Hey Laurent,
We use VW Landmark and SU Pro, and we’re a mac-based office. Some iMacs, some Mac Pros. I have the latest iMac, maxed out on hard drive, video card, and 32GB of RAM. One in the office has slightly less RAM on an 1.5 year old iMac, works ok, but not as fast on SU in particular. Video card is really important. You may spend an extra $800, but worth it for the upgrades over the long run and still much cheaper than the Mac Pro. My advice would be not to look for the minimum configuration, go for the max. Consider how many hours you are at this machine x number of years… daily cost ends up very low for cost/benefit analysis of not having to wait as long and deal with a laggy computer for years on end.
We deal with VW files that are typically 30-75mb, but can get up to 150mb+ on more image intensive files. My iMac can handle all that pretty well. SU performance is always a combination of geometric complexity and available RAM + video card. Typical files for us are 50mb-150mb.
VW has been a good solution for us, very powerful planting tools and much better graphic interface/output than CAD. 3D is overly complex and no where near as intuitive or easy as SU, therefore we have opted for the back-and-forth workflow, even though it gets old…
Consultant collaboration is not much of a problem, but you will likely run into lineweight issues when importing/exporting. Xrefing, etc. no problem.
Hope that helps!
