The iMac Pro is an interesting product. One question is, will it serve the needs of the Mac Pro crowd (developers, video renderers, etc.)? From the folks I’ve spoken with, a good number say that they will buy in, that this is a computer they’ve been waiting for.
Other folks want expandability, the ability to swap out RAM, SSD, GPU cards, etc. Some of these folks are already going down the Hackintosh road, others are waiting for Apple to reveal more about their Mac Pro plans.
As to Apple’s plans for an actual Apple-branded external display, this from the iMac Pro press release:
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.
And, finally, here’s the iMac Pro video shown at the WWDC keynote. That music is Pull It, by Jeff Beck. Definitely some interesting product coming down the pipeline.
it’s a step in the right direction. But I will most likely hold out for the Mac Pro, upgradeability is nice, especially since it seems the iMac cannot have the DRAM upgraded, what you order it with is what you get.
Other than the extreme price, it is my dream computer. I ran a Powermac G5 for 8 years, and the only thing that I opened the case for was to upgrade storage and swap out video cards. I know that in this day and age, I’m going to be using TB3 for additional storage, and presumably the onboard video will be good enough for the life of the machine (my G5 had the terrible base video, my current 2011 iMac has the base video and it’s still good enough, so presumably the Radeon Pro Vega will be more than enough for the life of the machine for what I plan to use it for).
The inability to upgrade the RAM is an unfortunate design decision – historically, that has been a great and reasonably inexpensive mid-life performance boost.
The machine looks impressive, but a day after the announcement I’m starting to wonder if it will end up being like the G4 Cube. Everyone loved over the Cube’s cool design and small footprint – but when it came time to actually buy, they chose the regular PowerMac tower.
This is probably a bit off topic, but I find it dismaying how “bro-y” Apple is becoming lately. I know they have all those diversity initiatives, but the gear, the adverts, the music … in fact everything about the company is just darker and more “macho” than ever before.
With Steve Jobs, Apple was all white futuristic gear with awesome alternative music and when it wasn’t their iconic white gear, everything was colourful and bright. It was a happy place. A safe place.
Today’s Apple is all about black (the boys colour). It’s all about rap and heavy metal (which I realise this site is cool with and no offence there, but) I just don’t like it. They hardly even make white gear anymore.
I can’t be the only one who finds this new direction sad and negative. Bring back the positive, happy, white, light, cool and futuristic Apple. Bring back the rainbow too.
I miss it. 🙁
Im not sure about the RAM. It’s NOT soldered if the picture on the site is accurate – that shows socketed RAM. I suppose it depends on whether the case is removable – there’s certainly no door or other easy access to the RAM.
However… you’d need to source DDR4 ECC RAM anyway. Buy it with 64 or 128 and it’s hard to think of people needing more while the machine itself is enough for their other needs. And, of course, this is the selling point of the Mac Pro which is designed to be expandable from what they’re saying.
This is all over the place. Steve Jobs killed the rainbow as one of his first moves back at Apple. He also authorized the various colors of iMac, the “toilet seat” iBooks, the black and white iPhones, and I’d be surprised if didn’t have some small hand in the iPhone 5C (coming out as it did less than two years after his death).
The Apple of 2017 still has silver models, they’ve just got some variety as well. If this iMac Pro truly ends up available in only Space Grey, it’ll be the first such model.
It’s possible, but I don’t see it. The built in display ought to make it compelling for many people.
Personally, I think putting that much CPU in an iMac is thermally insane. But maybe Apple can pull it off.
Jeff Beck – not Jeff Back, rock on
If this is becomes my Logic Pro X machine, how loud are those fans going to get when I playback a super-complex mix? I can use in-ears to isolate from the fan noise, but more often I prefer studio monitors behind my computer.
For production where noise is a non-issue, then this Pro is a generous next evolution of the all-in-one iMac.
I think it’s kind of cool too. Plus it falls inline with iPhone and iPad offerings. I don’t see such big difference from when Steve was still with Apple.
Besides this could very well been the direction they’d have naturally progressed to as well. In the end, what difference does it really make anyway?
I use Foundry Modo, an $1,800 3D modeling, animation, rendering app which runs well on my aging iMac. I’m also an Adobe CC subscriber with a tendency to want all these apps open at any given time.
Lots of windows and dreaming of multiple (3, ideally) displays.
