Apple’s all new iMac Pro staring at $4999, available in December 2017
Posted on 06/05/2017 12:38:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple today gave a sneak peek of iMac Pro, an entirely new workstation-class product line designed for pro users with the most demanding workflows. The all-new iMac Pro, with its gorgeous 27-inch Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation, is the most powerful Mac ever made. Featuring a stunning new space gray enclosure, iMac Pro packs incredible performance for advanced graphics editing, virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering. iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December starting at (just under $5k)
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.
“We’re thrilled to give developers and customers a sneak peek at iMac Pro. This will be our fastest and most powerful Mac ever, which brings workstation-class computing to iMac for the first time,” said John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering, in a statement. “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”
Apple’s all new iMac Pro staring at $4999, available in December 2017
Workstation-Class Performance in an iMac Design
Featuring next-generation Intel Xeon processors up to 18 cores, iMac Pro is designed to handle the most demanding pro workflows. With an all-flash architecture and all-new thermal design, iMac Pro delivers up to 80 percent more cooling capacity in the same thin and seamless iMac design. And with a new space gray enclosure and gorgeous 27-inch Retina 5K display with support for 1 billion colors, iMac Pro is as stunning as it is powerful.
The Most Advanced Graphics Ever in a Mac
iMac Pro comes with the new Radeon Pro Vega GPU, the most advanced graphics ever in a Mac. Featuring a new, next-generation compute core and up to 16GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), iMac Pro with the Vega GPU delivers up to an amazing 11 Teraflops of single-precision compute power for real-time 3D rendering and immersive, high frame rate VR. And for half-precision computation, ideal for machine learning, iMac Pro delivers up to an incredible 22 Teraflops of performance.
Fast Storage & Advanced I/O
iMac Pro also supports up to 4TB of SSD and up to 128GB of ECC memory, and with four Thunderbolt 3 ports can connect to up to two high-performance RAID arrays and two 5K displays at the same time. For the first time ever on a Mac, iMac Pro features 10Gb Ethernet for up to 10 times faster networking.
Pricing & Availability
iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December starting at just under $5K (US). More details can be found at apple.com/imac-pro.
Source: Apple Inc.
Tangential to topic, Tim Cook demonstrated Siri putting affect into its speech. Said the same word three times, with different affect each time.When he goes (commercial) public (rather than just nerd public, he should have Siri pronounce the sentence, “I never said he stole money,” Six times:
- I never said he stole money.
- I never said he stole money.
- I never said he stole money.
- I never said he stole money.
- I never said he stole money.
- I never said he stole money.
You could configure a Mac II maxed out for around $22,000 back when it was new. I ran across one of those maxed out versions about ten years later, say circa 1998, and saw it was for sale for about $100. You could buy one of those now for $5. . . Newer hold their prices far longer than 10 years, often retaining 30% at ten years.
Heh, well... That Mac IIfx you bought was pretty serious box. Dang, that thing would run all the way up to System 7.6.1 and not act like a boat anchor.
Even after Apple discontinued the IIfx it wasn’t surpassed in performance until the Quadra 840av which was even more expensive than what you paid. Also, there was about year and a half long window of opportunity where you could have paid another $400 to upgrade your IIfx’s core with the 50mhz version and overclock the board and you’d own an outdated machine still faster than Apple’s new Quadra 840av. Do you remember the detractors to the Quadra 840av complaining to Apple about that?
That date range you bought it in was a time when the RISC vs CISC processor war was on a violent upswing. Huge tech leaps being done at the time. You could have even bought an Orange board to fill an expansion slot in your IIfx to add an Intel processor — Like a 486 DX2/66 or whatever it was then — and run MS Windows/DOS if you needed to.
Hey, if you still have that IIfx you might be able to sell it for several hundred bucks to a collector. I’m sure you got your money out of that if you were in desktop publishing at the time.
That's the thing, people complaining as if $5K is a lot, when that was the norm in the early 1990s. People have it great these days in comparison. My buddy bought a Mac IIfx, paid over $9k in the early 1990s. I said "why?", he said "because I can!". He was a game forum administrator, and enjoyed the task. I bought a IIci, less power but cheaper. A few years ago I bought a IIfx for my computer collection, a hobby of mine, and it cost me $50. When you pay for a new state of the art machine, you're paying for the intellectual capabilities like a lease, and not necessarily for the materials that went into it. Technology will get better and cheaper as time goes by and most machines quickly lose value; older tech gains value only if it has rarity and historical value. For instance, first year Lisa computers with dual 5-1/4 drives go for tens of thousands while second year Lisa's and later are better but go for hundreds. This new iMac Pro will probably not be a collectible, although it will be rare due to cost.
