Hi

I have the following setup:

Apple Mac Pro 1,1 workstation with 2 Dual Core Xeon 3Ghz chips, 10gb RAM and 3 HDD's amounting to 2.25Tb, two optical drives (one the oem and one Lightscribe added by me when I got fed up with the oem rejecting almost every disk I tried to write!)

5.5Tb NAS Drobo 4 disk

27" Dell monitor

Running Mac OSX 10.7 as a 1,1 machine is 'banned' from running Mountain Lion by Apple.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the machine at all - it works absolutely fine. I use it with Apple Aperture to edit and maintain a professional photo library of 75,000 images and as my office machine for admin tasks etc. I do a very small amount of video editing but it is less than 5% of my activity.

I am aware however that (a) it is getting long in the tooth (b) Mountain Lion is about to be replaced by Mavericks (c) soon Aperture will probably be replaced by Version 4 and that is likely to require at least ML if not Mavericks in order to function correctly (d) the hardware has moved on and this system is probably slower than a newer system with a single chip with more cores and faster RAM, never mind a double chip setup.

I also run a Mac Mini and a Macbook Air, all of which are new enough to run ML but which are not as I do not want to be 'bilingual' in OS terms. We also run 2 iPhone 5's.

As I see it, my options are:

1) Buy a new Mac Pro (likely to be at least NZ$6000)

2) Buy a tricked up iMac 27" (NZ$4700)

3) Do nothing

4) Buy a top spec Macbook Air and run that as my main computer with the 27" monitor (Mac Book Pro is too heavy and I spend too much time travelling to want that much weight)

I'd be interested in the thoughts of fellow GZers as to which solution/spec you feel is most cost-effective and offers best grunt for the buck- given the prerequisite that I am not swapping from Apple's platform! ;-)