway, Sony) seems to me like taking the Toyota Corolla or Ford Fusion option. Cheaper, but not likely to impress in form or function.

The same is true for computers and photographers; some people enjoy building computers and learning all about the components, some people don't want to know what's inside and just want to edit photos on the fastest hardware they can get in a no-nonsense turnkey solution. The higher end Macs deliver on that, and the cost of the Mac Pro is pretty true to the Porsche analogy.

That said, knowing your way around the Mac OS is pretty important these days for a commercial photographer. I haven't been in a commercial studio in the last 4 years that had anything other than iMacs or Macbook Pros for shooting and editing. They are completely ubiquitous.

absplastic wrote in post #17976916
What makes Macs especially popular with photographers is the turn-key system nature of them. You take the iMac out of the box, plug it in, and go. Nothing is a 100% success rate, of course, but it's basically true that you don't have to be a "computer guy". Many people, especially gamers like to build their own systems, and they can get as much or more powerful a system for less cash outflow. But don't discount the amount of work that goes into spec'ing parts, assembling, testing and troubleshooting.

Since we are making use of the car analogies today, I see a DIY PC as the "built not bought" option, like an Impreza that's been tuned, stock internals replaced, aftermarket exhaust, turbo, etc. Where as the Mac is like buying a stock Porsche and driving it as is. Both cars are fast and fun to drive, both get you to work, but one solution is for people that enjoy the project aspect of building and tuning, and one is for some one who just wants to drive. A pre-built PC (Dell, Gateway, Sony) seems to me like taking the Toyota Corolla or Ford Fusion option. Cheaper, but not likely to impress in form or function.

The same is true for computers and photographers; some people enjoy building computers and learning all about the components, some people don't want to know what's inside and just want to edit photos on the fastest hardware they can get in a no-nonsense turnkey solution. The higher end Macs deliver on that, and the cost of the Mac Pro is pretty true to the Porsche analogy.

That said, knowing your way around the Mac OS is pretty important these days for a commercial photographer. I haven't been in a commercial studio in the last 4 years that had anything other than iMacs or Macbook Pros for shooting and editing. They are completely ubiquitous.

I would've agreed with this a few years ago, not because I was a Mac user a few years ago, but because this was definitely true then. These days with the gaming community in the PC world growing and the success of Windows 10, many pre-built PC's are actually very good machines and excellent value for what's in them.

I built my PC and do tune my cars as well, I won't deny that that's my personality type and can certainly understand why not everyone is into that, but the latest pre-built PC's are every bit as good as a comparable Mac for much less money. If you wanted to spend that same amount you had budgeted for a Mac on a PC you'd get a much more capable machine.

I can also see the value in knowing the system and the software. And I did enjoy OS-X, that was the biggest hiccup for me switching to PC, I was really afraid I would hate Windows (because I had in the past). But after a brief run with Windows 7 I upgraded to Windows 10 and haven't missed OS-X since.

I WAS excited for that new Macbook last year, until it was confirm there was not 16Gb of ram offered...
Talk about under resourcing a brand new model....

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17976914
The good thing about the Mac Mini was because I had the model prior to the soldered RAM it held it's value, I sold it at the beginning of the year for $600

Yeah, both my Mac Pro tower and my wife's Macbook were the last of their kind with user upgradeable RAM and drives. This definitely kept them relevant and providing good value. I too am disappointed by the move to soldered-in-place components, particularly with the video card in the latest Mac Pro, as that particular piece is often the first to become outdated; you can buy it maxed out with RAM and drives, but you can't configure it with a graphics card from 2018

I understand why the stuff is all soldered in place in the laptops though. The extreme thinness and weight reduction would not be possible with socketed components. I don't like the non-upgradeability of my Macbook, but at the same time I do travel with it and would not trade it for something like an Alienware laptop with 3 times the weight and thickness.

I'm still rocking my 2009 Mac Pro 16 gbs ram 750 GBs HD1, 1 TB HDII. (2009).

Never a problem. I have had many PCs and usually 3 years and I was upgrading or had a MAJOR crash.

airfrogusmc wrote in post #17977360
I'm still rocking my 2009 Mac Pro 16 gbs ram 750 GBs HD1, 1 TB HDII. (2009).

Never a problem. I have had many PCs and usually 3 years and I was upgrading or had a MAJOR crash.

Be thankful that you dodged the 2011-2013 Macbook Pro video issues.

Don't have a laptop.