I haven't read the article and I balked when they exclaimed the bit about 18 GB of RAM. That'd be an unusual number but, more importantly, is well below what I'd expect for a minimal amount of RAM in a designated 'professional' system.
These days, I'd want 64 GB as a minimum but I suppose 32 would suit for some tasks. I still muck about with some modeling that hasn't been shunted off to the GPU, so I'd even find a use for 128 GB.
A few browser tabs, email client, IDE, and Slack are going to eat up a goodly portion of 18 GB.
That is Video RAM for the GPU, though not the main RAM for the system. The minimum RAM amount you can buy the iMac Pro with is 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB configs are also available
Also, 18 GB was certainly a typo, if you look now, they are saying 16 GB now.
It's at about 460 watts TDP just for the CPU and GPU alone in top configuration, assuming standard clocks and volts. Apple will have to live with throttling, or find top-binned parts that can be undervolted and downclocked while remaining stable.
I am not an optimist. Full size chassis need some pretty serious cooling for these parts, and I see none of that with the Pro.
The cooling system looks similar to what you'd see in a 1U chassis. Since it's standing on it's own instead of sitting in a rack next to a bunch of other machines, it should be fine.
It's going to be very loud under a full load though, it would have been nice if they went with liquid cooling instead.
Performance per $ isn't great, but the hardware is good. If you want to crunch data like a champion you need to spend the same $ on a desktop with a big fat GPU suited for GPGPU tasks and with proper cooling. The rest of the system doesn't really need to be insane, but you have to be able to keep up with the GPU.
I doubt the iMac can keep running with a high load over time without thermal throttling.
I would worry that something breaks after warranty expires and the whole computer can go out of the window. With regular good old desktops you can just replace the broken part. With such special custom made hardware it is sometimes impossible. For example the macbook airs have non standard ssd that is not replaceable, so when the disk dies, whole notebook is done...
With laptops, such as the Air, based on the great sales figures, consumers are willing to forego being able to repair versus having something compact. It also probably helps apple in the warranty department if their manufacturing quality is so high that people opening it up themselves causes more problems than the product is expected to have by itself.
I used to repair my laptop and desktop, but nowadays I'd rather just go to the Apple store and have it swapped out and not waste time for parts. The share of the market that wants repair-ability is probably just not high enough to care about, at least for Apple.
Edit: if this is for business or professionals, then I don't understand why they would make something like this either though. I assume their highly paid staff has market data and whatnot, but I share your opinion that it's ridiculous if this is supposed to be for business use.
My friend in film production tells me that his shop does a ton of editing on iMacs despite the premium on hardware. He is an enthusiast and has built his own editing PC, but he tells me the iMacs are rock-solid and never give them any trouble, despite the specs being worse on paper than some other editing machines.
I think that the consistency, quality, and software integration are worth a lot to businesses, especially mid-size businesses that don't have an entire IT department to fix issues that come up, and in these contexts, having a reliable computing monoculture means you can just focus on business.
I won't be surprised if iMac Pros do make it into plenty of business contexts.
I'm going to be honest: I never had any PC problems really until Windows 10 came around. Occasionally windows update would get bonked or I'd hose the machine myself but it was pretty reliable. That's going back to Windows NT 3.51 for me. Since Windows 10, screw it. QA is gone. So many little papercuts it's not worth it any more. I use my two Macs and rarely touch the PC, an HP z620 which has just been a total pile of crap to me really. Nothing but problem after problem.
I have clearly had three bad machines. I've got an X201 and a T440 as well. The Z620 was especially bad, but the X201 and T440 are perfect hardware-wise and existed before the whole windows 10 thing. The software is the main problem.
I'm using an X201 with Win 10 right now. The driver support was significantly better on Linux. With TLP and a lightweight window manager like i3, the battery consumption was miles better than windows. Without Wifi I was able to reduce the consumption to 8-9 W an hour, with wifi it was around 11-12W.
When I first switched back to windows, I was shocked to see the battery consumption being around 22 W. Lenovo's own battery management driver helped a lot. If I'm using firefox nightly I can reduce it to 16-18W an hour.
From my observation it seems to me that windows draws a lot of power when the system under low load, even on battery saver mode. With linux you can tune the battery consumption far better.
Performance-wise, due to Windows background services I experience occasional lags. The anti-malware engine, indexes etc. consume a lot of CPU cycles. The real bottleneck on X201 is the CPU. Due to heavy CPU usage, my laptop sometimes overheats and closes itself. I have only experienced this on Chakra Linux with an unstable version of KDE. Other linux distros and FreeBSD were absolutely fine.
Wifi connectivity was also very problematic. First couple of weeks wifi adapter stopped working everytime after I woke the laptop from sleep.
Now I don't have much to complain besides lags and the mediocre power consumption. Firefox nightly has helped immensely for a fluid browsing experience.
The bottomline is, for x201, if you want stability and performance but a more conservative experience go for linux. If you want a hassle-free cohesive but slower system go for Windows.
PS: Bugs on Windows might stem from X201 being an old machine.
Macs fail often. It's just annoying to hear this myth perpetuated that they never fail. They might fail less than other vendors' laptops, but 'macs never fail' is clearly not true - one simple example is 'staingate'.
They do fail. But when they do it doesn’t disappear into some independent repairers hole for six months and you get a messed up pile of tainted shit back (Acer, Sony, Asus I’m looking at you). I’ve never had a mac or thinkpad break where I haven’t killed it physically and I’ve fixed them myself then.
A little. I think it's been mostly fine. But my point is that he has spent a bunch of time building and optimizing a PC that he would not have had to invest into a pre-built, pre-configured machine. He does it because he finds it fun. His company doesn't want to spend time with that stuff, and they seem to be very happy with the consistency they are getting out of their Macs.
Similar situation here. I've got a 2013 MacBook Pro, a 2016 iMac and a 2015 HP z620. The z620 has been nothing but a pain in my ass since I bought it. It's noisy and shuts down all by itself at least once a week. The Macs, rock solid.
Buying a Mac for business is simply outsourcing IT support to a different vendor (Apple vs. local support options) and paying for some of the support upfront vs. on demand.
Getting good support from a vendor or hiring in house implicates a lot of overhead.
The choice to go with Apple is very understandable to me, based on my experience with how much time it takes to find and supervise IT support personnel/vendors. They are about as hard to manage as office cleaning staff, where when you look away for 5 minutes the carpet doesn't get vacuumed because it's hard to detect at first.
It's also pre-paying to avoid downtime and less efficient work. Given that I can't predict when hardware will have issues, I think this case gets stronger as well.
Yes I can understand it with compactness of mabook aris (I also have one), but with such expensive desktop, I would want to keep the possibility to repair and upgrade. When motherboard, display or any non standard soldered component dies, you have to replace the whole thing probably..
Or abandoning such a nice big, hi-res screen. I sort of like the screen and computer separate. Even the highest end smart tv's are starting to diverge into the screen, that lasts a decade or more, and the controller computer that can be replaced.
But you can't do that with the latest MacBooks, which have their SSDs soldered directly onto the logic boards. And you can't do that with memory for any Apple notebook from the last several years for the same reason.
My 7 year old MacBook Pro is running okay thanks to some memory and storage upgrades. I would not be able to get the same life extension with one of the new models, which makes me hesitate to get a new Mac.
