Hrm.. Folks here keep acting like this means Apple still doesn't get the Pro market (or that there is still a pro market).. This really seems to me to be a "what can we get out sooner" product released as a stopgap to next year's preannounced new Mac Pro. I suppose it's still valid to fault them for the reality of their product line and for having gotten themselves into this position in the first place, but I think it's pretty clear that this is not Apple's actual attempt to fully pent-up demand for a good traditional workstation from Apple.
Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
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Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#132I'm watching this iMac announcement and .. hm, I still find it underwhelming. The top-spec'd iMac will be less powerful (when it comes to CPU) in Jan/2018 than my current desktop I bought in mid-2015. We'll see the actual pricing though. I don't think that forcing high-perf components into a small desktop chassis makes a lot of sense, but it might me only me.
For starting at 5k the pricing requires a bank loan for most people when you could pick up a refurbished desktop for $300-400
The market for this is enterprise users.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say an external GPU introduces pretty significant upgrade potential.
That was the exact statement made about the Mac Pro when it was released in 2013. Look how well that went.
The mac pro did not feature external GPU, just external storage. The only thing you won't be able to upgrade in this machine is the CPU. The RAM is not soldered on those high end iMacs, and disk and gpu can be external over TB3.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#134Not a Mac user but do they ever release a top-end product that was less powerful than last year's top-end product? If not hasn't ever top-end mac ever been the most powerful mac ever?
MacMini 2013' are better than a new one.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#135Maybe I'm a sheep but I think it's great. Up to 128GB ECC, up to 18 cores, large NVMe SSDs with up to 3GB/s speeds (likely reads, but probably also writes), and it's in that beautiful grey / black. Really cool. The 8-core model at 5k seems reasonable to me since the monitor is likely 2k itself. You'll probably see a lot of them being bought for upper eschelon developers at hip startups. And the TCO of a mac vs. a bei…
Yeah, if I had that kind of money stuffed between my couch, I'd totally buy it. I don't care that it's a ridiculous machine and that single thread performance with that 18-core monster won't be anything to write home about. I still want it, because it is awesome.
I agree. I think the sweet spot for my workload (not encoding much video just compiling stuff) the 8-core model with higher clocks makes more sense for me.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#136This is Apple's answer to their negligence to the Pro market, and it's hugely disappointing. The iMac was already supposed to be a Pro machine. And then they "New Coke"'d it by making it too thin and susceptible to overheating. Performance suffered and now they're compensating with this machine. At $5000 the iMac Pro falls just short of a ~$2000 Hackintosh. It's still locked into the thin form factor that can't be up…
Does that $2k hackintosh have a Xeon, ECC RAM, and a (presumably based on their history) great 5k monitor?
Because a good Xeon E5 can easily cost $2k by itself.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#137From what pro users wanted - this makes it worse, not better.
Atleast it's a relatively powerful all apple option. Earlier we'd have to go for a hackintosh, which is a no go in many professional environments. Still not good enough tho - it's not upgradeable.
It would be a great thing if screen was a cintiq, like Surface. This.. it feels like a stopgap - expensive one at that.
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#138To all of you who're disappointed by this not being a "proper Pro":
"4x larger L2 cache" and "2x wider AVX" suggest they're going to use the upcoming i9 X-series chips [1] that are based on Skylake design with ~15% better instructions-per-clock (IPC) performance than Broadwell-based Xeons, plus they'll clock much higher than Xeons too: with turbo boost up to 4.5Ghz for even the 10-core model!. Quad channel DDR4 at 2666Mhz is also an improvement.
All this promises a much better single-thread performance vs the current Pro line. IMO that's insane amount of power, it can even probably handle Slack desktop client! :)
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announces-skylakex...
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#139Gonna leave this here from the official press release as it seems quite a few people have missed this point: "In addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest-end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display." https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/imac-pro-most-powerfu... Also…
If you want a keyboard that looks similar and has good quality but not for macOS, I've heard good things about Surface Keyboard
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/d/surface-keyboard/8r3...
Re: Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever"
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is Apple's answer to their negligence to the Pro market No it isn't. >The iMac was already supposed to be a Pro machine. Not it wasn't. The iMac was always decidedly the consumer desktop. The pro machine actually had "Pro" in its name.
The pro machine actually had "Pro" in its name. All "pro" means in Apple-marketing-speak is "deluxe" these days. You can clearly see it in the MBP where they have traded off features that professional users wanted, for thinness that noone in that market cares about. Make it 5mm thicker or even 10mm for 32 or 64G RAM and everyone would have been delighted.
Yep, I wanted exactly two things in the MBP on the last refresh: 32+ gigs of RAM, and an nVidia GPU.