Apple’s powerful new iMac Pro launches December 14

“Apple said Tuesday that the new iMac will be available on December 14,” Todd Haselton reports for CNBC. “The news was confirmed in an e-mail from Apple that was sent to customers.”

“Earlier, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said in an interview that the company’s iMac Pro would launch in the next couple of days,” Haselton reports. “Apple announced the iMac Pro, its most powerful desktop computer to date, back in June.”

The all-new iMac Pro, with its 27-inch Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation, is the most powerful Mac Apple has ever made. Featuring a new space gray enclosure, iMac Pro packs serious performance for advanced graphics editing, virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering. iMac Pro starts at $4,999.

FWIW, my son told me the same thing about the next OS upgrade on this “oldie, but goodie”: it’s probably not gonna be able to run it...we shall see. For now, it does what I need it to do. Unlike him, I’m not a heavy “power” user which is why this old one has probably served me well. His machines? All new “state of the art” stuff and he’s drooling to get his mitts on the new iMacPro. But he spends his days working as a programmer for Zillow and needs machines like that to do his work.

We use a 2013 Mac Pro with 6 Cores and 32 GB of ECC DDR3 RAM to render 3D CAT scans of our patient's mandibles and lower skulls in preparations for doing full mouth upper or lower implants. It's already blazingly fast. . . this iMac Pro would be 200% to 300% faster than that Mac Pro. That replaced a 2008 Mac Pro, also with a Xeon 4 core, with 32 GB of ECC RAM.

However, getting the 3D patient's scans in under 2 minutes is still acceptable and getting them in 40 seconds will not improve our productivity at all. The doctors will not get to looking at them any sooner because it still takes more than 2 minutes to get the patient back into the chair from the 3D panalypes. . . LOL!

I don't know if you have Fry's Electronics stores where you are but they sent me an email ad today and this was included in it:

27" iMac 3.4 GHz Quad Core Intel i5, 5K monitor, 1TB Fusion Drive, 8GB RAM, $1648.00

That's not a bad price for a brand new Apple 27" 5k iMac, especially for a Fusion Drive model. Apple retail for this is $1799. I use this model as my main computer at my office. It's fast enough for the kind of thing I gather you do.

The Fusion drive is a combo SSD and spinning hard drive where the boot files and most used files are on a 128GB SSD, while data and lesser used files are on the physical spinning drive. It makes for a very fast overall system that boots in seconds. You'll have to apply for a "promo code" membership but it costs nothing. . . but they may have limitations as to what states can have memberships. Check it out. Free Shipping too.

Why do you think Apple has gone to court repeatedly over the years to kill hardware clones? Remember the Laser and others?

Now they protect their fiefdom with software licensing on a proprietary OS...

The last Mac Pro was a dud.. they bet on the wrong video system, and were left in the dust when the industry moved in a different direction and they had no way, thanks to stupidly putting style first, of adapting... hence FINALLY making this new one now....

The last incarnation of the Mac Mini, its starter mac... was a bomb... insanely slow low end processors and stupidly soldering the ram to the MB for no other reason than to gouge users who might want more ram than the base offering.

The latest Macbook Pro’s are equally stupid... going fully USB-C, removing the SD reader as well as making the touchpad so ungodly big for no reason that typing on the devices is a frustrating chore, shows that Apple has been losing its way and doing things it thinks are cool just for the sake of it... not because folks desire it.

I really think Apple has been losing its way on a lot of things, in the post Job’s era. Not that it had a perfect record during the Job’s era.

Why do you think Apple has gone to court repeatedly over the years to kill hardware clones? Remember the Laser and others?

Now they protect their fiefdom with software licensing on a proprietary OS...

I do indeed recall all the Mac clones.

Apple's OS has never been licensed except for a short time in the 1990s. It's not "now they protect their fiefdom" by any stretch of your imagination. The license always limited the use of MacOS, OSX, or macOS to use on Apple hardware except for that time in the 1990s when Apple opened it for license for use on Mac clones. That stopped when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.

The Clones were an attempt by some misguided CEOs to emulate the Microsoft model who did not grasp that Apple was a hardware company, not a software publisher. The experiment in clones was killing Apple as the clone makers started doing the same thing that Windows manufacturers do, compete in a race to the bottom of the price barrel to see who can cut prices better than the other at the expense of quality.

However, even today, for the most part, High End PC equivalents of their machines are generally comparably priced.... However in their latest incarnations, Apple’s been getting a little too full of its own self importance and made some stupid moves...

