The differences in speed were less dramatic as I expected. At this point I now have a new iMac Retina 5K Display to compare as well. Where I saw the biggest differences was in (no surprise) video rendering and processes that take longer than a minute or so anyway. Even then, the iMac and MacBook Pro are no slouch. ![]() This is when I realized that in order to see significant speed improvements the software you’re testing not only needs to be optimized for the faster processors, but also it would need to take advantage of the multiple cores. With the new iMac Retina 5k there was even less of a difference. On every test I threw at it the Mac Pro outperformed my now two-year-old MacBook Pro, but in some cases it was only slightly faster. Actually it is faster at (almost) everything! Just not by a margin of two. When will a Mac Pro significantly outperform any other Mac?Īs I said above, I was wrong in my assumption that the Mac Pro would be at least twice as fast at everything. Luckily I was able to reassemble most of them with a couple minor exceptions that I will outline below: Therefore I didn’t really hold on to the test files that I used. At the time I did the tests back in May, I really wasn’t expecting to run these tests again. Actually I was wrong! Now fast forward to November and I have brand new iMac Retina 5k here to review and test. My assumption was that the Mac Pro would certainly be at least twice as fast at everything I threw at it than my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina Display Mac. Next, I began running side-by-side tests of the things that I do daily that take more than a few seconds. I loaded the latest version of my Adobe Creative Cloud applications on it as well as a few utilities that I use such as ScreenFlow. I got the opportunity to test a Mac Pro standard configuration in my studio for a few weeks. Well we know the latter didn’t happen, so now it was time to test the performance. However, I said to myself perhaps if the performance (for what I do) is significantly better and the price point for an entry model was $2,500 or less, I’d consider getting one. Otherwise I was quite happy just using my MacBook Pro simply because I could use it in any room at any time. Sure I appreciate the faster performance, but I found myself only using my Mac Pro when I knew a process was going to take a long time to complete. As I stated above, I realized with my last Mac Pro that I wasn’t really a Mac Pro customer. When I saw the rumors that Apple was going to release a radically different design for the Mac Pro, to be quite honest I was only mildly interested. I’m doing this review/comparison simply to answer the question, “as a photographer would I be better off spending my money on the NEW iMac Retina 5K Display or a Mac Pro?” If you’re a videographer and you’re a Mac user then you probably already have the new Mac Pro because you demanded the fastest Mac you could get to render your videos on a daily basis. ![]() ![]() The next thing I’d like to get out of the way is that if you’re looking for a Mac Pro review that tells you this new Mac Pro is better than the previous Mac Pro with all the benchmarks to back it up, then you’d probably be better served by other reviewers who have targeted the performance of the new model vs. If you’re reading the rest of this post then I’ll assume that you’re a Mac user or thinking of becoming one. If you can build your own PC cheaper, that’s awesome! If you’re happy with a Windows PC or Linux PC, or anything else, I’m happy for you. I find it entertaining when people feel compelled to tell you/me how much they don’t want the thing you’re reviewing or writing about because they use something else. ![]() If you don’t like Macs/Apple or don’t want a Mac for whatever your reasons are, you can pretty much stop here and find something else to do with your time. I was a little blown away! The same game rules apply! I noted that although my MacBook Pro fared quite well against the Mac Pro for common “photography workflow” tasks, that an iMac would probably do even better! Well now I have a NEW iMac Retina 5k Mac to test/review and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results. I ran all my tests using my high-end Mid 2012 MacBook Pro Retina Display. I didn’t actually have an iMac to compare. Earlier this year in May I did a post called “ Photographers: iMac or Mac Pro?” It was a post that was meant to really ask the question that as a photographer would you benefit from the faster and more expensive Mac Pro over say a nicely equipped iMac (or in my case MacBook Pro)? There was only one problem with that post.
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