Apple’s all new iMac Pro staring at $4999, available in December 2017
Posted on 12/12/2017 9:59:52 AM PST by Swordmaker
“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.
Apple’s all new iMac Pro staring at $4999, available in December 2017
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Brief article in full here.
MacDailyNews Take: Less than two days away!
I was on the Apple Store web site just a couple days ago looking at that... and drooling over the prospective specifications. I would love to see some real-world comparisons and trials of this machine.
But the price tag reminds me of the earliest days of personal computing... yowzers! But yes - this is a premium piece of equipment.
It's a market that is actually quite large. . . and they will sell a lot. It's for the professional videographer, artists, movie makers... especially editors, animation studios, etc. What is great about it is that it has a 5K screen which allows you to edit a 4K video on screen with your CLIPS and your tool kit on screen with your 4K full frame video fully displayed. 4K monitors can't do that and at best emulate the actual image or overlay the tools and clips or have to have the tools on a second monitor, interrupting the flow of creation by separating the work from the tools. There are very few 5K monitor systems available that can do this. . . and they've been wanting an iMac that has the power to do the real-time editing with the monitor the 27" iMac has had for some time. This is it, an iMac with a workstation class computer in it.
It was only a couple of years ago that they were paying $5,000 for just the 5K monitors. Even a used Dell 5K monitor is $1400 these days.
I recall that back in the early 80s, an executive was home sick and getting antsy, not being able to do his work. It was driving him crazy, having nothing to do except watch gameshows and soap operas. So he decided to try and do some of his office work on his kid's Commodore 64 using a word processor called SpeedScript. He was typing letters and some reports and he realized it seemed to be going faster than his work at the office on WordPerfect, especially on things like search and replace, and moving things around.
Curious to see if he was right, he called his secretary and they did some timing checks on duplicate documents. The C=64 turned out to be FASTER, sometimes up to ten times faster than Wordperfect on almost every word processing function than her office IBM-PC. . . except for saving and retrieving documents (the Commodore 1541 floppy drive was notoriously slow compared to other disk drives, but you didn't get many disk errors because it had its own 6502 computer built in to monitor read/writes).
One of the most eye opening to him was when they created a document that had just the same word repeated 400 times and then did a search and replace of that word with another. The C=64 was done with that task in under five seconds while WordPerfect took something like fifty seconds, IIRC.
Printing was the same between both computers. . . but they were limited by the printers. They were both printing at 80 or 120 characters per second on daisy wheel printers, I don't recall which. (Remember those clattering days?)
When they were discussing this in the magazine where it was written up (PC World?), I wrote to point out the obvious explanation, and others came to the same conclusion. The 1.023MHz C=64 did everything in RAM, while the 4.77 IBM-PC was much more of a DISK OPERATING SYSTEM. . . and the other fact that SpeedScript was monolithic program that was only 39K in size. (I ought to know, I typed the whole thing into my C=64 in machine code!). WordPerfect, for that day and age, was huge, probably 10 times the size of SpeedScript. It simply took longer to go through everything it had to do for every command. . . and it had to go through TEN TIMES THE MEMORY, even though the clock speed was faster.
Also Wordperfect's file sizes were much more than ten times the sizes of the text files the SpeedScript was using. . . and even though the PC was about 4.5 times faster than the C=64, it was having to wade through ten times more memory and probably twenty times larger files of a lot of text plus formatting dross to do the same job. Sometimes the simple and lean can beat the complicated and fat.
The mouses that Apple has shipped for the last several years are more than just mere meese. They are also trackpads. The Top surface acts the same as a the trackpad on a laptop acts for gestures, taps—single finger, two, three, or even four finger taps. . .which could not be done on your mouse. It also can be used as a standard mouse and has both right click and left click depending on which side of the mouse you depress. . . it's also wireless. . . and you charge it from the USB port when it needs it.
It's extremely versatile.
My only complaint is that since the port for charging is on the bottom, you can't use it while it's charging. That's a poor location. On the other hand, it doesn't take long to charge for many days of mousing around.
The new Mac Pro is due out in the first part of 2018. . . and is supposed to be as you describe. I am hoping they will be re-introducing their world class monitors in 5K again.
That is one advantage it holds over Apple's mouse. I chose the Logitech iPad Pro keyboard over Apple' iPad Pro keyboard for several reasons. It had a better keystroke feel than Apple's was what tipped me to Logitech. . . it was a tad more expensive, though. But it's been worth it for the almost three years I've been using it.