The last Mac Pro was a dud.. they bet on the wrong video system, and were left in the dust when the industry moved in a different direction and they had no way, thanks to stupidly putting style first, of adapting... hence FINALLY making this new one now....

I disagree. The 2013 Mac Pro is actually one of the most expandable Macs ever made, just not internally, but with a Thunderbolt accessory cage you can add multiple drives, cards, and a host of others of up to 64 accessory devices if you so desire. The internal graphic card in the Mac Pro is swappable for other cards. The processor is swappable for other Xeon processors, as is the memory. It will drive up to six 30" 5K monitors on the card that in it, and you can add more graphic cards. Just because they all don't fit inside the single round case does NOT mean it was not expandable.

The last incarnation of the Mac Mini, its starter Mac... was a bomb... insanely slow low end processors and stupidly soldering the ram to the MB for no other reason than to gouge users who might want more ram than the base offering.

You obviously have not used one. . . nor is your characterization correct. Only ONE of the Mac mini models is as you describe, the lowest cost Mac mini, with the 1.4GHz i5, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. The other Mac minis sport 2.6Ghz or 2.8Ghz Intel i5s, 8GB of RAM, and either 1TB HD or a 1TB Fusion drive. Those are quite capable Macs.

Again, you're wrong because you mischaracterize the port. It's a dual function port. Yes, its a USB-C port, but they also double function as high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports as well which use the same connector. I've been using one of the MacBook with what you term the "ungodly big" touch pad and it is not a chore to type. The touch pad is quite useful. I don't think you've ever used one.

As for an SD card reader, if one needs one, they are as inexpensive as $12. Why add to the weight and size of the computer to include one for everyone if they do not need it?

So, HamiltonJay, you've really demonstrated you don't have a clue what you are talking about when it comes to modern Mac models in your criticism because you've missed the target in each of your claims.

Sorry, but I work on Macs daily, their lastest Macbook Pro is a solid swing and a miss..

“Apple’s OS has never been licensed except for a short time in the 1990s. It’s not “now they protect their fiefdom” by any stretch of your imagination. The license always limited the use of MacOS, OSX, or macOS to use on Apple hardware except for that time in the 1990s when Apple opened it for license for use on Mac clones. That stopped when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.”

That’s exactly what I said, they protect their fiefdom by software licensing.. you can’t run it legally on anything but their hardware. Not sure what you are trying to argue here, you are basically proving my point.

Sorry, but the Mac Pro was a dud my friend, they bet on the wrong video and left themselves no out.. and the industry left them behind.. you think otherwise, please go and do the research yourself, apple execs are on the record publicly on this...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-failure-admission

As to not using a Mac Mini... sorry my friend, but again you are WRONG. The last redesign of the Mac Mini was a bomb... a 1.4 GHZ Cpu on even the smallest desktops was feeble and pathetic, particularly for the price, and the decision to hard wire the memory to the board served no purpose whatsoever other than gouge consumers more $$ if they needed more than the base memory incarnation.

You can continue to claim I don’t use the equipment, because I offer criticism rather than glowing fanboy copulation to Apple, but the reality is Apple has blown it big time on many of its decisions since Jobs passed. The Macbook Pro is now anything but a PRO machine... if I need to carry 4 or 5 dongles to do my job, when I did it perfectly fine with your previous incarnation without any, thats a fail. And if I am having to spend copious amounts of time to stop what I am doing to keep hitting option z to undo the insanity that your touchpad decided I wanted to do, but did not because its the size of female opera singer after a big meal... That’s a fail.

You are welcome to your opinions to the contrary, but I work with this equipment daily, and I can back up every criticism I have with it. You can dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what their talking about if you need to to save your ego, but its simply self delusion on your part.

1983 sounds about right, not much earlier for that number though. I think it was sometime in 1981 maybe 82 when we got the IBM PC. The HP 9825 was originally acquired in about 1977 or so and retired from the lab work in 1979. 79 is when my group acquired it.

For a year or so, we operated the 2 desktops side by side. New program writing shifted to the IBM PC with the legacy HP9825 just used to finish up the pilot plant work with their custom programs. Funny thing is that the IBM PC just lasted that year or so. A chlorine plant a few hundred yards away had a leak and we evacuated. A few weeks later the PC was dead so opened it up. Chlorine gas had gotten into the building and the circuit board was corroded. Now though, the HP computer and the other HP gear was ticking along just fine so opened the HP9825 up for a look. Not a bit of damage. Conferred with HP geeks and they said their boards had a clear coat kind of mask sprayed on both sides. While they would not claim it, HP hinted something about milspec mumble mumble.

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