My bride bought me a 20 MB SuperMac “Dataframe” SCSI external drive for our Mac Plus in 1986. $600! Probably $3,000 in today’s dollars — half of this beast.
Technology advances are just incredible.
This looks like a monster! ;-)
Depends on many factors, as with any vintage hobby. There is a healthy vintage Apple hobby market. I'm a collector. There's currently a Apple II on eBay for nearly $20G. One guy is selling just the CPU chip for an early Apple II for $1000 (and using a picture of the 1977 model I had sold to someone else but I made my money on it). Another chip for $500. Yes, people are trading to obtain chips to keep these machines going. Even though the machines like the IIfx are painfully underpowered compared to what is available now, people still are enjoying them.
Thanks, I suppose on a 27” display that last part might make it work for me. Have to have a look-see.
How did the Lisa do, BTW? Did it do as well as the NeXT?
I am still an Apple investor as part of QQQ, but I am not sure Apple is getting ready for the Cloud.
It was just announced today at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference that the Apple App Stores had paid out $70 Billion to independent developers in sales of their apps and that $21 billion of that was paid out just this last year alone. That is a sign that your assertion that somehow there's more competition in the PC arena allows more people to develop things is not quite right. Apple's use standard hardware that works on standard PCs. There are SIXTEEN MILLION registered developers for Apple worldwide. I would be willing to bet that dwarfs the number of registered developers for Windows.
This is a Pro computer. For mere mortals there is the regular iMac lineup.
> [the keyboard]
Now that's funny. :-) Well played.
PRECISELY.
Apple is a SYSTEM company. Hardware and software that are developed together as an integrated, coherent whole entity.
During much of my engineering career I was a "systems" engineer, just as much as a hardware engineer, and more than I was a software engineer. It's the hardest of the three, if you do it right.
A box of hardware components can make a hardware box, and a generic operating system like Windows can operate that box, but it's not like the OS and that hardware were designed from the get-go to work as an integrated unit.
When I pony up my hard-earned cash for a piece of Apple gear, it's because it was designed to work as a whole, not as a bunch of separate parts that were convinced to cooperate with each other using a hammer, spit and piano wire, and prayer.
But I say this proudly as a 30-year user of Windows:
The outstanding triumph of Windows is that it works reasonably well on the incredibly heterogeneous, and often miscellaneous and haphazard, collections of components that people install it on.There is plenty of room in the world for both approaches. But let's not make the mistake of trying to compare them on the basis of simple things like price and hardware specs. The approaches are apples and oranges.
The Lisa served admirably as the conceptual prototype for the Macintosh. At $10K, it was crazy expensive, but it demonstrated the usefulness of its concepts and introduced them into many a workplace, including the aerospace engineering outfit I was working for at the time.
I worked and played with that Lisa a fair amount, though not as much as the guys whose department paid for it :-) ,P> Ultimately it yielded to the Mac, after selling around 100,000 units. But it had set the stage very well.
> Did it do as well as the NeXT?
Better -- the NeXT computer sold about 50,000 units.
I was looking at monitors this morning and saw the 16:10. I love doing graphic design but it’s been a long while. Will I not have to blow it all up 600% to do the fine tuning? of course, I will have to upgrade my adobe software, too! LOL
the Macintosh SE/30, introduced in January 1989 for $6,500, came with a 16 MHz Motorola 68030 and 1MB of RAM built inMore info here.
•the Macintosh IIcx, March 1989, $5,369, 16 MHz Motorola 68030, 1MB RAM
•the closest to the NeXT Cube is the Macintosh IIci, launched in September 1989 (one year after the NeXT Computer) for $6,269 with the same processor, the Motorola 68030 running at 25 MHz, and 1MB RAM in the default config
These are most certainly targeted for creative business users - film, design, marketing, iOS developers. They are great machines and have considerable longevity in the market.
Look at these machines in terms of marginal efficiency. If you price it out as working full time across a 2,000 hr FTE, it’s 2.50/hr and likely will last 24 months, so you’re looking at $1.25/hr to speed up your employees who are making anywhere between $50k and $150k/yr. On the services side, marketing companies are charging $75-$125/hr for graphics work. $100-$300/hr for film editing. You want those companies having the highest possible speed - so you’re not paying for the processing lag.
This is just the top of the line in iMacs. Apple just refreshed the entire gamut of iMacs and there are new iMacs running from $1049. You don't need this one. Find one affordable that does what you need to do. 99% of people don't need the iMac Pro.
Look at one of the lower end new iMacs. Soon you will not be able to upgrade that 2007 model to any of the security upgrades as the capabilities of the software won't support it. We upgraded all of ours two years ago, just in time for a burglar to break in and steal several of them. So we upgraded the replacements. . . and the burglar got boat anchors suitable for selling for parts machines as we wiped and locked them remotely.
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