I can't really be arsed to type everything out on tapatalk, but I'm basically in complete agreement with davrosG5. In terms of screen, I'm looking at spending about a grand and I doubt the iMac screen is that good. Good enough is not good enough as far as I'm concerned.

I love the glossy screen. I get to play on my iMac and have a handsome bastard staring back at me

Possibly one of the reasons Macs aren't heavily used in the creative industry here, is their insitence on using glossy screens. The HSE equivalent will fine a company, if they provide an employee with a glossy screen, which means that they are left with either Mac minis or Mac Pros. The mini isn't powerful enough and the Pro is just too expensive. They want a 600-1000€ powerful desktop, which they can attach a professional, matt finish monitor to.


Printing production work, for a start. Even web work. The stuff is all proofed, before it goes out and is professionally printed, before being presented to the client. Using a display that can't display the full spectrum or is badly calibrated can be disasterous - especially if the customer's logo uses colours that are hard to acturately represent on a standard monitor.

I worked on one project, where I had an old monitor as a second monitor, which I couldn't calibrate. After several days work on the CSS templates, I showed it to my boss. He asked me why I hadn't put the gradients in? I asked him what gradients, showing him the original material on my screen. Moving to another computer, there was clearly a gradient running down the screen.

Okay, this example was an old monitor, but if the gradient of the actual colours fall in the 14 - 16 bit range, no standard monitor, or an iMac, will be able to display that accurately and you'll not be able to reliably proof the images, before sending them off to the customer. That is a big no-no!


Exactly. A decent desktop machine can be bought for around 800€, which would be more than suitable for graphic work. A pro monitor can cost over 1500€. If you are spending a minimum of 2300€ for a Mac Pro, which will give similar performance to an 800€ standard desktop, that is a huge budget increase.

When I was in Soho, many post production houses were using Apple kit for their work. Giving a grade to a piece based on a calibrated Apple monitor. I know there other professional photographers out there who'll work off a laptop screen in the first instance, possibly doing a further edit later on a larger screen.
Some people will then go onto spending a wedge of cash on a screen and possibly even a clef grey smock to slip on in front of the display. And a hood for the unit.
Is it necessary? Perhaps in a few rare jobs, which is why I'd guess we don't see those types of displays and setups as commonplace.
But for most people? Sorry, I don't buy it. A well calibrated monitor, with a careful user who's paying attention to their work shouldn't come too far wrong. You put in a graduation that wasn't meant to be there because you were working off a non-calibrated display. Not be cause the bit-depth was insufficient. Theres also plenty of tools in the software that'll show you the numeric value of any colour, meaning that if you know your clients colour make up it's simple to check what you've got in front of you is correct.
Besides, if you do have a job where colour accuracy is that vital, good thing the iMac will support a second display, huh?

^^ This.

I've used an iMac with a glossy screen for colour production work. We used a standard RGB colour profiling all the way through the process, and the final PDF was output as CMYK. The screen I used was plenty accurate for this process.

I think perhaps we're focusing a bit to much on the iMac screen.

I'm sure it's good enough for the majority of colour work but it's still not going to beat a dedicated colour critical display and nor should it. If it did then the iMac would cost well into Mac Pro territory and it would be overkill for a large chunk of the user group that the iMac nominally targets (home users).
If you get on with the glossy screen then that's great. If you don't then it's a fairly big deal breaker and one that, unlike the MacBook Pro, can't be overcome with a BTO upgrade.

There is also the issue of expandability, you cannot add any expansion cards to an iMac. I realise that you'll eventually be able to hook up some PCIe cards via the Thunderbolt ports but Thunderbolt has a maximum 2x bandwidth per port which is nigh on useless for things like SAS/SATA expansion cards (normally 4x or 8x required for a decent number of ports) or adding a second graphics card (8x or 16x slot required). Using an iMac locks you out of taking advantage of nVidia graphics card acceleration of CS5 stuff.
As for adding storage, yes, I know you can add external drives via USB and FW800 but the fastest performance still comes from internal drives connected via SATA or SAS connections. Apples latest decision to fiddle with the SATA or Power connection on the internal drives in the iMac is a case in point. They don't want users fiddling with the insides so are making it harder for people to do low cost upgrades without involving the dealer network or an Apple Store.

