You're used to mac and not building your own computer so get a mac.

Big thing is to get an M1 processor mac with at least 16 GiB or more memory. These are absolutely a must, so no buying a used old Intel for cheap -- not worth it at any price. The other specs won't really matter much for you, but upgrade if you feel like it.

If you're on a budget I'd get a Mini or Air expanded to 16 GiB depending on how you want to work. These will be fine for anything you're going to use them for as long as you get 16 GiB ram not 8 GiB.

Your main concern is storage space. Apple storage is ridiculously priced so get the minimum SSD and a cooled, external enclosure and normal huge spinning drive in it for a Mini or probably better with a NAS network attached storage for a laptop (so no wires). You can just pick pretty much anything that looks okay on Amazon. Normal hard drive has to be formatted HFS+ not APFS and will be fine for your use case. Get another external drive and set up Time Machine so you don't lose files again. You can get a huge storage and backup for a few hundred dollars. An unlimited online backup like Backblaze is a good idea at ~$70/yr for peace of mind or spend $100/yr on a new hard drive and keep lots of backups - once you get into many GiB online backup slows down and takes a long time to finish uploading, but you leave in on and it eventually gets everything.

I would avoid the iMac because it's all-in-one and not repairable, so when the internal drive fails it's junk. Maybe you can use it as a monitor, idk, but to me it's just an annoyance and not worth it.

You're used to mac and not building your own computer so get a mac.

Big thing is to get an M1 processor mac with at least 16 GiB or more memory. These are absolutely a must, so no buying a used old Intel for cheap -- not worth it at any price. The other specs won't really matter much for you, but upgrade if you feel like it.

If you're on a budget I'd get a Mini or Air expanded to 16 GiB depending on how you want to work. These will be fine for anything you're going to use them for as long as you get 16 GiB ram not 8 GiB.

Your main concern is storage space. Apple storage is ridiculously priced so get the minimum and a cooled, external enclosure and normal huge drive in it for a Mini or probably better with a NAS network attached storage for a laptop (so no wires). You can just pick pretty much anything that looks okay on Amazon. Normal hard drive has to be formatted HFS+ not APFS and will be fine for your use case. Get another external drive and set up Time Machine so you don't lose files again. You can get a huge storage and backup for a few hundred dollars. An unlimited online backup like Backblaze is a good idea at ~$70/yr for peace of mind or spend $100/yr on a new hard drive and keep lots of backups - once you get into many GiB online backup slows down and takes a long time to finish uploading, but you leave in on and it eventually gets everything.

I would avoid the iMac because it's all-in-one and not repairable, so when the internal drive fails it's junk. Maybe you can use it as a monitor, idk, but to me it's just an annoyance and not worth it.

You're used to mac and not building your own computer so get a mac.

Big thing is to get an M1 processor mac with at least 16 GiB or more memory. These are absolutely a must, so no buying a used old Intel for cheap -- not worth it at any price. The other specs won't really matter much for you, but upgrade if you feel like it.

If you're on a budget I'd get a Mini or Air expanded to 16 GiB depending on how you want to work. These will be fine for anything you're going to use them for as long as you get 16 GiB ram not 8 GiB.

Your main concern is storage space. Apple storage is ridiculously priced so get the minimum and a cooled, external enclosure and normal huge drive in it for a Mini or probably better with a NAS network attacked storage for a laptop (so no wires). You can just pick pretty much anything that looks okay on Amazon. Normal hard drive has to be formatted HFS+ not APFS and will be fine for your use case. Get another external drive and set up Time Machine so you don't lose files again. You can get a huge storage and backup for a few hundred dollars. An unlimited online backup like Backblaze is a good idea at ~$70/yr for peace of mind or spend $100/yr on a new hard drive and keep lots of backups - once you get into many GiB online backup slows down and takes a long time to finish uploading, but you leave in on and it eventually gets everything.

I would avoid the iMac because it's all-in-one and not repairable, so when the internal drive fails it's junk. Maybe you can use it as a monitor, idk, but to me it's just an annoyance and not worth it.