These applications are not optimized for more than a few cores anyway, so if you can get a CPU with a faster base clock, you will be able to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of the regular iMac. For standard post-processing work in Lightroom and Photoshop, the iMac is going to be your best bet, plain and simple.Ī pretty decent build with the latest generation iMac Retina 5K will cost around $2K – that’s a huge difference in price! In fact, if you spend a bit more and get an 8-core Intel Core i9 CPU, you will be able to potentially outperform the basic Mac Pro when running Lightroom and Photoshop. Unless you stitch a lot of super high-res panoramas, or edit 4K+ content and need all the CPU cores, RAM and GPU you can get, there is no point in getting them. The thing is, machines like the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro are better suited for demanding, multi-threaded applications that can fully take advantage of their processing power. I just don’t see the point of spending this kind of money on a machine that you will be using to edit images. Want to get the new 32″ Pro Display XDR? Add another $6K on top of that. Add a solid 4K IPS wide-gamut monitor, and you are looking at $7,500+. So for the most basic and “workable” machine, you are looking at spending at least $6,400.

The next “step up”, which is a bare minimum in my books, is the 1 TB SSD option, which you will need to spend another $1,400 for.

For the most basic Mac Pro, you are looking at shelling out $6K, which will come with a mere 256 GB of SSD storage! It is puzzling why Apple even bothers selling the 256 GB option because that’s clearly not enough. However, despite its many strengths, it is not a machine I would recommend to most of our readers. Running powerful, workstation-class Intel Xeon processors with up to 28 cores, up to 1.5 TB of RAM, up to 8 TB of fast PCIe NVMe flash SSD storage, up to 2x powerful GPUs and plenty of expandability options, the Mac Pro is a dream machine for any content creator. Without a doubt, the Apple Mac Pro “Cheese Grater” is an absolute beast.

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