Most is really ambiguous here. By units sold? Probably not (mass quantity low end laptops aren't upgradable). By dollar amount sold? Definitely not (Apple has an outsized share of the market based on revenue). By new models? Probably.
Apple has about 7% of pc market world-wide. It's average sales price is around $1,200 to $1,400 (haven't checked lately). Average PC maker ASP is $500-$600, so Apple likely has 15-20% of market by revenues, and more than 50% of market profits, given it's 15-20% margins vs. 2% PC maker margins.
This is all PCs. In laptops it's likely that Apple's share is even higher.
I upgraded my Dell XPS 13 recently. Only tricky part was buying the special screwdriver bits which cost me 10 dollars on amazon. It was probably the easiest laptop upgrade I've ever done in the last 17 years.
I swapped out my XPS 13's broadcom flaming piece of shit radio for a intel chipset, AU$25. The disk is a swappable M.2 . They retail for ~AU$600 for a 500G. Dropped a mail to Dell Australia for a quote to upgrade the 8G MB to 16G, took them 5 working days to quote: 2 week job, AU$2300, I paid AU$2100 for the machine new.
I bought a Macbook Air recently and love it, almost want a Macbook Pro but I don't want a laptop where I can't replace the Hard Drive or RAM two things which sometimes just need a replacement. I guess I'm going for a Dell with Ubuntu next instead.
In which case you'll find a small but annoying set of new problems. Dell can make some great stuff, and Ubuntu can be great. Dell+Ubuntu can be great, or fine, or ok, or a disaster. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, you can't ever really be sure which case you'll get until after you've plunged in. Ask me how I know this :).
This also means that iMac and Macbooks depreciate quite heavily in price after the warranty expires.
I'm thinking of selling my Macbook Pro while I can get a decent price for it as I've now had it around 3 years. I'm better of investing that money in new parts for my PC.
Do you mean that even Apple can't repair it? I had problems with my Macbook Pro and they specifically ordered an item from Apple and shipped it to repair the machine.
Something like the iMac, if the video card goes out on it (common problem) the only replacement part is from Apple and costs $600 so you might as well just throw the whole thing out (or sell it for parts)
600-800 is probably where I draw the line but if your configuration costs $4,000 then you might think it is worth it. Also Apple offered to "buy the damaged part" in my case (though I'll need to ship/reship) so if you are US based it might be cheaper.
That's based on a few dozen anecdotes over the past half decade - workplaces almost fully on macs. More and more common wi-fi issues, battery/charging problems with latest MBPs, display issues (especially with external monitors), ever more frequent system hangs and weird behaviour in general (locked up processes, memory trashing), animations like mission control keep getting slower unless it's a fresh system, half-assed incorporation of iOS design, continuity hardly works, unreliable bluetooth (and useless outside connection peripherals). App Store has been taken over by crap and marketing scams. They've also been opening the enterprise program to more and more customization (= more crap pushed onto your machine root system, outside of your reach). I might be forgetting something.
I'd still prefer a brick to the face over having to use Windows for work :)
Unless you've used something better than Finder, you will have no idea how much it actually sucks.
I say this as a Mac user that's used Linux for most of his life: Finder sucks. I don't feel like hashing out all the reasons for why right now. Nothing I say on a little Internet forum will change that.
Yeah, my experience with Mac is that it "just works" after extensive configuration file edits and dozens of helper applications. I have never modified any other OS to this extent to get the basics working.
File management and some UI paradigms in general. Terminal.app isn't very comfortable. Package management feels hacky and various things seem to work better with various managers. And the need for 3rd party package manager for basic stuff itself. Absolutely terrible OpenGL drivers. The way library linking is implemented for the bundle files is horrible. Troubleshooting is hard. And those are just first things from a quick dump out of my head, I could type more.
macOS seems like a better, Unix-based Windows for me. Better than Windows, but that's pretty much the only thing I can say about it.
Seeing the history of updates to the Mac Mini and Mac Pro why would anyone trust Apple with a high end desktop computer? The odds are high that they'll keep pumping this thing largely unchanged for the next 5 years while letting the state of technology race ahead.
I'm saying this because no matter what Apple say, their focus is undoubtedly on what makes them the most money: iPhones.
>Seeing the history of updates to the Mac Mini and Mac Pro why would anyone trust Apple with a high end desktop computer?
Because they don't buy for the next 20 years, but for their actual current needs. If anything happens and the line stops, I can always go find another solution then and there, as opposed to now.
Besides, this is like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. There were several cases for concern (e.g. when the MacPro wasn't updated properly for 3 years).
The day of the release of a new Pro machine is the exact opposite of that.
>Moving from a MAC pro workflow to a Wintel (i9 Xenon or AMD) is non trivial
So what do I earn from "biting the bullet"?
I go through a non trivial process for merely the possibility that the iMac Pro might not have continued new models (which will only matter to me in 2-3 years at earlier if I buy it).
And that when there's already another Mac Pro model announced for 2018.
Yeah but today it’s awesome. In five years they will have something else even more awesome. I think the problem is they still sell something that was considered awesome from five years ago.
Yeah, this seems like kind of an odd compromise, for people who want the power of a high-end machine, but the convenience of an all-in-one and are willing to give up upgradability for it?
Also, the 'real' new Mac Pro is supposed to be announced soonish--at this point it would seem to make more sense to wait and see what that offers before committing to this anyway.
(Though I suppose if you are in a corporate environment where buying is driven by accountants who replace everything as soon as the thing outlives its depreciation schedule--or even have everything on leases, like we do here--maybe the fact that it will someday be relatively obsolete doesn't matter).
> I'm saying this because no matter what Apple say, their focus is undoubtedly on what makes them the most money: iPhones.
I've never understood that argument. If iMacs make profit - any profit at all - why can't they just put up a shack next to their main building UFO and have a subdivision crank out iMacs? It's a question of having or not having "a few additional millions".
Also, a large part of their iOS business is tied to macs - you need a mac for development, and they don't want that platform to become so bad to hurt iOS development.
Because of optimization and such. The 17 inch Mac Pro was only 5% of their Mac Pro market, so they cancelled it. A shame if you ask me, still hoping they revive it at some point.
And yet in the not too unrecent past, businesses where willing to spend a considerable premium on hardware that came with the promise that similar configurations would still be available two years later.
(Also, when was the last time you saw the state of the art "racing"? Reducing the update cycle to meaningful increments is the only way to keep the interest in new generations high without getting lost in pointless novelty features because you just got to fill that annual presentation somehow)
This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up. No fixability / no upgradability is the price we pay for laptops, but does it really have to be the price for desktops? I'd think that swapping a video card or adding a drive or two is the sort of thing that one might do over the lifespan of this thing.
I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?
>This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up.
They have already announced that is coming later on in 2018.
You "can" swap out parts and repair iMacs, it is just not something one does casually. You need tools, instructions, skills and will-power.
The thing is most people, even pros, don't bother with that stuff even when they have Dell boxes. Apple knows that and, I think, trades off ease-of-repair for sleekness and mostly wins out (until recently).
AFAIK, there is no "screen mode" that enables one to use these things as monitors.
