Good for them, not good for people on a budget. $2000 for a low-end system?! I think $1000 for a low-end decade long lasting system is more reasonable. No way in hell would I pay $2000 for a base model Mac of any type.
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Apple Confirms iMac Pro Will Be Discontinued When Supplies Run Out, Recommends 27-Inch iMac
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The point remains that you are not going to end up with a $1k 6k display either way.
I only remember Apple refused to repair the damaged iMac Pro.
Popular YouTuber Says Apple Won't Fix His iMac Pro Damaged While Disassembled
Linus Sebastian, who runs the popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, recently shared a video in which he claimed Apple and an Apple Authorized...
www.macrumors.com
The iMac Pro is not expensive compared to BTO Dell/HP systems with comparable external monitor.
Why not both? iMac with M1, iMac Pro with M1X or M1X+ (12 off performance cores and no efficiency cores) I don’t see why any high device that’s always plugged in needs efficiency cores, I think going forward that any high performance ‘always plugged in’ devices will use a specific chip set.
Why not? The first 4k TV on the market cost $20,000 - a few years down the line and they were in the low $1000s. Now they're under $500. When the 27" LED Cinema display came out, it was a darn good price for a 1440p display. The 5k iMac in 2014 was way ahead of the game, as was the adoption of "retina" displays on MacBooks in 2012.
It is almost entirely down to economies of scale. I don't know about $1000 per se, but if Apple decided to order 6k display panels in "$2500 iMac" quantities rather than "$6000 XDR Display" quantities they could cost a lot less.
An "affordable" (by Apple standards) 6k iMac in 2021/2022 is no more implausible than the $2500 5k iMac was in 2014.
The point that remains is that a large player like Apple - 4th biggest PC maker in the world, who buy components in quantities that significantly affect the market price - has quite a lot of choice on the specs vs. price vs. quantity trade off when they plan products.
Absolutely true as Apple are not producing their own chips, they are designing them. TSMC produce them with what can only be described as science fiction manufacturing procedures, but where it demonstrates that Moores Law still has a lot further to go, contrary to what many people believed.
Because TSMC produce rather than design, no doubt they will receive orders from other companies, quite possibly other computer companies, because the manufacturing process is so far in advance of Intel.
How many years have Intel been going to change to 7nm chips?
Now I don't believe there is any going back for Intel. In my opinion it is done! More and more companies will like not only to keep their own branding on chips, but less and less time to wait for Intel to produce what customers want, as if a competitor is going to a much better chip at 7nm, 5nm, 4nm, 3nm then they will have to keep up with their competitors to survive.
Unless Intel radically changes, it is done and even if it does change, expect it to have to follow suit and be a producer rather than a designer, but obviously offering standardised chips for general use, but where it will create a major separation in the market from base level cheap electronics, base level computing and then a rather large jump to computer companies requiring bespoke chips to keep up with the opposition.
This problem will not be restricted to Intel, but all chip designer/producers, where they have to compete against bespoke designed chips down to 3nm (or more, who knows!).
It may mean that the big players such as Apple, Samsung, Dell etc. may gain even more market share as the base level end have to rely on what Intel/AMD can supply, not having the facilities for Chip Design, which could stifle innovation.
The TSMC situation could literally be as important as the industrial revolution.
True. My experience from running a computer company is that even in business accounts, the machines were never upgraded, unless the original purchase was really low on memory. If the system had a second processor socket, if you didn't sell one with the box, it was never used. We very occasionally sold a video card or other minor upgrades.
The one outlier was a corporation that decreed that there would be no new computer purchases for their upcoming fiscal year. So the local manager decided to purchase new 'guts' for the boxes they currently had. We replaced the motherboards, processors, memory, etc, for nearly all of their systems. The management staff said corporate decreed no new systems, but encouraged 'upgrades', so, they went shopping. I guess it solved their issues. A couple systems couldn't be upgraded because of nonstandard motherboards, so they 'upgraded' the chassis, and just had to fill the new, er 'upgraded 'box with *something*. Corporate games...
Having an iMac Pro, I really value the massive number of ports over the iMac. (Sarcasm here. A Windows box can have 15 or more USB ports, and the damned iMac has, 4? Stupid) The iMac Pro has 'loads' of ports compared to the straight iMac. It's a decent system for what I use it for. Laugh if you want people.
Well... an additional 2 x USB-Type C ports? Hardly loads.
But objectively, the I/O on both are fine.
All I can think of that they were able to put a better FaceTime cam in the iMac Pro since 2017 but only added it to the regular iMac last year.
This is an interesting bit about TSMC 1nm process and possibilities after 1nm.
www.ventronchip.com
At the forefront of technology, TSMC will enter the 1nm process - Ventron
www.ventronchip.com
People always forget that Tim Cook's specialty was as Chief Financial Officer and managing the supply chain on costs, not a tech guy or a products guy. And God knows, not a visionary in the least! Steve Jobs chose hims simply as the safe choice for not running the company into the ground with anything crazy. That's why I'm anxious about Apple Silicon. It's something that is completely outside of Tim Cook's wheelhouse.
AMD has updated their graphics several times since 2017, they could have updated the gfx.
However, as several fellow posters have pointed out, the iMac Pro seems like the replacement apple had intended for the mac pro, then back paddled and came up with the new tower. No point in updating a stopgap product.
