I am going to buy iMac

Question

if this is tl:dr please go as i really need serious help thanks:)
i am not good with computers. also when i am sarcastic about the UK prices, please note its not an attack on apple but on the government. i love apple and i 100% understand its our leaders' fault that we pay twice as much for the same product
i bought a macbook pro recently, its 17inch with 2.3ghz i7 4 ore or 8 core? i have no idea, 8gb ram and solid state hard drive (it was about £3400, or in americe, £2500. i guess my government spent that £900 on a bomb to drop on Libya)
i want a desktop computer now, because i'd like a larger screen for when im not in need of portablility and i was looking at the 21.5inch ones, as the others are too large to fit where i "work"
the problem is, i only have about £1300 left (which in America id have no trouble finding what I want with that amount) as i've been spending all my saved money lately due to depression (hence the macbook etc) and buying a desktop computer, i would hope to get something more powerful in return for no portability (yes i know the larger screen is worth it too, but i'd like power also)
so my question is is this imac more powerful than my macbook pro
500gb hard drive
8gb ram
AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512MB GDDR5
2.5ghz i5 (note my macbook is 2.3 but it's i7 although i have no clue what that does but i assume a higher i number > lower number)
and my macbook is
256gb solid state
8gb ram
2.3ghz i7
and AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5
if NO then can you consider this iMac instead (however i'll have to squeeze my bank really hard to get enough money out, but this I can just about afford)
2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512MB GDDR5
if you read this far then I can't thank you enough but can you please comment, then i'll thank you some more;)
edit ALSO i'm a student but i'm only 17 and do i need to be 18 to get the discount? thanks

Answer 1

by looking at the specs the laptop is better but if your not a gamer or graphics designer  then you most likly wont notice a difference in the performance at all so with that said a few downsides
the processor is i5 the i7 processor is the better processor the graphics card has half the dedicated memory that the laptop has and the hdd compared to the solid state is not much of a difference unless you wanna move your computer all the time you wont need a solid state drive
but like i said before if your not a gamer or graphics designer on your computer you will not notice the difference most likely