Once every 4-5 years I buy a new computer for my main rig. My main requirement is it needs to be powerful enough to push a lot of pixels. Approximately 17% of my income last year was created and billed on my old rig. Mostly they were poster sized photoshop files, with lots of layers and things going on. I won’t get too technical for those not into photoshop; suffice to say the files were complex.
I’m picky about my metal. I don’t want to spend a lot, but I also don’t want to sit around waiting for the computer to catch up with me. It’s tricky to find that sweet spot in terms of price/performance for the kind of work I do. Last time in 2017 it was an 27″ iMac 5k with 64 Gb of RAM, the faster (4.2 Ghz) i7 processor, and the fastest possible GPU. Since photoshop at that time was not threaded, having a multi-threaded computer wasn’t a big boost for me.
This time around I went with a Mac Studio and a Studio display. Picking the display took me a lot more time than the computer. I wasn’t happy about the price of the Studio display, but it does several things for me, including having a sweet audio output, and a decent built in camera for meetings. I could have purchased the fancier color display which is easier to calibrate, but then I would need to buy a separate web camera and speakers. Having it all rolled into one was far more convenient for me. My desk isn’t that big, I need all the space I can get.
In the photo above you can see me transferring my files from the older computer to the newer. This is one thing that Apple does very well. Their app Migration Assistant, does a sweet job of transferring all the pertinent files. My old rig had an older OS than the new one, still after a couple of hours of transferring files (all my music and photos take up a lot of space) all I had to do was type in the passwords for my email accounts. Everything was there. It was just as if all I did was move to a slightly different monitor, and gave my old computer a speed bump. That kind of seamlessness is hard to beat, and one of the reasons I remain in the Apple ecosystem.
That and my business, pixelectomy, is 100% apple. All of my clients, all of the time. This last part is a pretty good incentive to stay in that ecosystem. The last thing I want is to make my clients work hard for me. My goal is to be as smooth with them as Apple is at switching computers. So far it’s done the trick. I recognize there are other ways to do photoshop. Believe me I have this conversation all the time with my peers. I just don’t want to be an expert at that as well. It’s hard enough to push piles and write fiction. I don’t need more.