The iMac is actually stupidly easy to open, I had to replace a fan on one recently - got the fan on ebay for very cheap, then used a plastic guitar pick to get the glass off the screen(it's held by magnets so you need to wedge something between the glass and the case to separate them) - then used a normal screwdriver to release the 8 or so screws holding the display itself and voila, the whole thing was open and easy to work with. It looks scary but actually it was super easy to repair.
It used to be sensibly designed and just need a screwdriver, but look at the latest iFixit teardown. You have to pizza-slice through screen adhesive to crack it open now, and have a replacement custom cut seal to pack it back together. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+Retina+...
Yeah, as much as I like tinkering on my own machine, if someone has a machine go down at work, or gets approved for an upgrade, etc., tech support gets a call and they come drop a new box on our desk. Not enough time in the day for us to make it more complicated than that.
Very interesting – is this documented by Apple? Can’t imagine why they’d disallow this, though of course an iMac pro would be a very expensive external monitor....
Wow, totally blew it on that one. Sorry! Like you, I wish this were still available on newer iMacs. I wonder why this useful feature was so short-lived.
> I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?
I wish, there used to be Target Display Mode but it was removed in recent years (anything after Mid-2014). For the 5K iMac it was pretty obvious why it was missing, until fairly recently (DP 1.3 was ratified late 2014) there wasn't a connection fast enough to even drive the internal display (they ended up using a custom timing controller to overdrive a DP 1.2 link) so TDM was a no-go, but it'd be nice if they brought it back :/
Even when Target Display Mode was a thing, it still required a running OS on the target system.
I do love my iMacs, but I spend more than zero time shaking my head at the tight coupling of expensive, high quality components that will, eventually, fail independently.
Apple generally does a great job keeping the "eventually" at bay. But it's always coming.
Maybe for graphics professionals who don’t like Windows and can’t get the software they need on Linux. Otherwise, especially for devs, it would just make so much more sense to build a PC for the upgradability if nothing else. Being able to drop in a new card or CPU as desired is a pretty big perk, although I find it somewhat strange to be describing it that way, as it used to be a given.
You can also build tiny (compared to the PCs 5-10 years ago) powerhouses thanks to the rise of enthusiast mini ITX boards and SFX power supplies. My new tower is small enough to fit in a backpack, but it can fit a full size reference video card, 4 2.5” drives, and the motherboard has two M.2 slots.
I neither need nor can afford one, and as other have commented, for a "professional" an all-in-one computer is rather impractical. I'd much rather have a simple box where I can replace individual components, or the monitor, if it breaks.
That being said, I'm interested in the new magic keyboard: wide, and in space grey. Would look pretty nice with my hackintosh :-P
I'm not amazed. This processor will inevitable throttle, I don't believe that they could cool it to allow for constant boosting. Graphics looks like trash: it's a consumer video card (no ECC, bad double precision speed) inferior to Nvidia. And of course everything glued together will render this PC obsolete in few years without any upgrade path.
When the original trash can pro was released, AMD was a reasonable video choice. Unless Apple is also going to release a CUDA compatibility layer, I think most people would want an Nvidia video solution.
They make 1U servers with similar space constraints and those sorts of CPUs without throttling, if you're willing to accept that your computers sounds like a jet engine.
The iMac Pro is basically a stopgap until the new Mac Pro's arrive next year.
They actually acknowledged they messed up with the 'dustbin' Mac Pro and it's lack of upgradability, which is a first. (https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...). They are working on a completely new Mac Pro to address the issues actual pro's have, but that's going to take a while. The iMac Pro is just here to fill the gap.
I want to be an unmitigated fanboy, but I agree. We need an upgradable package. My PC gaming rig is going on 10 years now, after 2 GPU upgrades. That's a lot of bang-for-buck.
(I ask because it was announced months ago and isn’t due out for a few more months.)
Looks great though. It’s a little overpowered for the stuff I do, where the demanding things are distributed systems which don’t make sense to host on a workstation, even in simulation. But I sure wouldn’t mind one.
I'm a programmer and so buy middle of the line macbook pros with mid range CPUs, mid range RAM, and integrated GPUS. Ironically, my wife, a designer, always chastises me for getting such slow hardware: turns out what works for a programmer doesn't work for soemone who has to use a lot of Adobe CSS :). I assume this iMac pro would be for her, not for me.
I'm a programmer and I tend to buy the thing with the largest numbers. I justify it by admitting to myself that I am only buying it because it has the largest numbers, and that it will last me longer, thus causing less pollution. But really it is just because of the numbers.
I tend to squeeze every penny and I have a bit of buyer's remorse for buying a refurbished MacBook 2015 with the smallest storage: 128 GB.
Everything else is great, but I'm constantly finding myself in situations where I am about to install Docker, or go-lang, or something I am experimenting with and eventually come to the conclusion...not worth it to install.
Should I fire up Garage Band? Nope, I probably will use it twice and then it will sit there taking up disk space.
I'm trying to take advantage of more "cloud" solutions but they're not the same :(
You can replace the ssd on that MacBook. It won’t be cheap, but storage that fast isn’t anyways. I have the 1tb ssd from a MacBook in my windows desktop
She always wants more power. I tried to get her to divide her giant Illustrator files into smaller ones, but I haven't been successful so far. But ya, we aren't getting this, too expensive :).
Never underestimate the ability of Adobe to make a computer feel slow. I'm a user and fan of their Premiere and Illustrator products, but I believe they need to invest a lot more energy into: 1 - making their stuff crash less often! and 2 - optimizing some of the unreasonably slow features. In a way, ever more powerful computers like this have enabled Adobe to stay lazy.
But it is what it is, and at the end of the day an extra $1500 to not hate life every time you try to pan around in a piece of art is worth it.
I do some video editing to make goofy videos for friends
On a whim I tried out the latest version of Adobe Premiere (I normally just use Sony Vegas, or "Vegas Pro" as it's now called)
On an i7-4790 with 16 gigs of memory, a GTX 970 and an SSD, Vegas loads in roughly 5-6 seconds
Premiere took roughly a minute, and rendered the entire system unusable while it loaded! after loading, just sitting at an empty main screen, it was consuming a monstrous 8GB of memory all by itself
Vegas by contrast, even when I shovel Blu Ray videos into it, barely peaks above 1.5GB, and I'm able to multi-task even while rendering
That makes sense to me... I do some side work which involves media assets and that’s where my current machine is slow. I only “slice and dice” the completed assets in order to add them to the app so it’s not really a problem.
But if I were working with that stuff all day, I’d want as much power as I could get.
But as a programmer, my biggest and by far most frequent bottleneck is when my computer is idle and I’m sitting motionless, thinking about what the best thing I ought to type next is.
I'm researching how to get more of that thinking augmented by the computer, since with the programming tools that we have today, much of what we do still happens in our heads. If our programming experience were much richer, we'd probably start clamoring for more advanced hardware to go with it.
To all the people banging on about upgrades... exactly what in the name of silica are you working on that this machine can not possibly handle for the next 5 years? What could you possibly want to upgrade? And what are you currently running?
exactly what in the name of silica are you working on that this machine can not possibly handle for the next 5 years?
The whole point is I have no idea exactly what I'll be working on 5 years from now or what kind of machine it might need. But what I do know for certain is that the things I'm doing today would have been extremely tricky to do on a machine from 5 years ago.