TWO 4 TB SSD's. . . I swear, Mrs.Burke. Cross my heart!
Ooooh. . . enjoy, Yaelle.
People used to say how overpriced the original Mac was when it came out in 1984 at $2495... but if you go back and look at the ads for IBM-PCs in that same time frame, you'll find that it's selective memory.
The Mac came with a monitor, a 3.5" floppy, and the computer for that price. An IBM-PC in that same year was $1995 with one floppy, no HD, and no monitor. Add a green or amber screen monitor added $499. To make it really work you needed another Floppy which added $299. If you really wanted it to work another $2500 was necessary to add a hard drive. . . a 10 Megabyte hard drive. Now you were more than $5000. You might find it discounted a bit and could get a package deal for $4500 with one floppy and an HD. . . still a green screen 9"- 12" monitor. Color monitors were $999.
So the upshot of this was that the $2495 Mac was not so outlandish in price.
It took the introduction of the PC clones to start forcing the prices down in the PC world and even then it took several years for that to really hit. We bought one of the first PC-AT clones with a 30MB HD from one of the first non Kaypro Clone firms in SF and it still set us back $3750 in late 1984 (the same setup in an IBM-PC AT was $5900 with a green monitor - they wanted $1250 for a color monitor). . . a lot of that price was the 20MB drive and a color monitor, though. Our new software had four colors. Whoopee. A bit over a year later that same company was selling their top of the line clone for $1600. . . and then a year later they were defunct, killed by price cutting competition which was all over the place.
I recall when you could configure a Pro Mac II setup and reach $24,000 fairly easily. Start with an $8000 Mac II, Max out the RAM, add five or six large SCSI HDs internally, add three Radeon Video card, add 6 monitors in an array. . . top of the line 68030 processor. . . Damn fast machine for the day and age.
That would be about $40,000 in 2017 dollars. Some professional video editors would gladly pay it.
My son is an Apple guy and told me about this new machine several months ago. I went to the Apple site and read all the propaganda about it....man, that thing is amazing, but waaaaaay overkill for little old me.
I’m currently running a 2010 27” iMac with 2.93 Ghz and i7 Core, 2TB HD with 32gb of RAM shoved in it. It does everything I need it to do and runs the latest iOS as well. It’s still a very sweet machine even as old as it is.
It’s kinda funny because the original HD went out a few years back and I replaced it. The problem was that the replacement drive didn’t have the thermal sensor available at that time, so the thing roared in panic mode like a WWI fighter plane taking off once it warmed up. Couldn’t stand that roaring so it just sat collecting dust for quite a long while. I almost sold it for next to nothing just to get rid of it. Then, I discovered an aftermarket thermal sensor just for that kind of application and installed it. Yippie! It worked like a charm, and the old 2010 iMac was destined to become my main machine after several iOS upgrades to the latest, and I’m still using it to this day. Even now.
I know I’ll need to eventually replace it, but it won’t be with this new high $$$ Pro model. I’m gonna wait at least till next year before I start looking to do so.
Keep an eye on the Apple refurb store.
Keep an eye on the Apple refurb store.
We had a couple of those in the office. . . until a burglar stole them with the iMacs they were used with. They are nice.
Now I get it it. Mac Pro vs iMac Pro. Then Apple is legit on this by offering two ways to go. I will be interested to see what innovative form the new Mac Pro takes. The physical shape and the inputs/outputs. We don’t have to guess much about the internals which will be similar to Imac pro. But with a range to choose from and up fixable, alterable, upgradeable.
Windows all-in-ones have awful specs for the money spent. Cheesy computers.
No offense to Apple's mouse, I've tried it and it just doesn't work for me from an ergonomics pov.
I hate to say this, but you lost me after the above sentence. What I understand from this sentence is that the advertising agency I worked for long ago which used Mac's for video pre and post production would absolutely love these machines. I'd bet Disney will be buying quite a few for their parks and animation studio's as well. :-)
That's probably just the tip of the iceberg.
“...Keep an eye on the Apple refurb store....”
Yep. I frequent there quite a bit, but before I purchase, or upgrade, anything, I’m gonna wait/see what happens with the new MacPro that should be coming out sometime next year. It, too, will likely be overkill for my usage, but if I can get a long, useful service life out of it similar to this machine, it would be worth it.
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.
It will be interesting to see what the modular Mac Pro will be like. This iMac is more upgradeable than you think. The back panel comes off to let you access the memory and the SSD, perhaps even the Xeon processor and the graphics processor.
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