I'm not sure what they are meant to be complaining about regarding the iMac Pro itself. It wasn't a bad computer if it met your needs. Sure, we'd got to the stage where it either needed to be upgraded or discontinued - and now we have the answer - but that's hardly a surprise when we know that the whole Mac range is going to be replaced by Apple Silicon over the next year or so (which, amongst other things, will completely change the Core i vs. Xeon dichotomy which was the main distinction between the iMac and iMac Pro).
The main reason people have been complaining about the iMac Pro (and Mac Pro) is that they don't meet their needs and/or budgets - whether it is pro/business or enthusiast - so why would they have bought one?
However, there has a bigger picture problem with Apple's pro desktop since about 2012:
2012: After 2 years without an update, "classic" Mac Pro gets a very underwhelming spec bump that causes a mass of complaints. In the EU, the classic Mac Pro is discontinued, with no news of a replacement, because Apple can't be fussed to fit a fan guard to meet a safety regulation that has been in the pipeline for years...
2013: Apple launch the radically different trashcan requiring users to have a complete rethink over peripherals/internal expansion, and making performance highly dependent on support for GPU-based computing... and if you needed time to make that transition, tough, because the classic Mac Pro has gone folks - long gone in Europe.
2016-17: If you did buy into the trashcan, your business lease is running out, time to re-equip with the latest Mac Pros.... which, oops, don't exist. Same specs as 2013 (beyond moving the entry-level up a notch).
2017: Apple admits the trashcan was a mistake - vague promise of some sort of "modular" Mac sometime. iMac Pro announced (not available in quantity until the new year) which is fine and dandy if you wanted an all-in-one, useless otherwise.
2019: Mac Pro announced (don't expect to get one until 2020)! Hooray! Except it starts at ~2x the price of the previous Mac Pros - and that's for a pathetic spec. Real starting price is $10k+.
2020: Your iMac Pro is coming up on the 3 year mark... no replacement in sight. Pretty obvious at this stage that the iMac Pro was a dead end... then Apple announce Apple Silicon so, Hallelujah, the Mac Pro you got in January is now a dead end, too...
So, in summary: every pro desktop Mac since 2010 - including the 2019 Pro - has been a one-model-wonder with no upgrade/replacement path that doesn't include a radical change in specs, workflow and budget. Now, that doesn't mean that your Mac becomes useless overnight - I'm sure people will be rocking their Mac Pros for another decade, just as people are still rocking their classic <= 2012 towers - but it is a headache as soon as (e.g.) you add another employee, get a computer stolen or your accountant tells you it's the tax-efficient time to buy kit or re-lease, because you can't just drop in an incrementally better system: you're talking major workflow change and forced major OS upgrade.
I suspect that the practical upshot of that is that any business user for whom those things mattered has already left the building and switched to PC. Those remaining are either (a) Apple enthusiasts prepared to walk over red hot coals to stick with their brand or (b) more understandably, people who are so heavily committed to Mac-only software to the extent that the risk, time and re-training needed to switch to Windows or Linux outweighs the hurdles that Apple throws at them. Oh, yes, and those users for whom all-in-one machines like the iMac just happen to hit the sweet-spot.
Trouble is, short term you can milk more cash out of your captive users by hiking prices and that looks good on your quarterly results. ...but in the long term, if you don't try and grow a market by attracting customers from your competitors, it will shrink it means the stagnation and slow erosion of the Mac user base. And, sure enough, there have been several years of results from Apple showing fairly stagnant growth in sales but huge gains in revenue (although the last year has seen a huge boost in laptop sales, I'm not sure that's shown up at the pro desktop end).
The other clue: look at the Mac Pro section on Apple's website. See all the performance comparisons with comparable pro apps on Windows? No? Exactly - but there are plenty of benchmarks showing that the Mac Pro is much faster than your 2013 trashcan. Pretty clear who they are selling to...
Edit: I'm really hoping that the Apple Silicon move will make Mac unique again and reverse this a bit. Also, some of the design & pricing decisions starting with the 16" MBP suggest a sudden outbreak of common sense, too.
I think Apple will have a smaller AS iMac, maybe 23”, that would in the range of $1200. They do have the $999 M1 MacBook Air and the $699 M1 Mac Mini.
The 27" Ultrafine (using the same panel that the iMac 27 5K uses) draws up to 200W at peak. That's more than 3x the entire draw of the M1 MacBook Pro. It's more than 5x the max power draw of the M1 Mac mini.
I'll certainly accept and enjoy a new look, but it's never been a deal-breaker for me. I don't shop for technology as a design-first concept, rather a functional performance leads my decisions
This product is outdated and discontinued. Why is it not discounted?
Not owned one but used one a few times. Gave the Palm a try later but that was just bad. Glad I never wasted more money on this unfinished tech demo.
Running X-Plane on the 2020 iMac generates so much fan noise that it almost drowns out the game's sound effects.Although I was expecting this and been saying this for months its sad to see that Apple spend all this R&D on a 1 stop product. Why they haven't implemented for the iMac is beyond me and I really hope the only reason that truly stopped them was the ram door. One of the worst possible thing about iMac was the cooling and they don't even bother to change that and in August they gave us another "crap" machine that is loud under load. IF there is no amazing redesign this year for the AS iMac then I don't know what their designers are doing there. Maybe still designing the bloody Airtags and Airpower.
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