iMac?

[vtwillys]

Thinking of retiring my slow pc and going to the dark side. Anybody here running an iMac and light room? Went to the apple store today and checked out an i3 and a 21.5 inch display. Really sexy and fast.

[MrMagoo]

Well, I don't know how much help I can be, but I "went to the dark side" about 2 months ago. I have been a PC guy all my life, but finally saw the speed and ease of use of MAC!

I got a MacBook Pro 15" with the i5 processor and 4GB Ram, 500GB HDD.
I am also running Aperture as opposed to Lightroom. I did run lightroom on my PC and found it to be a bit slow after adding many pictures. I have yet to see any slowdown with Aperture!

There was a bit of a learning curve from PC to MAC but the Apple.com website actually has many short tutorial videos geared specifically toward those of us "going to the dark side!"

Hope you make the jump...you will love it!

[convergent]

I went to the dark side a couple years ago and will never go back. I run Lightroom on a 15" MacBook Pro core 2 duo and it runs great. It should scream on that iMac. I have tens of thousands of images in my libraries... My images are on a NAS and my libraries are on my 5400rpm laptop drive. I love Lightroom.

[convergent]

One more comment on this... if you do decide to switch to Mac, I highly recommend a book called "Switching to the Mac" from The Missing Manual series. They are lime green and white books. The author is Pogue. There are different editions of this, so make sure you get the Snow Leopard Edition if you get it soon... or Lion if you wait until after the next OS update. This book is totally from the point of view of a Windows user and predicts all the points where you will wonder how to do something and then tells you how to do it on the Mac. It took me about 6 months before I was totally comfortable and now I'd never go back.

[vtwillys]

Thank you everyone who responded. My son is a computer geek and offered to spec a build a box for me. For the dollars it is probably my best bet. Light room is the best bar none for me? Started with LR3 coming from Paint Shop Pro and Elements.

My new PC will have 8 GB of ram! 1 G video card! 1TB hardcore with another plugged in via USB for back up. I will run an Intel I5.

Maybe next time I will get a Mac. Typing this on my IPad so I already have one foot in. By the way! Phot processing apps for this little IPad are not bad for raw shooters.

On my way to the everglades to shoot some pics with a couple of friends. Hopefully I will have something good to share.