My Problem
In this time of the pandemic, my 10 year-old 27 inch iMac finally broke down. So I am trying to decide what kind of Mac I should purchase. On one hand, I would love to purchase the 2019 Mac Pro that Apple came out with at the end of 2019. It is incredibly powerful and more importantly its the easiest Mac to upgrade. Over the last 10 years since I purchased my 2010 iMac, Apple has made it almost impossible to upgrade Macs. My 2010 iMac was easy to update. MacSales.com would sell you a cheap kit to open that iMac so you could take out the hard drive that came with the iMac and then put a fast SSD drive. You could also open up the iMac and add a second SSD drive or another larger hard drive. Same with the MacBook Pros and old MacBook Airs. You could open them up and replace the hard drives with a better SSD drive or a larger SSD drive if it came with an SSD drive. But no more. You can’t really upgrade the SSD drives in the MacBook Pros and the MacBook Airs and its much much harder to now upgrade the iMac. But the 2019 Mac Pro you can easily upgrade. Apple designed it for pros to make it easy to take out and put in hardware in it.
But the problem is that Mac Pro is very expensive. Without the monitor, it is roughly $6,000 with tax for the cheapest configuration. That is a lot of money. How can I justify getting it? I am not some pro who makes videos or a musician producer who needs the power of such a an amazing Mac. And the 32-inch screen for this Mac Pro is close to $5,000. So if you want to get the Apple monitor for that Mac Pro, you would pay at least $11,000. That is nuts, right? But the thing is, this Mac Pro will last a long time. Because it is easy to open up, it will be easy to upgrade. So let us say I own it for 10 years. And 10 years is easy for the Mac Pro. After all, I used my 2010 iMac for 10 years easy. Monthly payments spread out over 10 years for $11,000 come to $91.66 per month. That isn’t bad when you think about it. Having a tremendous computer in your life for under $100 per month makes sense. I am trying to think of all the things I pay more than $100 per month which I would never enjoy as much as a Mac Pro with Apple’s 32-inch monitor. I pay a whopping $450 per month to park my car indoors in New York City. That is crazy. But I pay it because its convenient to have my car so close to where I live. I drink a lot of Diet Coke and probably average $2 per day on Diet Coke. Well that is $60 per month but that is still a big chunk of the $100 per month for the $11,000 Mac Pro and 32 inch monitor. My lunch during the work week is at least $7 to $10 per lunch. Let us say its $8.50 for the average lunch. That is $170 for lunch during the work week every month. And I don’t even really enjoy those lunches very much. If I made my own lunch and brought it to work I could probably average $4 or $3 for lunch every day. If I saved $5 every day for lunch at work, well that comes to about $100 per month which is what over ten years would be the cost of the Mac Pro and 32-inch monitor.
What Wonderful Things Could I Do With the Mac Pro?
So what would be some of the wonderful things I would do with the Mac Pro? Well, I love to edit videos as a hobby. And I would never really run out of processor power with the Mac Pro. The other great thing with the Mac Pro is you would have so much storage that you could easily make it a Windows computer with Boot Camp. Boot Camp runs off the same drive as the Mac OS. But with a Mac Pro, you could put another drive with a Mac OS on it but partition it so 90% of the drive is Windows. Then when you need Windows you boot the other Mac OS with with Windows on it rather than partitioning the drive that is your main Mac OS drive. Also, after many years go by, you can use the Mac Pro to be your server because it can hold so many drives.
But seriously. With a pandemic going on, and the economy being destroyed because no one can leave their home, am I really going to purchase an $11,000 computer? I would probably wait for Apple to upgrade the iMac. There are rumors Apple will soon update the iMac. When you get the iMac you also get a great 5k monitor. And you can pay just somewhere between $2.5k and $4k to get a really good configuration of a 27 iMac.
So there you have it. Don’t know what Mac to get. Do you?
