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No heavy lifting? Meh. USB 2 is fine for that. FW800 plenty. TB is overkill.
I think you might be underestimating the speed of things. Even a mini could work for you. And it will take 16 gigs of ram.
If you can get an iMac upgraded with a SSD, go with a 27" i7 and then drop $200 on 32 gigs of ram.
Tons of speed, quadruple ram nice large 27" screen.
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Well, no heavy lifting other than I'll likely have the VMs on the external drive. Need some bandwidth for that.
Hadn't thought of a mini though. I will be using Photoshop a lot, but not for print stuff.
And maybe I should qualify "heavy lifting" - to me that's batch processing 8GB PDFs in Photoshop, or working on a ~2GB+ PSD with 75+ layers, or transcoding a TB or two of HD video. For the most part, I'll be doing less than all that.
That's partially why I have been out of new Mac hardware... most stuff I do doesn't require the speed.
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Mini might work for that, but I would go i7 and full 16 gigs ram.
personally, I would take the 27" i7 iMac. (I have a 27" 2010 2.93 i7 + 24" Dell 2405, 12 gigs ram (soon to be 24!) FWIW)
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Going with a powerful portable (MBP) gives you the opportunity to also do some work from home when needed if thats going to be an option . . .
iMacs are awesome mine has worked very well and payed for itself. I may upgrade it this year while
I still have some warranty left.
Rudie*(:>*
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One of my favorite aspects of SSDs is that apps like Photoshop use the SSD for virtual memory instead of a slow hard drive.
Movie encoding is perhaps a different story, but an SSD will be a nice boost for a lot of things anyway.
