Apple debuts iMac Pro with beefy specs, real ports, $5K starting price
Posted Jun 5, 2017 by Devin Coldewey
Hardcore Mac fans may have had their fingers crossed for the return of the Mac Pro, but an extra i slipped in there somehow, and Apple instead has produced an iMac Pro. Its a wallet-busting all-in-one workstation, and it looks handsome and sinister in a dark grey finish.
The iMac Pro has more or less the same look and feel as the 27-inch, 5K iMac we first saw in 2015 (though now its more like the $5K iMac, am I right?). But the engineers at Apple have once again reinvented the thermal qualities of the case hopefully a little more carefully this time in order to accommodate some hot new specs.
You get an Intel Xeon processor and, depending on how much you love cores, you get 8, 10 or 18 of them. The GPU is a Radeon Vega setup with up to 16 GB of VRAM great for developers, especially in VR. Perhaps excessive is the up to 128 GB of system RAM you can get, but Im sure someone out there is saying finally!
The one spec that didnt really impress is the storage. A 4 terabyte SSD will fill up mighty fast if youre really doing the HD video editing and game development Apple expects you to. External drives, NAS units and all that other stuff will be must-have add-ons.
Considerately, there is a nice little spread of ports on the back:
Thats your SDXC port, 4 USB 3 ports, 4 Thunderbolt (not Lightning) ports, Ethernet and is that a headphone jack? Courageous!
Its a nod to the professionals who love Macs but were dismayed by the recent MacBook Pro refresh making a clean sweep of all the legacy ports i.e. ports used by millions in industries where legacy hardware and software is deeply embedded. Had Apple released an iMac Pro with 8 Lightning ports I think there might have been riots.
The price for this beast of a computer starts at $4,999 for a base configuration and, as you might imagine, rises precipitously from there. (Apple was careful to compare it to similarly priced workstations, not all-in-ones or ordinary desktops.)
That iMac pro really is pretty badass, said Tim Cook after the reveal. It ships in December.
I guess using my sony with the hotwire is obsolete now.
One week with Apples iMac Pro: Completely sealed, non-upgradeable, and super powerful“iMac Pro has been in the house for a week – this has been my experience so far!” Marques Brownlee writes on YouTube.
Apples powerful new iMac Pro launches the general public on December 14th.
Brownlee tested a 3GHz 10-core Intel Xeon W iMac Pro with 128GB DDR4 RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 16GB HBM2 memory, and a 2TB SSD. iMac Pro is a completely sealed computer, so the specs you order are the specs you’ll be using. Choose wisely, Padawans.
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.
MacDailyNews Take: For the right type of user, iMac Pro is the stuff of which dreams are made.
See also:YouTubeVideo
If they could fold up the stand you could slip it into a carrying case and have a nifty 27” laptop.