New Mac Pro or 27" iMac

I apologize in advance for the length but I need some help in making a decision.
SITUATION:
I run a small business and currently have a Late 2012 21.5" iMac and two 23" monitors (3 screens total for running multiple applications and copy/pasting). My day-to-day includes always having 4-8 browser tabs open running external sites that I input order information into, a huge multi-thousand line Excel Spreadsheet (2008 MS Office for Mac), Google Voice tab open for phone calls/texts, Skype always open to talk to my technical team, Calendar, Notifications, Mail, etc... I keep most all emails because I have to search and refer to previous emails for customer issues, etc... so I have more than 10,000 emails in Mail. I take screenshots and screenvideos for our Help library at times as well. All day long I'm pretty much copying and pasting information to and from my spreadsheet to these other applications to process orders and using most of these applications simultaneously. I'm also backing up all data via Time Machine and Dropbox. Due to the volume or orders I process each day, I need my computer to be FAST!!!!
ISSUE:
My 21.5" iMac only has 8GB of RAM and is not user upgradable. I've had this iMac less than a year and I'm seeing the "colorwheel of death a lot", usually when copying and pasting, but sometimes other places as well. I think I need a more robust computer for reasons listed below, plus my wife's 7 year old iMac is on it's last leg so I'm planning on giving the 21.5" iMac to her and upgrading for my business.
Not that it happens all the time, but quite often an application will stop functioning and I have to Force Quit the application and reopen.
Each time I copy data from a cell in Excel it takes at least 5 seconds for the dotted line to appear around the cell indicating it's copied, so I have to be very careful not to paste the wrong data. This did not used to be the case. It would respond as fast as I could copy then paste. Excel and Word also take a lot longer to open and close than other programs.
When scrolling in various applications, sometimes the computer seems to stall then all of a sudden catch up and the page quickly scrolls to catch up.
I've run the Activity Monitor (which I know little about) and seen that I'm running normally 6.5-8GB of Memory Used. On the "DISK" tab often times my "Reads In" is higher than my "Reads Out" which I don't know if that's normal or not.
QUESTION:
I would like to know what you guys recommend for my situation.
Should I purchase a "beefed-up" 27" iMac with 16-32GB RAM or should I purchase one of the new Mac Pro models?
If Mac Pro, should I go with the 12GB Quad-Core or the 16GB Six-Core? (I realize I would have to purchase another monitor and microphone for phone calls).
I don't mind spending the money, but moreso I'm trying to get the right machine for my application without wasting money.
Thank you for your time and help to make this decision.
<*///><

January 9th, 2014 -- Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Shootout: 2013 Mac Pro vs 2010 Mac Pro
January 3rd, 2014 -- 'late 2013' Mac Pro 6-core versus 'mid 2010' Mac Pro 6-core
December 31st, 2013 -- Slowest 'late 2013' Mac Pro 4-core versus Fastest 'late 2013' iMac 4-core
December 28th, 2013 -- Does Final Cut Pro X 10.1 render faster on Mac Pro towers with Dual AMD GPUs? What about Motion 5.1?
December 16th, 2013 -- 'Late 2013' Retina MacBook Pro beats the 'Late 2013' iMac on Thunderbolt 1.0 Write Speeds
Good review on new vs old Mac Pro
My nMP Review (vs my old 4,1 Mac Pro)
I feel you outgrow an iMac sooner while almost impossible with Mac Pro (other than new software and such in 6 6yrs time) One is an investment and can be upgraded. No throttling (hopefully) and Haswell cpu while nice is not a 24/7 Xeon designed for the type of work loads.
http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2013/20131218_3-MacPro-CPU-choice.html
http://www.macperformanceguide.com/
If it weren't for the fact that software in 6 yrs will require newer hardware to meet the demands, your nMP will still be going strong. Other than Apple dropping support for whatever OS X in 5-6 yrs instead of 8-10 years it would still be able to run and do what it is designed for for years to come. Say that about an imac that can be outgrown or "why did OS X 11.99 make my system slow?"
nMP review from a 3,1 owner
My nMP 6core Arrived Today -- View from a non-Pro user
Nice photos: nMP FINALLY

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Should I buy a new Mac Pro or an iMac?

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The iMac would be a 3.5 quad core, 1TB fusion drive, and 8gig of ram that I would then max out externally to 32gig, and finally NVidia Geforce 4gig GPU.
Either one we buy we'd get Applecare.
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Obviously I understand the Mac Pro will be faster generally speaking, but will it really make a big difference when using Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects and Photoshop? Or is a fully specced iMac going to be just as good?
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While both machines can handle everything you mentioned now, the MAc Pro will be faster now, and easier to expand in the future. The iMac will simply not be as cost effective long term. If however your needs wont change or you don't plan to use the machine more than 3-4 years, the iMac is going to get the job done and of course be much cheaper.