Current eGPU enclosure technology is for powering up a machine with integrated graphics, not keeping up with top of the line cards.
Thunderbolt 3 just isn't fast enough for that to be feasible. The bottleneck is such that there's already no point in putting a high end card like the GTX 1080 Ti in an eGPU enclosure (Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/laptop-external-grap... ).
I bought a top spec iMac a few years ago for working on Unreal 4 projects in my spare time and doubling as a dayjob machine, and sure enough I wanted a better GPU a couple of years later and went and bought a PC. Amusingly UE4 is actually one of the sample screenshots in the linked page. Nothing Apple does can really compensate for the rate at which GPUs get quicker, and putting an AMD one in there is doubly irritating since that's not what the majority of the market uses.
So each time you want to upgrade your GPU, you're also having to purchase a new screen. The difference in my case was between having about 10fps with a lot of debug draw in the UE4 editor on the iMac, and about 90fps for the same thing on a new PC with a 1080.
About the only good thing about the iMac was that it held its value remarkably well, and I sold it for half the purchase price 3 years later.
This is the attitude that I find incessantly arrogant. And it is probably the same attitude that Tim Cook and the apple leadership have.
Just because you cannot imagine what people might need to use a computer for does not give you the right to tell them how much performance they need.
Perhaps they are going to the arctic circle and have to rely on parts lying around if anything breaks!
Perhaps they work with cutting edge computer graphics and need a brand new GPU with a certain new feature or hardware chip to test out!
Perhaps they are simulating something gigantic and it is easier to test out parts of the code on a local machine with a PCIe add in card before pushing it to a supercomputer.
This is the definition of a PRO machine, people who have extraordinary requirements and need power and flexibility. Stop telling them they have "enough", you are not in the position to make that call.
This is the definition of a PRO machine, people who have extraordinary requirements and need power and flexibility. Stop telling them they have "enough", you are not in the position to make that call.
With respect though, you're talking about different sets of constraints.
The iMac pro is inevitably targeted at the group of people who don't need to upgrade, and maybe they will replace their machine every three to five years. Realistically, there is a limited amount of upgrading that will be done for most users, meaning that engineering effort that goes into building an expandable machine is relatively wasted.
The iMac Pro will not be suitable for every professional user, but it will cover a lot of use cases, and that's okay. If you do need an expandable machine, then there are other options there – but most people don't.
Impressive engineering to get that kilowatt-level power envelope into what looks literally like an envelope.
Then the next question: is the target audience really there?
The people who need 18 cores + a pro graphics card are the people who used to have mac pros (or still use them). These people care about expandable and replacable things, and most of all they want to use a screen with several computers because these pro screens cost a ton (Often more than the machine if you want a screen for e.g. video color grading or really serious photo work).
If the screen on this thing isn't up for the task ,then it's an expensive useless addition. If it is that good, then it's a waste to throw it out in 2 years when you replace the machine.
I mean I'm not saying this thing won't sell like hotcakes because it's an impressive machine and a not-very-price-sensitive customer group. But it just feels like they could have stuck these bits into the last mac pro tower, painted it black and had this product out sooner and cheaper than this?
I'm seriously considering an iMac these days. Currently I use a 2014-model 15" MacBook Pro, and it's heavy to carry to work every day. I also need a lot more disk space.
If Apple allow upgrading the iMac Pro with a 3.5" 12TB hard drive, I'd be interested.
The new MacBook Pros aren't suitable for my needs because they don't have ports. I need more storage, but can't upgrade my laptop. I don't want to go down to a 2012 MacBook Pro just to add a bigger hard drive in the optical bay. Also, I really like the Retina screen. So, how am I going to store the Big Data for machine learning on my office computer, while also having a nice screen?
The iMac seems like a more affordable option than a Mac Pro, and with cheaper, more suitable upgrades than the non-tower Pro.
If the iMac doesn't have a 3.5" disk slot though, then I take back all my compliments. The 4TB max SSD from Apple won't be enough for me.
> So, how am I going to store the Big Data for machine learning on my office computer, while also having a nice screen?
This would be the choice, but I'd hesitate to buy one with the new Mac Pro coming. I hate the idea of attaching a screen to the computer unless absolutely necesary, especially a nice screen.
When I got my iMac the biggest change for me was the lack of clutter in my office. It was amazing. Part of that was the small Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but the rest was the box with all the cables trailing from it. It was a true breath of fresh air.
>These people care about expandable and replacable things
Apple likely has data that says there are enough people that don't care about these things to justify their production of this computer. I work in an office full of designers, illustrators, animators and developers and there are very few of them that have much of a passion for messing around with the hardware and would far prefer to just upgrade every few years (we also don't really have much of an IT infrastructure). We buy Mac's and replace them when they are no longer working optimally for our team. That said, we've had some iMacs last 4-6 years with no complaints from their operators. I will caveat that and say that I did go through and replace all the HDD with SSD's on the oldest round of iMac's before you could get the Fusion or SSD upon order for a reasonable price.
I'm sure Apple have done their research, but it also feels a bit like a stopgap. Who would buy this over a MacPro tower at similar cost?
This is aimed at people with the Mac Pro, not those with iMac of MacBook (at least thats my impression)
What I was getting at is that the people that prefer the All-in-one are likely e.g. graphic Designers etc, meaning people who already have MacBooks or iMacs. Not the hard core machine learners, VR creators, color graders etc that today have old Mac Pros and $5k screens.
Maybe they determined that there was more money to be had and a lack of options in the prosumer space between iMovie and Final Cut. The influx of home-baked content producers on Youtube comes to mind.
I will be blunt, all I have seen since day one is a photoshop exercise with a pretty web page in an attempt to save face after some influential sites starting bashing Apple for letting the previous model languish for three years.
Has there ever been a test system that was allowed to be used by a third party? Considering how far they pushed off "release" it all smacked of "cya".
with regards to the design, AIO. There are still many rumors of a new iMac chassis for the next iteration so why would the Mac Pro not debut the new chassis but instead soldier on with the old chassis?
I take no issue with a line of iMac Pro work stations but a stand alone tower is still a requirement in a Pro line. Even with Thunderbolt supporting high speed external devices the one element I really don't want baked in is my screen
Amateur extreme. Pro's need a machine that can evolve over time. More memory, larger storage as it becomes available, God forbid - a faster cpu. Remember the PC platform is inherently upgradeable. The LGA2066 chipset can be used with 8+ different CPU's. Pro's invest in proper tools to support their work, not in souped up toys. Without offense meant to my Honda bretheren, this in the same line as the $100,000 Civic mods. You certainly can, and it will be cool, but possibly not the best use of that money.
Its attractive because of the top end features. But they come in trapped in a disposable package. While that would not be terrible for $300 laptop, it is a piss-poor investment for what 9to5mac says will be a $17,500 top of the line box. Why? The instant one of the features is offspec,too little, to slow , you have an entire $17,000 machine that's too little, too slow.
And no mic input? Why? That's just silly. It cost them more to leave that out.
It belongs with Pro-Racecars, with prepacked engines and hoods welded shut, and with Pro-Lawn tools with no serviceable parts.
