“...Keep an eye on the Apple refurb store....”
Yep. I frequent there quite a bit, but before I purchase, or upgrade, anything, I’m gonna wait/see what happens with the new MacPro that should be coming out sometime next year. It, too, will likely be overkill for my usage, but if I can get a long, useful service life out of it similar to this machine, it would be worth it.
FWIW, my son told me the same thing about the next OS upgrade on this “oldie, but goodie”: it’s probably not gonna be able to run it...we shall see. For now, it does what I need it to do. Unlike him, I’m not a heavy “power” user which is why this old one has probably served me well. His machines? All new “state of the art” stuff and he’s drooling to get his mitts on the new iMacPro. But he spends his days working as a programmer for Zillow and needs machines like that to do his work.
We use a 2013 Mac Pro with 6 Cores and 32 GB of ECC DDR3 RAM to render 3D CAT scans of our patient's mandibles and lower skulls in preparations for doing full mouth upper or lower implants. It's already blazingly fast. . . this iMac Pro would be 200% to 300% faster than that Mac Pro. That replaced a 2008 Mac Pro, also with a Xeon 4 core, with 32 GB of ECC RAM.
However, getting the 3D patient's scans in under 2 minutes is still acceptable and getting them in 40 seconds will not improve our productivity at all. The doctors will not get to looking at them any sooner because it still takes more than 2 minutes to get the patient back into the chair from the 3D panalypes. . . LOL!
27" iMac 3.4 GHz Quad Core Intel i5, 5K monitor, 1TB Fusion Drive, 8GB RAM, $1648.00
That's not a bad price for a brand new Apple 27" 5k iMac, especially for a Fusion Drive model. Apple retail for this is $1799. I use this model as my main computer at my office. It's fast enough for the kind of thing I gather you do.
The Fusion drive is a combo SSD and spinning hard drive where the boot files and most used files are on a 128GB SSD, while data and lesser used files are on the physical spinning drive. It makes for a very fast overall system that boots in seconds. You'll have to apply for a "promo code" membership but it costs nothing. . . but they may have limitations as to what states can have memberships. Check it out. Free Shipping too.