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I am buying a new desktop for photo and video editing. I am trying to decide between the new Mac Pro coming out in Dec or a maxed out 27 inch iMac. If I go with the Mac Pro I will have to buy a TB display so I'm looking at about $1000 more for a base Mac Pro vs a top of the line iMac. I just need to know if I will be able to tell that much of a difference.

I too do a lot of video editing, and after a year in **** with a slow PC and PowerDirector, FCPX was looking pretty good. All I had to do was build an Apple PC around it.
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Hello,
I am using a new Mac Pro (late 2013, 3.5 6C) and are really happy with it. But I have one problem …
Currently I am using an iMac 27" as a display via Apple Thunderbolt cable (original cable from Apple).
But when I switch my displays via cmd+f2, my mac pro sometimes crashes. So I can switch back to my iMac always, without issues. But sometimes, when I want to switch back to my running Mac Pro (no screensaver etc.), I cannot switch back and the Mac Pro simply reboots.
Any ideas what to do? I've sent a bug report to Apple already …

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.
If you bought the product in the U.S. directly from Apple (not from a reseller), you have 14 days from the date of delivery in which to exchange or return it for a refund. In other countries, the return policy may be different. If you bought from a reseller, its return policy applies.

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I sold my old Mac Pro (first generation) a few months ago in anticipation of the new line-up. In the meantime, I purchased a i7 iMac and 12GB of RAM. This machine is faster than my old Mac for most Aperture operations (except disk-intensive stuff that I only do occasionally).
I am ready to purchase a "real" Mac, but I'm hesitating because the improvements just don't seem that great. I have two questions:
1. Has anyone evaluated qualitative performance with the new ATI 5870 or 5770? Long ago, Aperture seemed pretty much GPU-constrained. I'm confused about whether that's the case anymore.
2. Has anyone evaluated any of the new Mac Pro chips for general day-to-day use? I'm interested in processing through my images as quickly as possible, so the actual latency to demosaic and render from the raw originals (Canon 1-series) is the most important metric. The second thing is having reasonable performance for multiple brushed-in effect bricks.
I'm mostly curious if anyone has any experience to point to whether it's worth it -- disregarding the other advantages like expandability and nicer (matte) displays.
Thanks.
Ben

Thanks for writing. Please don't mind if I pick apart your statements.
"For an extra $200 the 5870 is a no brainer." I agree on a pure cost basis that it's not a hard decision. But I have a very quiet environment, and I understand this card can make a lot of noise. To pay money, end up with a louder machine, and on top of that realize no significant benefit would be a minor disaster.
So, the more interesting question is: has anyone actually used the 5870 and can compare it to previous cards? A 16-bit 60 megapixel image won't require even .5GB of VRAM if fully tiled into it, for example, so I have no ability, a priori, to prove to myself that it will matter. I guess I'm really hoping for real-world data. Perhaps you speak from this experience, Matthew? (I can't tell.)
Background work and exporting are helpful, but not as critical for my primary daily use. I know the CPU is also used for demosaicing or at least some subset of the render pipeline, because I have two computers that demonstrate vastly different render-from-raw response times with the same graphics card. Indeed, it is this lag that would be the most valuable of all for me to reduce. I want to be able to flip through a large shoot and see each image at 100% as instantaneously as possible. On my 2.8 i7 that process takes about 1 second on average (when Aperture doesn't get confused and mysteriously stop rendering 100% images).
Ben

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I got a new Mac Pro.
It has an external SATA controller and a video card with NVIDIA Quadro 4000 chipset on it.
It has a Snow Leopard installed.
The problem it has is that it doesn't wake up once it goes to sleep, either by choosing "Sleep" menu item or by using "Energy Saving" setting.
I notice some people mention a keyboard doesn't respond while his trackpad does. In my case, nothing works.
I don't know if it is due to keyboard or a magic mouse. I tried to connect another wired mouse to the enclosure of the Mac Pro directly, but it did't cause Mac Pro wake up.
By searching on Google, many people seem to have this problem, whether they have Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, and so on.
Personally, I have a 17" PPC iMac, 13" MacBook with Core Duo 2, and have used MacBook Pro 17", but they didn't have this problem.
I tried to reset the SMC, but it didn't help.
Do anyone know what cause this problem and how to solve it?
Is there any patch for this?
Thank you.

Does it sound like it's waking up but the monitor just doesn't display anything?
I ask because if so, I'm experiencing the same problem. I have a Quad-Core Mac Pro (no external devices) and if it goes to sleep I have difficulty getting it to display anything on the monitor after waking it up. Now, I just recently hooked up an additional monitor (VGA) for dual display, and the funny thing is, that monitor will wake, but my main monitor won't.
Sometimes I get this error after boot-up too, where the computer will get to the login screen, but my main monitor is receiving no signal ("at least according to my monitor").
If that's the same issue, then I'll post any success I find for you!
Best,
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