I Just Spent $2500 On The 27-inch 5K iMac, Did I Make a Mistake?
So I got myself the newest 2020 27-inch iMac from Apple, I have a decently powerful PC with a GeForce GTX 1070 graphic card, which isn’t horrible, it can still do the job. But I still decided to spend a whopping $2500 to get the newest 27-inch 5k iMac instead of upgrading my PC with the newest GeForce RTX 30 Series which have arguably way better performance.
Did I make a mistake? In this article, I will explain the reasons why I decided to throw away my savings to Apple, and you can be the final judge.
Here are the specs of this machine: 8-core 10th-gen i7 CPU; Radeon Pro 5500XT graphic card; 512 GB SSD storage; and a 32 GB Ram (additional with a third party memory kit).
Also here is a quick buying guide if you are considering getting an iMac, I had a really hard time deciding which iMac to get as well, all those Youtube tech review videos just keep giving out big numbers and test results which can be really confusing, so don’t feel like you are alone if you are also struggling, here is a straight forward guide to help you decide.
If you are only thinking to get an iMac for your schoolwork, and maybe occasionally edit some videos, with only 1080p footage and one layer of LUT, get the mid-tier version. If you are getting this iMac because you want a powerful work station for high-end constant video editing, get the top-tier version. It’s really as simple as that.
Now you might have seen some reviews comparing the 5500XT and 5700XT graphic cards, ignore them as they will only confuse you even further. The point is, sure, 5700XT is stronger than the 5500XT, but all the testing people do are for video game and 3D rendering, you are not getting this iMac for gaming anyways, are you? So you don’t really need that extra power for video, music, or image editing, I’ve been editing 4K Raw videos with multiple layers of LUT and special effects, and my 5500XT works perfectly fine with absolutely no lag at all. Just save your money and don’t think about that extra $500 upgrade if you are thinking of using it to edit videos. Plus then you can get your work station way sooner than the customized one, time is priceless. However, if you are indeed considering purchasing the monstrous Canon EOS R5 and editing 8K raw footage, 5700XT is the worthy upgrade.
So I mainly got this iMac for my video and photo editing purposes, I purchased it because I wanted a clean productivity workstation. My PC could work as a workplace, but it was too distracting for me for multiple reasons which I will explain later.
I personally believe that when you pay for an iMac, indeed you are paying a lot of money for it, however, you are not only paying for the computer itself, but also for the wholesome and smooth experience Apple and only Apple provides.
When I was using the PC to do work on my video editing and image editing, although Premiere Pro and Lightroom worked perfectly fine with it, especially when I was only editing 1080p video footage, it was really those small things that annoyed me and slowed down my productivity.
First of all, my PC could not open RAW picture files locally, if I wanted to preview the images, I would have to import them onto a hard-drive first then load them into Lightroom, select the photos I’m satisfied with, then, in the end, my Lightroom would end up with huge piles of unnecessary photos that I didn’t even want to edit and was simply too lazy to delete. Mac OS lets me preview RAW files naturally, and incredibly fast. So I can just plug in my SD cards, and preview the photos right then and there and I only need to load the photos that I know for certain that I will edit into my lightroom. It saves me a ton of time as well as storage while keeping my desktop organized and tidy.
If I say I am willing to pay $2500 merely for the AirDrop feature alone, I’m probably not lying. Whenever I finished editing photos on my PC, I would need to first upload them onto cloud storage, like Dropbox, or Google Photos, then download them onto my iPhone, then send them to my clients or post them on Instagram. Especially if you are a Chinese creator and you use WeChat. WeChat has terrible compression with videos and pictures, everything you send will look like trash on the other end. But with an iMac, I can simply AirDrop my products onto my iPhone or iPad with perfect original quality in no time and post them, or I can simply send them directly through iMessage to my clients straight from my iMac. The AirDrop feature also lets me smoothly transfer video files between my iMac and my iPad so that I can easily edit videos on my iPad pro wherever I want, Apple ecosystem for the win.
Of course, we need to talk about Apple’s Final Cut Pro X. I used to be a heavy Adobe Premiere Pro user, Premiere Pro is the standard editing app that we learned in Film School, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best video editing app for everyone. If you are a frequent Premiere user, you can understand the pain of seeing the crash windows more than you should. I wanted to add in an extra layer of LUT, it crashed, I wanted to add in some film grains, it crashed, I wanted to use this super cool 3D animation I just installed, it also crashed. Then it was the export time on that Premiere Pro, I used to sit in the school computer lab for 2 hours, doing nothing, just to wait for my short film to be exported, it would heat up my PC like crazy and the fan would always run at full speed.
All these things adding up can really get to your nerves, it can be so frustrating if you can’t even focus on your creativity only because your app simply keeps interrupting your work. I tried using the Final Cut Pro X on my iMac because I heard it was perfectly optimized for macOS, duh.
Has it been another whole world of experience! There is completely no lag whatsoever even editing 4K footage, I can add on as many layers of effects as I want and it takes no time to render them, the export time is also amazingly fast. A video that took Premiere Pro Approximately 30 minutes to export, gets completed in Final Cut Pro X within only 5 minutes! The iMac’s fan also never even turns on. The app saves your process automatically for you so you never need to worry about forgetting to press save before the app crashes, not that my Final Cut Pro X has ever crashed during my heavy usage.
There’s also one huge topic that not that many creators actually talk about, it’s the color in the final export. Premiere Pro does not export the proper color in the final product as you see in its preview window (you will need to constantly fix the color in the settings manually). Here are two images compared side by side, I used the same LUT and color correction on both videos, and as you can see, the Final Cut Pro X’s exported video just looks a lot more natural whereas the Premiere Pro’s color looks washed out and flat.
I also need to mention the iMac’s monitor, which I feel is incredibly underrated when people compare iMacs to PCs. The 27-inch iMac comes with a 5K monitor, with Apple’s true-tone technology and 500 nits of brightness. That is a monitor that’s going to cost you almost $1300 alone if you decide to buy a monitor with the same specs for your PC. Which still does not offer iMac’s True Tone feature. So if you take that into account, you are really not paying that much for the iMac’s internal specs alone. Not to mention this iMac also comes with a 1080p built-in camera and great speakers, which will also ultimately save you more money and desk real estate.
As you can see, these features mentioned above can definitely save you a lot of time during your creative process, but I think the most important thing is not how much time it can save, it’s your mood. I used to feel like editing videos and photos was such an annoying procedure because I needed to go through so many steps, and wait so long for the export, and stress that Premiere would crash at any random moment. These worries have brought down my mood significantly and even discouraged me from wanting to create with my computer and my footage. That is the worst thing that could happen to any creator.
Since I bought this iMac, yes, I am aware that you can get away a more powerful PC at $2500, especially with those new NVidia graphic cards. However, this smooth and stress-free experience and ecosystem is something that only Apple can provide.
So have I made a mistake? All I can tell you is that I am excited whenever I turn on my iMac and open Final Cut Pro X, I am encouraged to create more and just curious to see how much better I can do with this machine, and that is truly something that is worth every single penny I spent.
Here are some final thoughts for any potential creators out there who are considering getting an iMac or not because you are worrying if you are spending too much.
Don’t think, just get it. You are not spending this money on a PS4 or a pair of sneakers (not that sneakers really cost that much, but you get the idea), you are investing for a healthier and productive work environment which can ultimately boost your performance and help you create better content, this is the money that is worth spending. After all, if I didn’t get this iMac, I don’t even think I would be able to keep making videos and expand my creativity.
