Currently using macmini i5 from 2014 and HP i7 from 2016. Wary about purchasing from woke companies and don't want to upgrade for a good long time. Budget of 2000$. Would appreciate the input of battle-hardened keyboard warriors.
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Pick-up truck that I can fix myself
But if you like the idea of fixing it yourself, I would advise investing in extra hard drives, external hard drives, and other nice backup hardware so that you can easily recover from data loss type failures. Replacing corrupted software with quality backups fixes most common computer problems.
In my analogy, a pickup truck style computer would be a "workstation" class of computers. Those are built to minimize compatibility issues, and have enhanced tech support options, as well as having good performance for heavy duty computations typically used in CAD, and intensive graphics design work. Those requirements are not commonly needed by most people. And true workstation computers are very expensive. $2000 would be on the lower end for most workstations.
What you are paying for with serious workstation computers is the enhanced tech support that helps design those computers to be highly compatible with a wide range of hardware, and software, and also priority patch upgrades when you do have compatibility issues.
If you are not doing graphics design work, you probably want to avoid a workstation, because you are paying for stuff you likely will not need.
I do need a workhorse. That's helpful.
Ya, I see you do graphics editing. Workstations are built with extra redundancies to minimize glitches that can ruin hours of work. A mainboard with ECC (error correcting) RAM, plus a workstation type video card, and enterprise grade hard drives (with backup drives) would be what I would be aiming for if I were you. Also be sure you have a minimum 16gb RAM, preferably 32+, and whatever CPU you go with has lots of cores, 8+.
Humongous, thanks