Is this really true though for Apple's target market? I'm guessing that if I'm an artist for Pixar and I need a new "professional" machine, the company is 9 times out of 10 going to buy me a new computer rather than buying me a video card upgrade. I'd imagine most large corporations would do something like that since it's more scalable than upgrading individual parts piecemeal.
Buying one "pro" machine and upgrading it over a number of years seems like more of what I'd call an "enthusiast" strategy. I think it's reasonable that Apple is betting that Mac "enthusiasts" would be willing to upgrade their machine wholesale after a number of years (maybe recouping value by reselling their old machine) rather than extensively researching new video cards and buying one off Newegg.
Maybe they're wrong and people aren't willing to do that, but it's their prerogative to place that bet.
I hear this sentiment all the time that "pro users need the ability to upgrade" but not once in a decade of my professional programming career have I _ever_ seen a computer at a workplace upgraded. They get purchased, they get repaired, they get retired or they trickle down to "lesser users", but I've never seen anyone get additional RAM or a drop in CPU replacement on an employer-owned machine. If you needed a better computer all I've ever seen is a new computer purchased.
well since we're sharing anecdotes I have seen machines get upgraded at work.
working on a game. PVS calc took lots of memory and lots of time. Everyone's machines got a 6x upgrade in ram so they could be used at night to compute the PVS.
another anecdote. friend in another game found rebuilding assets on SSD was several X faster. Since the entire team was often waiting hours for asset builds to finish all machines got upgraded to have SSD.
this is especially true in GPU related fields. new gpus enable new things
I'm sure it happens in many industries, but my point is that I don't think it makes this an "amateur" computer. Plenty of professional employees will want one, get one, and will be completely unaffected by the design. Plenty of people will be on the other side of that too.
I've seen increased RAM and changed video cards to get multiple screens. The company I work for buys 1 standard setup, then upgrades depending on who's using it.
Counter anecdote: my workplace performed SSD + RAM upgrades for everyone and that fit well within that year's budget. The alternative would have to wait another year (or more) to replace all the laptops at a much greater cost.
I've been a 'pro' software engineer for a couple decades and the large place's I've worked have actually upgraded machines that actually could be upgraded: with more ram, better video, etc. I did a couple years as an IT Consultant and every single small shop, contractor, developer, video editor, recording studio, who are also 'Pros' by the way, I've ever worked with has always looked to upgrade their hardware before buying again. At $4k - $17k a machine, it's simple math. The machine's not dead, but its time for a new gpu, or hard drive, or more ram. The pc platform is designed for upgrading, from mouse to motherboard. It takes work to make it not.
Thinking about it, Apple's genius has been finding this line: "How closed can we go, how disposable can we make them and maximize churn, while not slowing down buying. We can even create a desire for churn [it's September, time for a new $600 phone, anyone?] Its exactly like the one you have, only different."
As others have pointed out here, the dog and pony show they put on recently, by inviting a select group of reporters (market influencers) into their hq was damage control when several magazines/sites called them out for crossing this line. New machines with lower specs than older machines, gaming battery life tests, irrational pricing, and selling 5 year old spec machines as 'Pro'. I might recommend reading the reporting of the meeting, it's a textbook example of high-end one-on-one selling, impressive location, the appearance of insider-access, sealed with a personal commitment from the leaders.
Meanwhile, they don't have a 'pro' product line, and though they have enough cash on hand to buy every pro team in every sport in the U.S. they haven't made any investments or advancements in pro pc technology in a decade. And that's cool, if apple doesn't want to fill the gap, someone will fill the space eventually.
And I concede that the headphone jack is fine, it;s a combo, first glance i assumed just output. That works.
I worked briefly in IT and a large part of my job was to go around and upgrade the RAM on people's machines. Not saying it's common across the industry but it is done.
Professional Independent contractors, sure I’ll buy that argument.
Never once, in all of the tech companies I’ve worked for, have I seen anyone upgrade a computer. Even recently, my Mac had an issue with parallels that couldn’t get resolved. New Mac given to me.
Coworker had a 1.5 year old thinkpad. Just needed to swap the RAM from 8 to 16. Nope, just was given a new Thinkpad with 16 gigs instead of spending $150 on RAM.
Companies write off a ton of these expenses, and they don’t “upgrade” the hardware. They upgrade the machine.
They'd be stupid to throw away money / working components. Often, old PCs go back to a "pool", where they are upgraded or scavenged for parts, and then given to new employees. Only when they are too old to upgrade, or it is not worth the work, they are sold to employees or dumped. From the perspective of employees, you just get a new PC.
Essentially you just need a room for parts and a few employees part time, and you can use your computing resources much more efficiently - basically free money. Granted, it only works for organisations of a certain size (large corporations, universities, gov.).
I will say that we had some issues at one fortune 500 company where we were passing RAM sticks out to contractors because the computers had pitiful amounts of memory, but they weren't fully capitalized.
Dumb things happen when productivity is abstracted. But again, these are not the people given iMac pros.
Your anecdotal experience is opposite of mine: at my place, we still use 4-5 year old computers, and frequently upgrade hard drives, memory, video cards even when needed. We have a few rooms dedicated to spare parts, and when we can't find what we need, new ones are bought. And honestly, my 4yo PC doesn't really need upgrading just so I can open my IDE or browser 20 seconds faster.
Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)
> And no mic input? Why? That's just silly. It cost them more to leave that out.
Do you mean separate mic input? Because it has the same combo headphone jack as all existing Macs. So it has mic input.
As a pro audio user, a built-in mic input is useless anyway. We have external USB3, TB, or Firewire interfaces for that. Lower noise, better DACs, phantom power, HiZ and XLR inputs, etc.
Beyond pro, nobody uses mic input unless they are using an iPhone headset on their Mac. Everyone is using USB mikes/headsets.
Linux is getting better as a desktop OS. I hope that continues so Apple gets some competition - Marketing an all-in-one as a Pro machine is just arrogant, I don't care whats under the hood the form factor is wrong.
I have been using mint 18 with cinnamon 3 and its a nice GUI and rock solid stable. It runs my dev env but also 24/7 servers and a few daemons. I just added some more ram for cheap (up to 24GB ) to run more docker containers.
Its hard to see how I could mirror this on OSX without spending a small fortune. I also own a macbook pro but due to donglegate its mostly for browsing the internet and light tasks (which i guess is what most apple products are designed for these days)
Huh, actually, thanks to NVIDIA, the latest drivers are likely to make your Mint 18.x failing to boot (requiring safe mode in 4.4.53, uninstalling 38x.xx drivers, reinstalling 36x.xx, etc.) One word: PITA. The aforementioned manufacturer is apparently aware of the issue, has been for months, but they're not fixing poop.
So as it appears that Nvidia still is playing their sad stupid little proprietary game on Linux (Mint can't fix the issue)... sadly it is better/safer to stick to the big distros (Ubuntu, notably) if stability is your main concern.
____
TLDR: PSA: too modified/exotic distros (like Mint+Cinnamon) are not well supported by some manufacturers, like Nvidia (nothing new under the sun, heh). Better use major ones (e.g. Ubuntu, main flavor will soon be Gnome 3 by 2018-04).
PS: No, I don't particularly like Ubuntu, but do we like Windows? Irrelevant, that's how we run Premiere Pro or previously .NET. Do we like macOS? Irrelevant, that's how we publish on iOS. Reality is what it is, and Ubuntu (vanilla/primary, as opposed to Ubuntu-based distros) is the chosen one for hardware support (usually, afaik).