All these issues go away if you have an intermediate tower system that sits alongside the iMac and below the Mac Pro. I'm sure Apple realises this as well as users do but it's not going to change its position because doing so would nuke MacPro sales because it's massively overpowered for a lot of people who are forced into buying it at the moment. I won't ulimately be surprised if Apple kill off the MacPro in the end because it no longer fits in very well with the markets Apple is focusing most of its efforts in.

Oh, I agree there's a gap in the line-up for a mid-tower Mac. Sadly, Apple seem to be moving away from the towers altogether. It wouldn't surprise me to see the Mac Pro line dropped entirely before the year's out.

I tink it's unlikely to be in that time frame but I think in the long term you might be right. As it stands there are certain things - hidef video capture, fibre channel data access and a few others - which you simply cannot do on an iMac. Yet. All of those things currently rely on there being a usable PCI slot in the computer.

Here's the trick - Thunderbolt is, essentially, PCI on a wire. There's nothing you can do on a PCI card that you can't do on a Thunderbolt connection. In fact, one of the peripherals I've seen is a box which you plug PCI cards into which you connect to a Mac via thunderbolt. Right now there are certain very useful devices like blackmagic capture cards and High speed data links that you can't do properly over USB. A lot of those are possible over Thunderbolt.

The Mac Pro has essentially a small list of advantages over the iMac - Sheer processor grunt, easier upgradeability, multiple drive support/easy replacement and PCI slots. Two of those advantages can easily be nullified by Thunderbolt.

In a year or two, the only advantages the Mac pro will have is being able to swap the video card, which I'm not convinced people actually do all that often, and sheer absolute available CPU power which, as CPU's grow more powerful on an individual basis, is less of an issue anyway; the only time you'll need a lot of cores (for example) is in very specialised massively parallel data processing applications. I've got a quad core 3.4Ghz processor in my iMac. Six months ago, that was Mac Pro territory.

Right now, there is still a need for the Mac Pro. if Thunderbolt takes off in terms of peripherals, I can see that need being much, much reduced in maybe 18 months time. 18 months from now, an awful lot of the Mac Pro's use cases will be fulfilled equally by a Mac MIni with Thunderbolt peripherals.

I think that would be a mistake. When Apple had problems before it was high end graphics users who basically kept Apple going until the rebirth as a consumer products company. The Mac Pro line is probably not a major earner now. With macs overall only making 27% of sales or profits, and laptops being subtstantially more than desktops then Mac Pros probably only make up a fraction of desktop sales. Though that does not mean that they would be sensible to abandon it as a segment.

WHy not? Many businesses stop producing products even though they are profitable. Desicions are made to invest money into segments that offer substantialy more return on investment. Ok Apple are different in some respects but as they will have "freed" the iPhone and iPad from having to have a PC with the imminent release of iOS5 and so much of thier revenue now comes from segments removed from the computer. You could argue Apple is setting itself up to remove the "computer" section from Apple all together!

Re. HD video capture - from what?
Most HD cameras use a memory card/hard disc to save the files to. It's trivial to get these into an iMac. We do it all the time at work.
Everything else (like a tape deck) usually has a FW output.

Well they dropped the word Computer from their name some years ago.

Not everything. For example if you work in the video games field and want to capture footage, consoles don't generally have a way to record the final output and only have HDMI out. Or if you want to screen grab footage from mobile devices like tablets. I was thinking of this lot's products as an example. Given I suspect Apple products won't get USB 3 for a while yet, some sort of T-bolt version of their breakout boxes would be required to use them on an iMac, Mabook or (I assume) future Mac Mini.

(googles)

Ooh, it seems they do plan to. Quite a nice looking box in fact.

Jon

I read somewhere that peripherals that were historically PCI plug in jobbies will become available over Thunderbolt.