The iMac Pro is looking really good for this. It’s a step up from even the Mac Pro with its cores and memory capacity, etc.
But I’m now observing a new trend: software as service from Foundry in the form of their newly announced Elara system. The software could run on THEIR hardware, as well as flexibly configured render farms, paid for by the minute/hour.
The UI would be via a web browser running on even plain vanilla laptops.
So this would tend to mitigate my absolute need for a powerful Mac.
Anyway, I have time to study and observe the market before I buy anything new.
One would hope they’ve got the thermal issues figured out, particularly given the anecdotal reports of high trash can failure rates.
The integrated display is an interesting question. I’ve been a notebook user for years now, but if I was buying a desktop I would prefer the modular solution (among other things, makes the machine more useful as a server later in life). But that’s just me – maybe the majority of buyers feel otherwise.
Narrow adjective “bro-y” notwithstanding, it’s almost as though you’ve forgotten or ignored everything Apple has done in the past year that isn’t influenced by Apple Music in some way.
After almost two decades of Mac towers, I resisted the idea of getting an iMac, but after almost a year of owning one, the display has certainly taken some of the sting out of the lack of expandability.
i guess, this it what the macpro was supposed to become, until they changed plans.
it’s probably a nice computer, but not the right one for me. no expandability, no nvidia gpus, a screen i don’t need, however nice it may be.
it’s strange, that it’s no middle option against a supposedly faster and more expensive macpro – if you want a faster computer with more than 4 cores and a more capable gpu then you have to buy xeons, ecc-ram, amd and that 5k screen. if I had to configure my (cost conscious) dream work-station, it’d be a core-x cpu, standard-ram and nvidia-cpu, external monitor – it’d probably cost half as much as an 8-core macpro but still be faster.
maybe this just means that this is sort of a stopgap solution, and we still have to wait quite some time for the macpro.
(it’s similar with the macbook – now there’s a newer low-price version, but the “real” 13″ touch-bar models still start at exorbitant prices.)
btw. didn’t yesterday’s product announcements smell a little bit desperate? new, lower priced machines with reduced specs, and not one but two new products that were not ready to be released, but still had to be announced ?
Poor Apple. Announce hardware and it’s desperate. Don’t announce hardware and they’re ignoring us. Can’t win.
They clearly view mid-range needs as those fulfilled by the iMac line. If you insist on Nvidia, Macs are not going to be for you with the possible exception of the upcoming Pro. Is this a problem? Not for most people, no. But for some, where they have, say, great 4k screens, but need something between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro? Yeah, it is. But come on, we’ve known for years that for whatever reason they view the desktop line as starting with the Mini and the 21″ iMac, topping out at the Retina 27″ iMac with (theoretically) the Mac Pro at the high end.
Yesterday Tossed the iMac Pro in the middle of that with it fitting above the Retina iMac and probably plenty of power for all but the very tip top of power users. AS I commented yesterday, the Mac Pro will be for two main markets (wannabes aside) – people who need even MORE power than the iMac Pro and people who need or just want the expandability.
Apple seems content to cede the people who are in the latter group but want to keep spend under $2-3k. I don’t know if that’s smart or not, but it’s not a surprise at this point.
I would hope they’ve got it right, but a MacBook Pro with Safari idling can get painfully hot at times. I’ll definitely let someone else try an iMac Pro first.
Though I might end up being part of the market for one. Interesting thing to consider.
Other than the lack of Dalmatian Flower Power or whatever. 🙂
no, it’s not really a surprise and time will tell if it was a smart move. it’s just from personal observation, that a lot of mac-owners I know, who were happy with spending more than average for a pc but can not afford to spend more than 3k don’t know what to buy next. visual artists, freelance-editors, musicians, …
personally i know a lot of people who need powerful macs but hardly anyone who needs those precise workstation cpus/gpus/rams. the only guys i know who could need that are scientists. but they use linux anyway.
