Ah, well, I spent my entire Wednesday driving to Salem, NH, and back to get
an up close and personal look at the Apple line of computers. Goody for me,
Apple had loaded CS2 on almost all of the demo machines, and so I got to
bounce back and forth between the various iMacs and Pro Macs, playing with
actual CS2 images and watching how the systems work.
Unfortunately, Apple chooses to only stock the basic machines in its stores.
Upgrades would be ordered through the online facility. I watched about seven
thousand people buy iPods, and get them in all sorts of custom
configurations by using safari and a sales rep. Also unfortunately, the
sales rep I spoke with was mostly an iPod guy. I think I knew more about the
internal capabilities of the machines for photo editing than he did. Maybe I
shouldn't have been surprised. <g>
I went in figuring that if I decided on Apple, it would be in one of three
different flavors: 20" iMac with an additional cheapo monitor for pallets; a
24" iMac with 3GB ram and the faster processor; or a Mac Pro with the 2.66
gig processors and 2 GB ram to start with. After messing around with all
three machines, I decided the one I liked best by a rather large margin was
the Mac Pro with a 23" Apple Cinema Display. (Just once in my life I'd like
to do a hands-on test and come out liking an option other than the most
expensive!)
The Mac Pro I used had the 2.66 gig processors, but only 1 gig of RAM. It
still smoked CS2 pretty good. I found some fairly large image files and
resized them and smart sharpened them and such to get an idea of how much I
could clog the machine up. Smart Sharpen sometimes took a few seconds to run
on a 16x20 image, but nothing like the antique Pentium 4 I'm running now.
Sigh. So it looks like a Mac Pro, if I can muster the courage to drop that
kind of cash. Which may mean putting off a system switch away from Olympus
for a while, which will in turn mean I can see what the so-called new
E-Thingy actually is before I drop another wad of cash. Arrrggggg! And
wouldn't it make more sense to get the best imaging system I can get and
make do computerwise than the other way around? Arrgggggg!
Ain't life a bowl of freaking cherries!
--Bob
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