The new MBP's fake keyboard is going to be the biggest boost Linux has had in a decade. All the devs I know are hanging on to their macbooks because they can't bear the thought of the new ones.
Unless Apple backs down on the TouchBar (unlikely), my current ageing MBPro is definitely my last.
on iOS, the weird tricks they are playing with scrolling means that between sections, you are dragging your finger with literally no response at all from the webpage.
the whole beauty of a a touch device is the physicality -- it feels like you're actually interacting with a real physical system embedded below the screen.
someone should tell web designers to stop messing that up.
1. For those who are criticizing upgradablity, there is a NEW Mac Pro design coming in 2018, modular and upgradable. I hope it will be a Cheese Grater like design but fits into a 3U Size Rack. I am pretty sure there are "comparatively" huge demand for Mac on Rack, and OSX Server in General.
2. The iMac Pro are really geared towards large segments of 3D Gfx, Photos and Videos Pros. So Professional Programmers may not be its target audience.
3. I dont believe the Cooling system is anything new. It is well engineered, but not new innovation. Which really pisses me off is because they could have done this a lot sooner, and they decide it is for iMac Pro and 27" only. I wish the normal 21 and 27 iMac gets more powerful CPU and GPU as well with the same cooling system.
4. There is nothing new on this page, why is it posted?
208 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadThese days, I'd want 64 GB as a minimum but I suppose 32 would suit for some tasks. I still muck about with some modeling that hasn't been shunted off to the GPU, so I'd even find a use for 128 GB.
A few browser tabs, email client, IDE, and Slack are going to eat up a goodly portion of 18 GB.
Also, 18 GB was certainly a typo, if you look now, they are saying 16 GB now.
Tangentially related: It's a bit of a strange feeling to recommend 32 GB of RAM as a base amount. My, how times have changed.
Throttling or not, I wish I was rich enough (we're probably talking about a 6 to 8k machine here !).
I am not an optimist. Full size chassis need some pretty serious cooling for these parts, and I see none of that with the Pro.
It's going to be very loud under a full load though, it would have been nice if they went with liquid cooling instead.
Yeah, the retail on that processor is $2k.
I doubt the iMac can keep running with a high load over time without thermal throttling.
I used to repair my laptop and desktop, but nowadays I'd rather just go to the Apple store and have it swapped out and not waste time for parts. The share of the market that wants repair-ability is probably just not high enough to care about, at least for Apple.
Edit: if this is for business or professionals, then I don't understand why they would make something like this either though. I assume their highly paid staff has market data and whatnot, but I share your opinion that it's ridiculous if this is supposed to be for business use.
I think that the consistency, quality, and software integration are worth a lot to businesses, especially mid-size businesses that don't have an entire IT department to fix issues that come up, and in these contexts, having a reliable computing monoculture means you can just focus on business.
I won't be surprised if iMac Pros do make it into plenty of business contexts.
Why i am the only one around using PC with zero problems and much much better than any apple product?
When I first switched back to windows, I was shocked to see the battery consumption being around 22 W. Lenovo's own battery management driver helped a lot. If I'm using firefox nightly I can reduce it to 16-18W an hour.
From my observation it seems to me that windows draws a lot of power when the system under low load, even on battery saver mode. With linux you can tune the battery consumption far better.
Performance-wise, due to Windows background services I experience occasional lags. The anti-malware engine, indexes etc. consume a lot of CPU cycles. The real bottleneck on X201 is the CPU. Due to heavy CPU usage, my laptop sometimes overheats and closes itself. I have only experienced this on Chakra Linux with an unstable version of KDE. Other linux distros and FreeBSD were absolutely fine.
Wifi connectivity was also very problematic. First couple of weeks wifi adapter stopped working everytime after I woke the laptop from sleep.
Now I don't have much to complain besides lags and the mediocre power consumption. Firefox nightly has helped immensely for a fluid browsing experience.
The bottomline is, for x201, if you want stability and performance but a more conservative experience go for linux. If you want a hassle-free cohesive but slower system go for Windows.
PS: Bugs on Windows might stem from X201 being an old machine.
Without fail the PCs always break in at lease some minor but still annoying way even tho I buy high end hardware where as the macs do not.
Getting good support from a vendor or hiring in house implicates a lot of overhead.
The choice to go with Apple is very understandable to me, based on my experience with how much time it takes to find and supervise IT support personnel/vendors. They are about as hard to manage as office cleaning staff, where when you look away for 5 minutes the carpet doesn't get vacuumed because it's hard to detect at first.
Or you can go and get either a warranty extension (before it runs out) or an aftermarket SSD, like millions (including me) have done.
My 7 year old MacBook Pro is running okay thanks to some memory and storage upgrades. I would not be able to get the same life extension with one of the new models, which makes me hesitate to get a new Mac.
_some_ new laptops
Most new laptops are still fully serviceable.
On profit, I can believe, but on revenue? Even at 10% market share, Macs would have to be five times the price of PCs to bring in equal revenue.
This is all PCs. In laptops it's likely that Apple's share is even higher.
Fuck you Dell.
I'm thinking of selling my Macbook Pro while I can get a decent price for it as I've now had it around 3 years. I'm better of investing that money in new parts for my PC.
iMacs, at least the 5k, is user serviceable for RAM upgrades.
The 21.5" is only 4K, I probably should have been more explicit about that.
Dual xeons, loads of disk space, and enough power to put at least two tiptop GPUs in.
[Citation needed]
I agree that it's all about macOS, and I'd use it even if it WERE "declining," but on what basis do you make this comment, besides personal anecdote?
I'd still prefer a brick to the face over having to use Windows for work :)
I say this as a Mac user that's used Linux for most of his life: Finder sucks. I don't feel like hashing out all the reasons for why right now. Nothing I say on a little Internet forum will change that.
It's been fairly well received.
macOS seems like a better, Unix-based Windows for me. Better than Windows, but that's pretty much the only thing I can say about it.
If you are doing things that need decent GPU support, you are shit out of luck.
I'm saying this because no matter what Apple say, their focus is undoubtedly on what makes them the most money: iPhones.
Because they don't buy for the next 20 years, but for their actual current needs. If anything happens and the line stops, I can always go find another solution then and there, as opposed to now.
Besides, this is like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. There were several cases for concern (e.g. when the MacPro wasn't updated properly for 3 years).
The day of the release of a new Pro machine is the exact opposite of that.
So what do I earn from "biting the bullet"?
I go through a non trivial process for merely the possibility that the iMac Pro might not have continued new models (which will only matter to me in 2-3 years at earlier if I buy it).
And that when there's already another Mac Pro model announced for 2018.
I'm not laying off the risk though -- I'm taking the same hit, only voluntarily.
My question was meant as: what I get by making the transition before that's actually the case?
I can always not take the risk until there's actually a reason.
Also, the 'real' new Mac Pro is supposed to be announced soonish--at this point it would seem to make more sense to wait and see what that offers before committing to this anyway.
(Though I suppose if you are in a corporate environment where buying is driven by accountants who replace everything as soon as the thing outlives its depreciation schedule--or even have everything on leases, like we do here--maybe the fact that it will someday be relatively obsolete doesn't matter).