“desperate” is maybe to harsh of a word, but i’d bet they are trying to reverse what seems like it’s becoming a trend (meaning: slower growth or even less people buying macs). a lower cost mbp & modest spec bumps on the mb-air. a lower cost consumer-imac. i’d guess, the transition from the mba to the mb/mbp didn’t work as planned and the imac doesn’t sell as well, as it used to. maybe the announcement of three unfinished future products is just a positive trend, so people can plan better, but yesterday’s announcements still felt a little odd with their already finished specs but no release date (and a speaker that looked exactly like concept renderings from fans).
they still made it look like they were firing from all cylinders – a file browser for iOS, showing the first fruits of their long rumored AR research, that black wireless keyboard with a number pad (sadly it looked like it got the key-travel of a mbp), drag and drop for iOS, even faster ipads (but still hardly any software to take advantage of it – too much fragmentation in terms of speed, in too little time, I guess), the new app store (which left the audience, predictably, pretty quiet),…
so, it doesn’t look like they are in a bad place right now, but like some product could be on a tipping point, and instead of re-focusing, they are still diversifying.
I’d be interested as to why musicians, artists and the like can’t use the regular Retina iMac all of which are far under $3k and pretty darn powerful.
Well, I’ve had several powerful non-Pro iMacs – my current i5 27″ from a few years back only gets to “warm plus” when running hour-long full-CPU Handbrake encodes.
Remember, the entire case is one giant heat-sink.
(No CPU details are public, but “next generation” and “8-18 cores” tells me Skylake-SP; the 8-core Skylake-SP is the 6136, at 130W TDP.
The 6700K in the “old” i7 4.0GHz iMac is 95W, so it’s not outside the realm of plausiblity, with a “new thermal architecture”.
Remember, it doesn’t sit on your lap, anyway…)
Every other 27″ iMac has upgradeable RAM, so it’d be a weird thing to solder it in, especially only for the … pro model?
Plus, Apple made a big point about external GPU support via TB3…
… is this deeply subtle parody?
Rose Gold!
Right. It’s just that there’s no door or other way to access it at least not in the pics they have on the site. Of course, that could change in the next few months. It seems odd to have to remove the entire back case just to popup in new RAM.
The keyboard being unavailable separately is weird if true. I like the feel of Apple’s keyboards, and if I spent this much on an iMac Pro and ended up with a key that didn’t work in six months or a year I certainly wouldn’t want to switch to another keyboard.
Whaaaat? No, there’s no way the Mac Pro was supposed to evolve into this.
I think what he’s saying is that until recently, this was all that was on Apple’s product roadmap. No new Mac Pro. Just this.
yeah i thought the same as rick — the current iMac is fine for those pretty common use cases. I’m a pro software dev on a 2011 iMac, still passable. so a modern 5k iMac will be fine for them.
PS: The price drops on the entry level stuff are par for the course – they’ve done that in the past and will in the future.
As for the Air vs MB… They obviously introduced the MB ‘too early’ ala the 2008 Air which was stupidly expensive. But that came down in price and the plastic MacBooks that were the entry machines went away when the Air could be shipping in a reasonable config for the entry level price. The same will happen in the next 1-2 years. The Air will go away, the lowest level MB will b $899 or $999 and then you’ll have a MB and MBP line.
I think they had to show the iMac Pro. They would probably have preferred to demo it in October and ship in December etc but they needed something to demonstrate that they still take power users on the Mac seriously. That’s on them for not getting updates out well in the next year or two.
Thats a good point, but six months, you should be covered by Apple Care. I still use the Keyboard that shipped with my Mac Pro 2008. I am on the fence on this new iMac Pro. I am not sure if I need all that power at this point. I am thinking that a top configured iMac would probably work well for me.
it was an emotional post, but I think you missed my point entirely.
No, but apparently it’s a case of describing a rainbow to the blind, lol.
I’m not surprised at the “bro-y” response (to continue using that delicious and accurate descriptor), and I’m not surprised at the irrelevant “factoids,” but I am surprised that no one (or at least no one that posts on this blog) seems to see what I see at all.
I would have expected a few of the old timers who have followed Apple from the beginning as I have, to see the difference that I’m talking about. It’s plain as day.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at here at all. My comment about the music was just about the difference between the music Steve Jobs picked for the adverts or had playing at the events, or the bands he selected or approved, and what we get now. What we get now is mostly “old man music,” (again, no offence intended to the site or anyone’s musical taste, I’m just trying to be honest, and descriptive), or rap/pop which is undeniably masculine/violent etc.
I mean it’s just a matter of time until Ted Nugent is up there on stage with Phil and Tim isn’t it?
I can kind of understand what you’re getting at. Yes Apple doesn’t have as much of Steve’s flavour to it. But a big part in terms of physical design is that we’re getting unabashed Jonny Ive.
