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iMac Pro

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Re: iMac Pro

#81

Post by charrondev »

aykutcan wrote: post #60
stefco_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend in film production tells me that his shop does a ton of editing on iMacs despite the premium on hardware. He is an enthusiast and has built his own editing PC, but he tells me the iMacs are rock-solid and never give them any trouble, despite the specs being worse on paper than some other editing machines. I think that the consistency, quality, and software integration are worth a lot to businesses, especial…

so Editing PC gave him trouble ? Why i am the only one around using PC with zero problems and much much better than any apple product?

I never had any issues until I got a hiDPI screen. 4k5k screens @2x still seem really half baked on windows.

Re: iMac Pro

#82

Post by huhtenberg »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #63
stefco_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't do that with the latest MacBooks, which have their SSDs soldered directly onto the logic boards. And you can't do that with memory for any Apple notebook from the last several years for the same reason. My 7 year old MacBook Pro is running okay thanks to some memory and storage upgrades. I would not be able to get the same life extension with one of the new models, which makes me hesitate to get a new M…

To be fair, most new laptops like the Surface Pro or Dell's XPS 13 make it pretty darn hard to upgrade the memory or hard drive.

> most new laptops

_some_ new laptops

Most new laptops are still fully serviceable.

Re: iMac Pro

#83

Post by strictnein »

jmnicolas wrote: post #3

If they manage to get the 18 core processor without thermal throttling it will be a real feat of engineering, but I doubt it's possible. Throttling or not, I wish I was rich enough (we're probably talking about a 6 to 8k machine here !).

> we're probably talking about a 6 to 8k machine here !

Yeah, the retail on that processor is $2k.

Re: iMac Pro

#84

Post by andruby »

demarq wrote: post #54

To all the people banging on about upgrades... exactly what in the name of silica are you working on that this machine can not possibly handle for the next 5 years? What could you possibly want to upgrade? And what are you currently running?

I have a MacPro that's less than 5 years old, and I wish I could upgrade the internal SSD, or get a gpu that supports FreeSync (or G-Sync).

And I can imagine specific hardware improvements for ML or VR in the near future.

Re: iMac Pro

#85

Post by EthanHeilman »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #63
stefco_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't do that with the latest MacBooks, which have their SSDs soldered directly onto the logic boards. And you can't do that with memory for any Apple notebook from the last several years for the same reason. My 7 year old MacBook Pro is running okay thanks to some memory and storage upgrades. I would not be able to get the same life extension with one of the new models, which makes me hesitate to get a new M…

To be fair, most new laptops like the Surface Pro or Dell's XPS 13 make it pretty darn hard to upgrade the memory or hard drive.

I upgraded my Dell XPS 13 recently. Only tricky part was buying the special screwdriver bits which cost me 10 dollars on amazon. It was probably the easiest laptop upgrade I've ever done in the last 17 years.

Re: iMac Pro

#86

Post by crispyambulance »

peatmoss wrote: post #20

This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up. No fixability / no upgradability is the price we pay for laptops, but does it really have to be the price for desktops? I'd think that swapping a video card or adding a drive or two is the sort of thing that one might do…

You "can" swap out parts and repair iMacs, it is just not something one does casually. You need tools, instructions, skills and will-power.

The thing is most people, even pros, don't bother with that stuff even when they have Dell boxes. Apple knows that and, I think, trades off ease-of-repair for sleekness and mostly wins out (until recently).

AFAIK, there is no "screen mode" that enables one to use these things as monitors.

Re: iMac Pro

#87

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jmull wrote: post #30

Is there something new here? (I ask because it was announced months ago and isn’t due out for a few more months.) Looks great though. It’s a little overpowered for the stuff I do, where the demanding things are distributed systems which don’t make sense to host on a workstation, even in simulation. But I sure wouldn’t mind one.

I'm a programmer and so buy middle of the line macbook pros with mid range CPUs, mid range RAM, and integrated GPUS. Ironically, my wife, a designer, always chastises me for getting such slow hardware: turns out what works for a programmer doesn't work for soemone who has to use a lot of Adobe CSS :). I assume this iMac pro would be for her, not for me.

Re: iMac Pro

#89

Post by snuxoll »

peatmoss wrote: post #20

This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up. No fixability / no upgradability is the price we pay for laptops, but does it really have to be the price for desktops? I'd think that swapping a video card or adding a drive or two is the sort of thing that one might do…

> I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?

I wish, there used to be Target Display Mode but it was removed in recent years (anything after Mid-2014). For the 5K iMac it was pretty obvious why it was missing, until fairly recently (DP 1.3 was ratified late 2014) there wasn't a connection fast enough to even drive the internal display (they ended up using a custom timing controller to overdrive a DP 1.2 link) so TDM was a no-go, but it'd be nice if they brought it back :/

Re: iMac Pro

#90

Post by stonith »

demarq wrote: post #54

To all the people banging on about upgrades... exactly what in the name of silica are you working on that this machine can not possibly handle for the next 5 years? What could you possibly want to upgrade? And what are you currently running?

I bought a top spec iMac a few years ago for working on Unreal 4 projects in my spare time and doubling as a dayjob machine, and sure enough I wanted a better GPU a couple of years later and went and bought a PC. Amusingly UE4 is actually one of the sample screenshots in the linked page. Nothing Apple does can really compensate for the rate at which GPUs get quicker, and putting an AMD one in there is doubly irritating since that's not what the majority of the market uses.

So each time you want to upgrade your GPU, you're also having to purchase a new screen. The difference in my case was between having about 10fps with a lot of debug draw in the UE4 editor on the iMac, and about 90fps for the same thing on a new PC with a 1080.

About the only good thing about the iMac was that it held its value remarkably well, and I sold it for half the purchase price 3 years later.

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