I've never understood that argument. If iMacs make profit - any profit at all - why can't they just put up a shack next to their main building UFO and have a subdivision crank out iMacs? It's a question of having or not having "a few additional millions".
Also, a large part of their iOS business is tied to macs - you need a mac for development, and they don't want that platform to become so bad to hurt iOS development.
(Also, when was the last time you saw the state of the art "racing"? Reducing the update cycle to meaningful increments is the only way to keep the interest in new generations high without getting lost in pointless novelty features because you just got to fill that annual presentation somehow)
I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?
They have already announced that is coming later on in 2018.
https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
The thing is most people, even pros, don't bother with that stuff even when they have Dell boxes. Apple knows that and, I think, trades off ease-of-repair for sleekness and mostly wins out (until recently).
AFAIK, there is no "screen mode" that enables one to use these things as monitors.
You actually can! It's called Target Display mode:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592
From the page you linked. It hasn't been possible with new iMac models since 2014. I'd expect the Pro to be the same.
Personally I would love it if tablets and new iMacs had video input to enable use as external monitors but unfortunately not
I wish, there used to be Target Display Mode but it was removed in recent years (anything after Mid-2014). For the 5K iMac it was pretty obvious why it was missing, until fairly recently (DP 1.3 was ratified late 2014) there wasn't a connection fast enough to even drive the internal display (they ended up using a custom timing controller to overdrive a DP 1.2 link) so TDM was a no-go, but it'd be nice if they brought it back :/
I do love my iMacs, but I spend more than zero time shaking my head at the tight coupling of expensive, high quality components that will, eventually, fail independently.
Apple generally does a great job keeping the "eventually" at bay. But it's always coming.
That being said, I'm interested in the new magic keyboard: wide, and in space grey. Would look pretty nice with my hackintosh :-P
I hope they'll build a proper Mac Pro.
They actually acknowledged they messed up with the 'dustbin' Mac Pro and it's lack of upgradability, which is a first. (https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...). They are working on a completely new Mac Pro to address the issues actual pro's have, but that's going to take a while. The iMac Pro is just here to fill the gap.
(I ask because it was announced months ago and isn’t due out for a few more months.)
Looks great though. It’s a little overpowered for the stuff I do, where the demanding things are distributed systems which don’t make sense to host on a workstation, even in simulation. But I sure wouldn’t mind one.
Everything else is great, but I'm constantly finding myself in situations where I am about to install Docker, or go-lang, or something I am experimenting with and eventually come to the conclusion...not worth it to install.
Should I fire up Garage Band? Nope, I probably will use it twice and then it will sit there taking up disk space.
I'm trying to take advantage of more "cloud" solutions but they're not the same :(
But it is what it is, and at the end of the day an extra $1500 to not hate life every time you try to pan around in a piece of art is worth it.
On a whim I tried out the latest version of Adobe Premiere (I normally just use Sony Vegas, or "Vegas Pro" as it's now called)
On an i7-4790 with 16 gigs of memory, a GTX 970 and an SSD, Vegas loads in roughly 5-6 seconds
Premiere took roughly a minute, and rendered the entire system unusable while it loaded! after loading, just sitting at an empty main screen, it was consuming a monstrous 8GB of memory all by itself
Vegas by contrast, even when I shovel Blu Ray videos into it, barely peaks above 1.5GB, and I'm able to multi-task even while rendering
oh and when you've already cornered the market and become an industry standard
But if I were working with that stuff all day, I’d want as much power as I could get.
But as a programmer, my biggest and by far most frequent bottleneck is when my computer is idle and I’m sitting motionless, thinking about what the best thing I ought to type next is.
The whole point is I have no idea exactly what I'll be working on 5 years from now or what kind of machine it might need. But what I do know for certain is that the things I'm doing today would have been extremely tricky to do on a machine from 5 years ago.
Thunderbolt 3 just isn't fast enough for that to be feasible. The bottleneck is such that there's already no point in putting a high end card like the GTX 1080 Ti in an eGPU enclosure (Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/laptop-external-grap... ).
And I can imagine specific hardware improvements for ML or VR in the near future.
So each time you want to upgrade your GPU, you're also having to purchase a new screen. The difference in my case was between having about 10fps with a lot of debug draw in the UE4 editor on the iMac, and about 90fps for the same thing on a new PC with a 1080.
About the only good thing about the iMac was that it held its value remarkably well, and I sold it for half the purchase price 3 years later.
Just because you cannot imagine what people might need to use a computer for does not give you the right to tell them how much performance they need.
Perhaps they are going to the arctic circle and have to rely on parts lying around if anything breaks!
Perhaps they work with cutting edge computer graphics and need a brand new GPU with a certain new feature or hardware chip to test out!
Perhaps they are simulating something gigantic and it is easier to test out parts of the code on a local machine with a PCIe add in card before pushing it to a supercomputer.
This is the definition of a PRO machine, people who have extraordinary requirements and need power and flexibility. Stop telling them they have "enough", you are not in the position to make that call.
With respect though, you're talking about different sets of constraints.
The iMac pro is inevitably targeted at the group of people who don't need to upgrade, and maybe they will replace their machine every three to five years. Realistically, there is a limited amount of upgrading that will be done for most users, meaning that engineering effort that goes into building an expandable machine is relatively wasted.
The iMac Pro will not be suitable for every professional user, but it will cover a lot of use cases, and that's okay. If you do need an expandable machine, then there are other options there – but most people don't.
Then the next question: is the target audience really there?
The people who need 18 cores + a pro graphics card are the people who used to have mac pros (or still use them). These people care about expandable and replacable things, and most of all they want to use a screen with several computers because these pro screens cost a ton (Often more than the machine if you want a screen for e.g. video color grading or really serious photo work).
If the screen on this thing isn't up for the task ,then it's an expensive useless addition. If it is that good, then it's a waste to throw it out in 2 years when you replace the machine.
I mean I'm not saying this thing won't sell like hotcakes because it's an impressive machine and a not-very-price-sensitive customer group. But it just feels like they could have stuck these bits into the last mac pro tower, painted it black and had this product out sooner and cheaper than this?
If Apple allow upgrading the iMac Pro with a 3.5" 12TB hard drive, I'd be interested.
The new MacBook Pros aren't suitable for my needs because they don't have ports. I need more storage, but can't upgrade my laptop. I don't want to go down to a 2012 MacBook Pro just to add a bigger hard drive in the optical bay. Also, I really like the Retina screen. So, how am I going to store the Big Data for machine learning on my office computer, while also having a nice screen?
The iMac seems like a more affordable option than a Mac Pro, and with cheaper, more suitable upgrades than the non-tower Pro.
If the iMac doesn't have a 3.5" disk slot though, then I take back all my compliments. The 4TB max SSD from Apple won't be enough for me.
This would be the choice, but I'd hesitate to buy one with the new Mac Pro coming. I hate the idea of attaching a screen to the computer unless absolutely necesary, especially a nice screen.
