One reason: longevity.
Starting with yesterday’s news at a premium price means it won’t last as many years before Apple reduces support. My 2012 iMac is in such peril right now.
With an awesome machine, especially with a fat SSD, it should be good for a decade.
I’m in a similar situation and also in no rush to make any upgrades yet. Most of my heavy lifting on my older iMac is personal photo and video editing as well.
I haven’t done the price & performance comparisons since I’m not ready to buy now, but one of the options I’m considering is switching to a Mac mini and adding a 3rd party monitor.
They’ve just re-engineered the mini and the reviews I’ve read are very positive. You can equip it with up to 64gb and 2TD SSD. You can also get very good 3rd party monitors, more than good enough for my photo editing needs.
My plan is to wait until the new iMac comes out and then do the full price / performance comparison.
So Balthisar this is pretty much my reason for questioning this. I can afford to max it out but do I really need to? I realize that is the response for folks who are much bigger tech geeks than I am. But why go for 32GB RAM if the most I might ever need at one time is 8GB? From researching things it seems Photoshop, etc. can require 4-6GB RAM which makes me want to at least go with 16GB. SSD is a no brainer over a Fusion drive. 1TB of storage on the machine strikes me as a reasonable choice because I will also have iTunes on this machine and I know it can really be a memory hog.
As for waiting, in your opinion do you think it would be best to go with the newest processor available or are the 7th generation Intel ones good enough to just go with one of them?
And I realized that my ten year estimate was probably optimistic. Regardless, the newer one won’t become obsolete so quickly as a stodgy old model.
And be careful with the Mac mini—we bought the previous model for our church A/V needs and it was a dog from day one. Hopefully the new one has more pep, but I would research carefully before going with a Mac mini.
You want an SSD for speed. You want your applications and operating system to live there. This will provide most of the responsiveness the system will give you. You also want your “active” media files to live there, so that your photo editing in PS will be responsive (saving, opening). Your iTunes collection can live on a spinning platter or NAS, because you’ll never notice the access speed when the next song is queued up.
It’s up to you to decide how large your SSD should be. Don’t forget that Thunderbolt SSD is nearly as fast as internal, and much cheaper than the Apple options. This might be a good place to place your “working” files. For years I ran my retired 2011 iMac off a Thunderbolt 2 SSD.
The RAM affects how many things you can use simultaneously without the OS swapping RAM memory in and out of the hard drive (“virtual memory”). When this happens, you’ll notice sluggishness, especially if you didn’t opt for SSD. If you’re primarily going to be working in PS with 50MB RAW images, you don’t need to worry too much about virtual memory.
Processor speed is pretty much moot at this point. If you are constantly rendering 3D images, then you want lots and lots of fast cores. But for running PS filters and doing common things, most operations are going to be taking place in a single core. Even the slower versions of the processor will turbo-boost to higher speeds as needed. Personally, I would go for a “slower” i7 than a “faster” i5, because of this.
Apple lets you bring things back without a restocking fee. Try a 16GB system for a week or so. If it doesn’t meet your needs, take it back and get upgraded memory and/or processor if you opt for the i5.
Side note: although I have a max-spec’d late 2014 Retina iMac, I also have a mid-2013 (I think) MacBook Pro. Because I bought it off the shelf, I couldn’t max spec it. It works perfectly fine for portable use, even when running VMWare (I need Windows for some work-related stuff). Modern computers really, really are overpowered for the vast majority of consumer use cases that don’t involve gaming.