I’ve been back and forth on whether or not I’m going to leave the PC world in the dust and transfer everything over to a Mac in the near future. An avid mac-user friend of mine is trying to convince me to drop about $10,000 on a fully loaded Mac Pro with a 30-inch cinema display. I put that idea out of her head when I sent her a screen shot of the money in my bank account. Now she’s all up in arms about how a loaded iMac would do the same thing for me.
I’m upset to know that the 17-inch iMac can no longer be found anywhere (new at least). I guess I can deal with the now standard 20-inch iMac but this doesn’t mean there’s going to be enough room on my desk for it, considering there are two monitors there already. The base model is going to run me in the $1200 range. This is a lot better in regards to finances, but it also stems back to whether or not there’s going to be enough room on the desk.
Another option that I’ve been considering is the Mac Mini. I have a dual-monitor setup but when I’m actually at my desktop, I’m using one side specifically for design and the other monitor is basically used for everything else. So the only real change here is the fact that I’m going to be switching back and forth between keyboards. With the wireless keyboard option, I can just store them away whenever I’m not using it so I can just go back to it later.
The final option, and this one hurts the most because of how hard I worked for it, but getting rid of my HP DV5000 laptop and purchasing a Macbook. It’s a leap for me considering I’d be losing 2.4-inches of viewing space but what I like about the Macbooks is that no matter which model you get – 1GB of ram comes standard with all of their systems.
So here’s my question –
You have a $1500 budget and you’re considering switching over to a Mac. Would you get an iMac, Mac Mini or Macbook? And why?