Apple likely has data that says there are enough people that don't care about these things to justify their production of this computer. I work in an office full of designers, illustrators, animators and developers and there are very few of them that have much of a passion for messing around with the hardware and would far prefer to just upgrade every few years (we also don't really have much of an IT infrastructure). We buy Mac's and replace them when they are no longer working optimally for our team. That said, we've had some iMacs last 4-6 years with no complaints from their operators. I will caveat that and say that I did go through and replace all the HDD with SSD's on the oldest round of iMac's before you could get the Fusion or SSD upon order for a reasonable price.
This is aimed at people with the Mac Pro, not those with iMac of MacBook (at least thats my impression)
What I was getting at is that the people that prefer the All-in-one are likely e.g. graphic Designers etc, meaning people who already have MacBooks or iMacs. Not the hard core machine learners, VR creators, color graders etc that today have old Mac Pros and $5k screens.
I wouldn't bet on Apple having a finger on the pulse of the pro market ever since I witnessed the reception of Final Cut "Pro" X.
Has there ever been a test system that was allowed to be used by a third party? Considering how far they pushed off "release" it all smacked of "cya".
with regards to the design, AIO. There are still many rumors of a new iMac chassis for the next iteration so why would the Mac Pro not debut the new chassis but instead soldier on with the old chassis?
I take no issue with a line of iMac Pro work stations but a stand alone tower is still a requirement in a Pro line. Even with Thunderbolt supporting high speed external devices the one element I really don't want baked in is my screen
Its attractive because of the top end features. But they come in trapped in a disposable package. While that would not be terrible for $300 laptop, it is a piss-poor investment for what 9to5mac says will be a $17,500 top of the line box. Why? The instant one of the features is offspec,too little, to slow , you have an entire $17,000 machine that's too little, too slow.
And no mic input? Why? That's just silly. It cost them more to leave that out.
It belongs with Pro-Racecars, with prepacked engines and hoods welded shut, and with Pro-Lawn tools with no serviceable parts.
Is this really true though for Apple's target market? I'm guessing that if I'm an artist for Pixar and I need a new "professional" machine, the company is 9 times out of 10 going to buy me a new computer rather than buying me a video card upgrade. I'd imagine most large corporations would do something like that since it's more scalable than upgrading individual parts piecemeal.
Buying one "pro" machine and upgrading it over a number of years seems like more of what I'd call an "enthusiast" strategy. I think it's reasonable that Apple is betting that Mac "enthusiasts" would be willing to upgrade their machine wholesale after a number of years (maybe recouping value by reselling their old machine) rather than extensively researching new video cards and buying one off Newegg.
Maybe they're wrong and people aren't willing to do that, but it's their prerogative to place that bet.
working on a game. PVS calc took lots of memory and lots of time. Everyone's machines got a 6x upgrade in ram so they could be used at night to compute the PVS.
another anecdote. friend in another game found rebuilding assets on SSD was several X faster. Since the entire team was often waiting hours for asset builds to finish all machines got upgraded to have SSD.
this is especially true in GPU related fields. new gpus enable new things
Thinking about it, Apple's genius has been finding this line: "How closed can we go, how disposable can we make them and maximize churn, while not slowing down buying. We can even create a desire for churn [it's September, time for a new $600 phone, anyone?] Its exactly like the one you have, only different." As others have pointed out here, the dog and pony show they put on recently, by inviting a select group of reporters (market influencers) into their hq was damage control when several magazines/sites called them out for crossing this line. New machines with lower specs than older machines, gaming battery life tests, irrational pricing, and selling 5 year old spec machines as 'Pro'. I might recommend reading the reporting of the meeting, it's a textbook example of high-end one-on-one selling, impressive location, the appearance of insider-access, sealed with a personal commitment from the leaders. Meanwhile, they don't have a 'pro' product line, and though they have enough cash on hand to buy every pro team in every sport in the U.S. they haven't made any investments or advancements in pro pc technology in a decade. And that's cool, if apple doesn't want to fill the gap, someone will fill the space eventually.
And I concede that the headphone jack is fine, it;s a combo, first glance i assumed just output. That works.
Never once, in all of the tech companies I’ve worked for, have I seen anyone upgrade a computer. Even recently, my Mac had an issue with parallels that couldn’t get resolved. New Mac given to me.
Coworker had a 1.5 year old thinkpad. Just needed to swap the RAM from 8 to 16. Nope, just was given a new Thinkpad with 16 gigs instead of spending $150 on RAM.
Companies write off a ton of these expenses, and they don’t “upgrade” the hardware. They upgrade the machine.
Essentially you just need a room for parts and a few employees part time, and you can use your computing resources much more efficiently - basically free money. Granted, it only works for organisations of a certain size (large corporations, universities, gov.).
Dumb things happen when productivity is abstracted. But again, these are not the people given iMac pros.
Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)
Do you mean separate mic input? Because it has the same combo headphone jack as all existing Macs. So it has mic input.
As a pro audio user, a built-in mic input is useless anyway. We have external USB3, TB, or Firewire interfaces for that. Lower noise, better DACs, phantom power, HiZ and XLR inputs, etc.
Beyond pro, nobody uses mic input unless they are using an iPhone headset on their Mac. Everyone is using USB mikes/headsets.
I have been using mint 18 with cinnamon 3 and its a nice GUI and rock solid stable. It runs my dev env but also 24/7 servers and a few daemons. I just added some more ram for cheap (up to 24GB ) to run more docker containers.
Its hard to see how I could mirror this on OSX without spending a small fortune. I also own a macbook pro but due to donglegate its mostly for browsing the internet and light tasks (which i guess is what most apple products are designed for these days)
I like the idea of a single cable for everything but I cant afford to replace my monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc. all at once.
Huh, actually, thanks to NVIDIA, the latest drivers are likely to make your Mint 18.x failing to boot (requiring safe mode in 4.4.53, uninstalling 38x.xx drivers, reinstalling 36x.xx, etc.) One word: PITA. The aforementioned manufacturer is apparently aware of the issue, has been for months, but they're not fixing poop.
So as it appears that Nvidia still is playing their sad stupid little proprietary game on Linux (Mint can't fix the issue)... sadly it is better/safer to stick to the big distros (Ubuntu, notably) if stability is your main concern.
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TLDR: PSA: too modified/exotic distros (like Mint+Cinnamon) are not well supported by some manufacturers, like Nvidia (nothing new under the sun, heh). Better use major ones (e.g. Ubuntu, main flavor will soon be Gnome 3 by 2018-04).
PS: No, I don't particularly like Ubuntu, but do we like Windows? Irrelevant, that's how we run Premiere Pro or previously .NET. Do we like macOS? Irrelevant, that's how we publish on iOS. Reality is what it is, and Ubuntu (vanilla/primary, as opposed to Ubuntu-based distros) is the chosen one for hardware support (usually, afaik).
the whole beauty of a a touch device is the physicality -- it feels like you're actually interacting with a real physical system embedded below the screen.
someone should tell web designers to stop messing that up.
2. The iMac Pro are really geared towards large segments of 3D Gfx, Photos and Videos Pros. So Professional Programmers may not be its target audience.
3. I dont believe the Cooling system is anything new. It is well engineered, but not new innovation. Which really pisses me off is because they could have done this a lot sooner, and they decide it is for iMac Pro and 27" only. I wish the normal 21 and 27 iMac gets more powerful CPU and GPU as well with the same cooling system.
4. There is nothing new on this page, why is it posted?