Gentlemen, if a little project I'm working on takes off I shall need a much faster Mac. What I need to do is to assemble a dozen books, each with a spread of 140 x 280 mm, in Affinity Designer. Its simple enough to do but each 3 up spread takes ages to load into the 12 up assembly. I assume my problem is a lack of memory and what I have now is; Processor 2.26 GHz Intel core 2 duo, and Memory 6 GB 1067 MHz DDR3. What is a significant upgrade likely to cost me?
I wouldn't personally put a lot of money into upgrading the current machine. I presume you have neither USB3 nor Thunderbolt so you can't add faster external storage, the best upgrade then would be to swap out the HD for an SSD; several hundred pounds depending on capacity. Your CPU and bus (to the RAM) are a limitation though you might be able to add more RAM (though 6GB or perhaps 8GB is probably your limit - you'd be into diminishing returns anyway). The other problem is that any money you do spend is unlikely to carry over to the next machine and is not going to deliver "much faster" across the board.
So... UKP889.00 or UKP1289.00? The higher figure buys a 21.5 inch iMac upgraded to 16GB RAM and a Fusion Drive (both in search of faster I/O). The 2.8GHz processor is probably sufficient (you can buy faster but if your software is multi-threaded then you've got 4 cores to load up your I/O and if it isn't then the CPU will ramp up to 3.3GHz which is quite respectable). The lower figure is a similarly spec-ed, but dual-core, Mac Mini if you already have display etc. You would at least be future-proof for a number of years then.
Eric Jervis 