Age old question: PC or Mac

What's the common belief these days for Photo/Video editing/storage?

Obviously it's what Mac is known for, but on a per dollar basis, what's the best return?

I have an older mac mini that is slow as hell loading up web pages, so it's out and I'm looking for a replacement. I could wait and see what the updated mac mini will provide in the next few months or get a PC (desktop) running windows 7 or 8 for 700 bucks and it'll be reasonably fast to run Lightroom and surf the net, and while using some basic video editing software for the gopro vids (brah). If going the PC route, are all brands created equal (dell, HP, acer, etc.)?

We have a pretty strong mac household with iphones and the wife has an MBP for school, so it makes sense to keep it in the family, but if I get a new mac mini, will I be fubar again in two years with no real way to upgrade the speed? I would rather buy some new carbon skis than buy an MBP or iMac.

Stupid technology and its constant need for upgrades to keep up with the current bandwidth demands. My two year old ipad surfs the internet faster than my mac mini.

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Originally Posted by brown9

What's the common belief these days for Photo/Video editing/storage?

Obviously it's what Mac is known for, but on a per dollar basis, what's the best return?

I have an older mac mini that is slow as hell loading up web pages, so it's out and I'm looking for a replacement. I could wait and see what the updated mac mini will provide in the next few months or get a PC (desktop) running windows 7 or 8 for 700 bucks and it'll be reasonably fast to run Lightroom and surf the net, and while using some basic video editing software for the gopro vids (brah). If going the PC route, are all brands created equal (dell, HP, acer, etc.)?

We have a pretty strong mac household with iphones and the wife has an MBP for school, so it makes sense to keep it in the family, but if I get a new mac mini, will I be fubar again in two years with no real way to upgrade the speed? I would rather buy some new carbon skis than buy an MBP or iMac.

Stupid technology and its constant need for upgrades to keep up with the current bandwidth demands. My two year old ipad surfs the internet faster than my mac mini.

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I think the MacBook Air rocks as a personal (non-business)laptop. Best in class. Mine is a couple of years old. If you have a need for storage, then get an external HD because the MBA are flash HD and expensive to get more memory on board.

But I don't edit much video, just make simple edits. Would verify specs for video editing.

Hot rod an IMac.

They all run on the same hardware now. So you have a couple questions to answer.

- What video NLE do you want to work with? There are tons of free and cheap NLE's for windows. For Mac you have few options in the cheap range and they aren't good. And some of the better prosumer ones (premiere) are cross platform.

- What OS do you prefer? Are you down with Windows? Can you get away from OS X?

- Since you have a mini now, do you have a good monitor? Since you are talking about photo and video stuff, a good monitor is ideal. If you don't have one of those you should get one. But now we are talking imac/mbp money anyway and they have very good monitors.

- I work in a very heavy PC environment but our department are all Macs. Nowadays, communicating between the two is simple if set up correctly. Don't go with a Mac just because your wife does.

If you answer those better, I can answer your question better.

Also, what Mini do you have? Is it the 2.4 C2D? That is getting long in the tooth at about 5 years old, but my current MBP has that processor and I only have problems with it when dealing with After Effects. It is more than a capable machine to edit full HD on. I had to edit on that mini out of necessity to get an edit done years ago. I was streaming 12 live streams of RED 2K in Prores Proxy live sync edit on the fly just fine. Editing takes almost zero processor power. It is more about throughput. You probably have a slow RPM hard drive and limited RAM.

And If you can't surf the internet properly there is something wrong with it. Timberridge for example couldn't view youtube videos in safari on his account and I pointed him to prefs to delete to solve the problem. Your computer doesn't just become slow with old age like a person. It should DO what it DID when it was new or there is a problem. Sure, with newer video codecs it may work slower due to newer more demanding standards, but accessing a webpage shouldn't ever be reduced by the age of your machine. Especially not a C2D.

Don't know if it helps but have you ever run something like CCleaner (free) to remove all the junk off the mini.

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Originally Posted by Colorado_Freeskier

Don't know if it helps but have you ever run something like CCleaner (free) to remove all the junk off the mini.

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I haven't, I'll look into that tonight.

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Originally Posted by systemoverblow'd

They all run on the same hardware now. So you have a couple questions to answer.

- What video NLE do you want to work with? There are tons of free and cheap NLE's for windows. For Mac you have few options in the cheap range and they aren't good. And some of the better prosumer ones (premiere) are cross platform.

- What OS do you prefer? Are you down with Windows? Can you get away from OS X?

- Since you have a mini now, do you have a good monitor? Since you are talking about photo and video stuff, a good monitor is ideal. If you don't have one of those you should get one. But now we are talking imac/mbp money anyway and they have very good monitors.

- I work in a very heavy PC environment but our department are all Macs. Nowadays, communicating between the two is simple if set up correctly. Don't go with a Mac just because your wife does.

If you answer those better, I can answer your question better.

Also, what Mini do you have? Is it the 2.4 C2D? That is getting long in the tooth at about 5 years old, but my current MBP has that processor and I only have problems with it when dealing with After Effects. It is more than a capable machine to edit full HD on. I had to edit on that mini out of necessity to get an edit done years ago. I was streaming 12 live streams of RED 2K in Prores Proxy live sync edit on the fly just fine. Editing takes almost zero processor power. It is more about throughput. You probably have a slow RPM hard drive and limited RAM.

And If you can't surf the internet properly there is something wrong with it. Timberridge for example couldn't view youtube videos in safari on his account and I pointed him to prefs to delete to solve the problem. Your computer doesn't just become slow with old age like a person. It should DO what it DID when it was new or there is a problem. Sure, with newer video codecs it may work slower due to newer more demanding standards, but accessing a webpage shouldn't ever be reduced by the age of your machine. Especially not a C2D.

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I've been lugging my windows 7 work laptop around for the past four years so I haven't needed to use my mac mini as much. Nor have I had as much drive to edit photos and video, the tasks I'm looking to complete should be pretty basic as I'm a jong about this stuff. So I guess at this point I know my windows machine a bit better than a Mac.
I think my monitor is fine, it's not new, but has a flat panel and is 22".

I have a 2.0ghz mac mini I think it's a core duo, not the core2 duo, probably 6-7 years old, so any computer will be a significant improvement. I use their bluetooth track pad and keyboard, which makes incentive to stick with the mac.

It's sounding more and more like I need to save up some coin and get some modern equipment. I'm looking to document my adventures more and have a gopro, a dslr and a P&S camera that are going to help fill up some hard drive space. We run a 1tb external hd as backup and storage of photos/video. I've stripped the mac mini to be about 1/2 full on its HD.

The current mac mini has not been updated since fall '12, so I'd guess that it's due.

Just made the switch from a grown windows user, over to a 27" iMac during christmas. After having used this iMac, I can seriously say I have no plans to go back to PC. I used to upgrade parts etc on my PC, but the things always seemed to have a 4 year life span. There was no extra cost for me comparing a new Mac to a new PC since I was also replacing my monitor. I think the price difference was $100 to comparable specs... I do a shit ton of photo editing professionally, and some video for personal stuff. I output to large prints. Great system and fast as fuck with no issues so far. Super user friendly, I got so sick of constantly fucking with windows all the time, all that time I can spend on my business.

IF I went in with a lower spec, I would have gone to PC for the flexibility in upgrades, however I said fuck it and went I7, fusion drive 16gb. Can still double the GB, but there's no need to for my use.

Ultimately the preference is nothing more than that...a preference. The whole argument between the 2 is about as stupid as fanboy b.s. Canon vs. Nikon. Get back to me in 4 years, i'll have a real opinion then.