Apple was JUST into it’s aluminum phase when Jobs died. the laptops had gone that direction, the first iPhone was aluminum, the G5s existed. But there was still an understanding that something for my Mom or a teenager would probably be plastic, something for someone who makes content and considers their computer a major status thing, will probably have harsher lines and be more metallic.
Apple was still using polycarbonate back then too.
I was just looking at a picture of an old ADC display. I noticed how the lines of it were much more curvy, but it was supposed to look like it was made of glass, even though it was plastic. And it occurred to me, now when they want to work in glass, they just do.
But glass/sapphire/x-ion glass is less bendable than plastic. And metal is still typically stronger when it’s not bent. And that’s visible in their products too. They’ve also moved away from having as simple of a product matrix on computers. They used to have the iMac and iBook, and the Power Mac and PowerBook.
Now they’ve got the Mac mini which is the unloved child, who’s users they hope will just get a laptop. They’ve got the iMac 24 inch which is the new entry level one. They’ve got the iMac 27 inch which really replaced a lot of Power Macs, though not everything. They’ve got the Mac Pro coming which covers the same users as the Power Mac, only not as modular. And they’ve got the old Mac Pro which nobody should be buying at this point, which will be replaced with a new Mac Pro once Apple figures out how much they do or don’t want to piss off people who like to upgrade internal components. (Seriously though, how hard is it to just be nice to hobbyists who like to tinker!?) And that’s just the desktop.
On the laptop side, you’ve got the Air which they’ll eventually phase out, which kind of went from being the G4 Cube of laptops, to replacing the iBook. They’ve got the MacBook which replaced the Air as the G4 cube of laptops, but which will soon replace the Air as the iBook entry level device, with a processor that is painfully light weight.
So instead of being rugged and usable by people who aren’t necessarily super careful. They look pristine, but do hold up to wear, but you’d still be scared to buy your irresponsible teenager one (in this sense the iBook and the original MacBook are dead and not really replaced). And you’ve got a MacBook Pro that yes does do everything that an old Power Book could do. You can edit video in your hotel room, you can mix music on the go etc. But it’s not really keeping up with the things that some users who used to buy a Power Book now care about.
Pro as far as Apple’s mobile branding goes, is now more about high end, something that a lawyer or exec might be happy to be seen with. And less about really empowering the bleeding edge of what people are doing with that sort of device. Which is a real shame.
As far as the music, I attribute that to Iovine being involved. I also think that Apple sees the genres of music that people are listening to, and they’re more aware of song sales and streaming figures. So they’re more inclined to use hip hop or more aggressive genres because they’re aware that it sells the best.
Also is the Mac Pro decidedly masculine in tone? Yes. But I think that’s in large part because they are assuming (rightfully) that the bulk of people working in jobs where this computer will be purchased, are probably male. Obviously there will be women who work in those fields, but my guesses is that if you asked any woman who works on a Xeon based work station whether she thought her work station would sell better in space grey or rose gold, she’d say, “You’ll sell more in space grey.”
I suspect that after a year or so, of the iMac Pro being on the market, they’ll probably introduce a new entry level Mac Pro with an i9 and normal RAM and high end GPU. But they’ll still have it in space grey to get the people who want to feel super high end while not destroying their bank.
The keyboard won’t be sold separately for the first year. I can almost promise you they’ll give into pressure eventually.
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My point was, you seem to have been distracted by the current Apple products you don’t like to a great enough degree to either not remember the Jobs-era decisions you wouldn’t have liked or not notice the current ones you still would.
Unless you simply enjoy arguing to extremes. Your “delicious and accurate descriptor” for painting everyone here as “bro-y” for disagreeing with your initial assessment below makes that easier, I’d expect.
That’s true, but for a keyboard my preference would be to buy a new one. If the old one can be repaired under AppleCare, so much the better. I end up with a spare.
Even a couple days without YOUR keyboard can be a miserable experience if you use your computer as part of your job or business, and that’s what I’d call a “pro.”
That makes a little more sense, but I think it’s unlikely. The task can Mac Pro was on Apple’s roadmap until they realized they couldn’t update it in a timely fashion; at that point, something they could update was at least hinted there.
Not only that, but I also expect the iMac Pro to be lower in price once a second generation hits the market.