Premiere Pro on Mac, just how much would I be missing

Question

I've decided to switch to the new iMac from my old pc that I've been using for years. As a student I have only enough for 21.5 inch at $1199 without configuration. With Final Cut out of the picture I've decided to use Premiere Pro and buying Production Premium. I haven't bought the iMac yet and having heard that Windows have better support then Mac platform. I'm having doubts whether Mac platform is worth it especially if I'm using it just for what's in Production Premium.
Effects and transitions missing, fine aslong as there are superior and similar features in place. But otherwise what am I missing?
Mercury playback engine, CUDA what's the deal with my iMac and AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB
(sorry if I sound like a total idiot, I'm new to all this)
Other missing features, differences between Mac and Windows with Premiere Pro and After Effects
Should I stick to PC are there comparables to the $1199 iMac?
Appreciate any answers... I am totally clueless as you might be able to tell.

Answer 1

In your case, stick with PC. An iMac has absolutely no internal expansion capability whatsoever besides the RAM. And as of the newest series, Apple has messed with the BIOS to now only allow Apple OEM hard drives to be used internally. An aftermarket internal hard drive will not work at all with the current iMacs. That leaves you with only the four USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire 800 port and one Thunderbolt port for external device expansion. There are no eSATA or USB 3.0 ports at all whatsoever on any iMac. And because Thunderbolt external hard drives are extremely rare (if they even exist at all), you're stuck with USB 2.0 (molasses-slow) and FW800 (still slower than SATA/eSATA) for any hard drives. What's more, the $1199 iMac comes only with an i5-2400S CPU, which is a gimped version of the i5-2400 that sacrifices stock clock speed in favor of lower power consumption: The stock, non-turbo speed is only 2.5GHz versus the 3.1GHz stock speed of the normal i5-2400 (in fact, the stock non-Turbo speed of the i5-2400S is slower than even the 2.8GHz i5-2300).
And that's not to mention that you can configure a PC with a faster CPU (i7-2600K), a far superior GPU (GeForce GTX 550 Ti), much more RAM (16GB, versus only 4GB in the $1199 iMac) and three 1TB 7,200 rpm internal hard drives (versus only a single 500GB hard drive in the iMac) for only about $200 USD more (including a large case, a high-quality 750W+ PSU and a Blu-ray burner) than the iMac (which, by the way, is essentially just a midrange-level MBP inside a much bigger package). And due to the poor multithreading performance of OSX, the $1199 iMac would be more than five or six times slower than the $1400 PC build I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph even if the CPU in the PC build is left at stock speed (in fact, the base-model iMac would have been slower in performance in Premiere Pro than most of the old Core 2 Quad systems and even some of the i3 and Core 2 Duo systems).
Message was edited by: RjL190365