It’s been a while since I posted a home setup of my computer desk and since I cleaned up last week, everything looks nice and a photo was in order. I’m still on the fence about the Retina iMac although it seems like a very appealing upgrade and the iPad pictured has been replaced by the iPad Air 2 (Gold) so I guess this photo is already out of date? Oh well.
It was back in 2011 that I went from a mobile only setup to an iMac + MacBook and haven’t looked back. iMac + MacBook Air was my setup but then I started editing RAW photos with my Olympus and now editing 4K Video so the MacBook Pro being the only notebook Apple makes with a dedicated GPU, I upgraded. The setup is still pretty simple.
- iMac 27” Late 2012 w/ Core i7 Processor and 1 TB Fusion Drive. It also has 24GB of RAM
- MacBook Pro 15” Late 2013 w/ Core i7 Processor and 512 GB SSD. It has 16GB of RAM and the faster GPU
- I use the AudioEngine DAC plugged up to the AudioEngine 2.0 system. Sound is crisp and these can get very loud. I was looking for accuracy and not loudness and it’s nice these have both
- I keep two LaCie D2 Quadra drives (FW800, not Thunderbolt) each with aftermarket WD Green drives both at 3 Terabytes. These are local Time Machine backup + storage of media I’m working with in LightRoom or Final Cut Pro at the time. They stay half-full pretty much at all times.
- I have the Magic Trackpad but use the Magic Mouse more mostly for Civilization and Sim City game play where a mouse is better.
- The Docs for iPhone & iPad are Twelve South and I think the MacBook Doc is Twelve South or Griffin, I got it for free a few years ago at Macworld.
- Although not a part of the setup, I have a Roomba 770 that cleans the house twice a week at 8AM and serves as my alarm clock on those days
Out of sight is an HP multi-function WiFi Printer, Synology NAS with 12 terabytes of storage, Cisco ISR, Cisco Gigabit Switch, Two Unifi 2.4Ghz Base Stations and two more 4 terabyte drives attached to the Synology that hold more backups. I keep those in the basement out of sight chugging away to keep the network going.
Notable upgrades TBD would be Retina iMac but I’m waiting I think for the next revision (1 more year with this one) and I’m very enthusiastically hoping for the Haswell upgrade to my MacBook Pro with more GPU power to support more 4K image editing.
