I have worked quite a time for an apple premium reseller. What I knew from the tech-support guys were, that a lot of the late 2009 iMacs have had technical issues, which then later were officially recalled from apple. The biggest issue mostly was the HDD from Seagate. Sometimes there also where combined issues with the Seagate HDDs and some GPUs, so some customers got brand new iMacs back (or at least full repaired), when they used the recall program from Apple (not just for a new HDD). My recommendation would be to first google all related issues and recall programs, which appeared on your model and even if your iMac is just close to a problem from a different but similar iMac you can call the tech-support and ask them if there are any ways to cheaply fix it or even get a new graphics card. IMHO this is much better than buying a new and super expensive Mac, which "only" has (according to Moore) about 30% more CPU-power to offer, than your current system, but that's only my opinion... Or how @Zenarcist wrote, get yourself a Hackintosh. I was super skeptical all the years, but there is this guy called tonymacx86, who has the biggest forum all about building a hackintosh and which components to use, so you're in pretty good hands + you will save a lot of money (only do it if you're using it as your hobby non-work-related machine)! BTW I'm now writing on my Hackintosh and this thing works flawlessly well!
*nod* though, just have the iMac checked. if it's only the GPU-chip you might have it repaired. if the motherboard as a whole is damaged than things get a bit hairy and you would have to decide, whether a repair is still worth it. I'm really sorry to not being able to give any concrete advice as to what Mac you should get now. With the MacPro you get the better machine, but you will buy a lot of stuff that you will never need (dual graphic cards etc.) The iMac looks nice but - and that is now really just my personal opinion - is really flawed designwise when you plan to REALLY put the machine to the test (thermal issues). Tough decision and I'm really glad that I'm well stocked with them good old tower-Mac Pros
To the guys who are saying this is "built-in planned obsolescence" I would say this is bullshit. I know a lot of guys, who still have their MacBook Pros from late 2007 and are running the latest El Capitan on it + upgraded SSD. This thing works like it's her first day even though there is only SATA I. Apple has no interest in ripping of their Mac customers, because these people often know what they need and which configurations they desire. If they knew Apple would rip them off by doing this "built-in planned obsolescence", they just simply get a PC. A Mac is super well designed and has a simple and beautiful workflow, but is not irreplaceable. iPhones and iOS are a different story.
question now remains, what to buy... i definitely would like to go with the Mac Pro 2012 model, also because of the issue BBSiteUser described that u can't get parts for the Mac Pro 2009 model anymore. I just got off the phone with a Mac dealer though... He said the new Mac Pro Quad-Core is faster than the Mac Pro 2012 12-Core?! Is the new Mac Pro really that fast and does it makes sense to add $1k and buy the new one?
since i need a "faster machine" anyway, it won't make sense for me to get it repaired. i know exactly what you mean by them good ol' tower-Mac Pros, i'm reaaaaallly moving towards buying that one too... oh and thanks a lot, man!!! appreciated.
ur welcome mate, no sweat at all ... was just suggesting to have the iMac checked and possibly repaired so you can sell it ... AND! ... not to make your decision finding even more complicated, but I was also suggesting to repair your current box as you might want to wait a bit longer with the new box ... check this out: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/appl...launches-iphone-6c-watch-2-ipad-air3-3510027/ ahhhhh ... Apple's most precious corporate asset: rumors
Maybe your monitor is defekt. Its not allways the Graphiccard or s.th. else. You can assemble yourself a PC what is 3x faster than a Mac plus if something gets defektive you can change it yourself. Even a 10 year old child can resemble PCs. Its really simple. just an idea for you.
You do realise that every year the socket of the CPU is changing and every 4 years (more or less) the DDR socket is changing, rendering the motherboard incompatible with new components? So what's left to actually change? The hard drive, videocard, case and power source?
That would be called an upgrade. Old components are still available if you want to change like for like. It's all about having the choice to do what you want. eBay is full of legacy computer components.
it's only 2.600€ ... now i even found a Apple Mac Pro 5,1 12-Core 2x 3.46 GHz 96GB 2TB SSD Nvidia Quadro K5000 MAC 4GB for 3.200€ !! is this even possible???? dayuuumn!
can you maybe post a link? that's be great! thx in advance EDIT: @musicislife ... before I forget, let me inform you that I run my Mac Pros with OSX version 10.8.x to 10.9.x and on one of them Studio One version 3.x+ just won't start (2.6.x runs perfectly fine). This specific Mac Pro is used mainly for development and had some things shoved into its OSX like GNU-core utils etc. To be 100% sure you might want to check if your DAW is good to go on a multi-cpu machine. Last edited: Feb 18, 2016
I bet it won't be working in 10 years time From the 1920's onward manufacturing companies decided that they had to purposely restrict the lifetime of their products, this cannot be denied. It is due to capitalism and the constant need for growth. Last edited: Feb 18, 2016
yup, that's quite the rig! 96GB of RAM ... you can hold 0.000023% of the whole internet in memory on that one ... or 98.76% of the internet if you skip pr0n mem is DDR1333, not the fastest, but that's no dealbreaker in audio. dual xeons will compute pink clouds around any newer single i7 (i7 is of course newer and nominally faster, but 2 Xeons will smack everything around as synthetic benchmarks are nothing). SSDs in a RAID0-configuration, including backup drives ... all in all: quite the powerhouse
Sounds good. Just want to add from my experience: If at one point you have to decide between higher number of cores or higher CPU clock, I would always go for the higher CPU clock! At least for audio production. It would be great if today's DAWs and plugins could distribute CPU load evenly over all cores, but it may take years until that's possible. I wish you better luck with your next model
At least check it out for your own curiosity http://www.tonymacx86.com/ but that Mac Pro does look a monster Last edited: Feb 18, 2016
i been on this website before.. now that i read into it, it's very interesting and considerable as well.. thanks!
