[Mitch Ives] "I was wondering about the display cards. The release of FCPX had tower owners out buying new display cards for compatibility. Can you swap display cards in an iMac these days... didn't use to be able to, which meant scrapping the entire iMac. That would be a rather expensive difference between an iMac and a tower?"
You still can't upgrade the graphics. Though external GPUs via Thunderbolt might be viable. (Yeah, it's only 4x, but if you look at GPU benchmarks with cards in slots of various speeds, this matters less than you might think.)
But anyway, an iMac probably costs half as much as a tower. Just buy a new one twice as often, sell the old one, and you'll almost certainly come out ahead vs. trying to keep a tower twice as long and buying upgrades for it along the way.
And if you're the sort of person who needs a laptop, a MacBook Pro is certainly a lot cheaper than a MacBook Pro
plus a Mac Pro. You can probably afford to replace the MBP three
times as often if you quit buying Mac Pros as well and just use the laptop for everything, which has now become remarkably viable.
--
Digital Workflow/Colorist,
Nice Dissolve.
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