Shoot so taking the innards of an M1 MacBook Air/Pro and putting it into the shell of a revamped AIO iMac, larger screen and possible batter to run it for 5-10 mins in the event of a power outage is out of the question. Oh well.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Confirms iMac Pro Will Be Discontinued When Supplies Run Out, Recommends 27-Inch iMac
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
There are multiple ways to handle this.
The iMac Pro is a bundle of two different products
- a different case (grey, at the time a better screen, 4 TB ports, probably stronger fan) AND
- different internals (more cores, stronger GPU, T2 controller)
If we look at these, the former is mostly not essential -- the screen has caught up, and I doubt many people use more than 2 of the TB ports. What matters is the different internals.
Why is this important?
Because Apple has the opportunity, moving forward, to retain the part that matters and drop the part that doesn't. Move the Pro branding from the CASE to the INTERNALS.
ie Apple sells
- iMac with Apple Silicon
- iMac with Pro Apple Silicon
Same case, different guts...
Presumably iMac with Apple Silicon (the presumed M1X, 8 large cores, 4 or 8 small cores, double the M1 GPU, RAM maxes out at 32GB?) will ship soon, spring'ish.
What would Pro Apple Silicon be? Probably it won't ship till the A15. Of course it will include what one would expect - at least 16 large cores, another doubling of the GPU, RAM maxing out at 64GB? That's obvious. More interesting is the things that could be added to make it more Pro than just a double-sized Apple Silicon SoC. Things I can think of include
- a second flash controller, so that you could add a second flash drive (and presumably config as either RAID-0 for reliability or striped RAID for double the throughput)
- support for genZ or something similar. (Basically a way to connect to random access memory that's not exactly DRAM. As far as the CPU is concerned it's DRAM, but the actual physical connection, including the timing stuff done by the memory controller like refresh, are handled differently. Think registered DIMMs or OPTANE DIMMs as a kinda example.
The point is that MOST of the use cases that want seriously large amounts of DRAM beyond 64GB just want something "DRAM-like", like Optane DIMMs, they don't need exactly DRAM. It's silly to pay the costs of DRAM (power, pins, memory controller hand-holding) when you'd be just as happy with a denser alternative. That's the problem genZ (and a few alternatives) are attacking.
- one can imagine even wilder alternatives. An FPGA on the SoC with Apple selling different accelerators (a video effects accelerator, audio effects accelerator, neural training accelerator) that you can buy and run on that FPGA? All nicely already hooked up to Apple's APIs, so your existing apps work, just twice as fast in the most demanding parts.
Completely disagree. There is no comparison between the 27" iMac and the iMac Pro. I am guessing you never sat in front of one all day while churning out a heavy workload. The iMac Pro worked in near silence while the iMac was like having a vacuum cleaner on your desk. Tally the silence and 10GBe and it was very easy to justify the extra grand for a work machine.
For that matter the same could be said for my old 12 core trash can that it replaced. For all the fussing and hand wringing, it was an amazing machine that sat there silently cranking out work without a fuss. Hell my Pegasus R6 that served it is still banging along after three sets of drive replacements.
I get so tired of all these so called "pro's" crying the same cries about upgradability and expandability. The fact is that the vast majority of "pro's" will never crack their machine open. It's just not cost effective to take a production machine down to upgrade. When a machine is replaced, the replacement is set up and dropped into the workflow and we move on. The old one may get sold or retasked, but it is almost never going to see mainline production again.
Last edited:
Or just save $1 a day from another source in your life, like a daily soda 🥤, and buy a new Mac every 3-4 years. That’s how I look at it.. You can even sell your old Mac because they tend to have decent resale value within 5 years
M1 already out performs many Xeons. If you mean can Apple make a large stable chip, I think they guaranteed to. They will have to replace the Mac Pro at some point.
How do you know this? Do you have a reference? It could be that, internally, at the time Apple began design on the iMac Pro they realized they needed a modular replacement for the Trashcan, and that the iMac Pro was thus indeed intended as a stopgap, and not as a replacement for the Trashcan. They released the iMac Pro in Dec 2017, and noted in April 2017 that they were working on a replacement for the Trashcan. And they could have already been at work on the Trashcan replacement well before that announcement.
And yet Apple hired a "Pro Workflow Team", consisting of experienced industry professionals, to help guide them on their new pro-focused designs, and these pros told them they wanted modularity. Further, companies that provide workstations to pros--e.g., HP and Boxx -- only produce, for their non-mobile workstations, highly modular machines. And I would think they know their markets quite well.
Note also that "pros" is not monolithic. There is an enormous range of pro users, and of pro user needs.
The extra TB ports are the only thing I really care about in the IMP. I do need the extra bandwith for a variety of things. So maybe the mini mac pro plus high end monitor may be the way to go for me if the new imac sticks with only 2 TB plugs.
I have an M1 and Xeons, and I can tell you that the M1 isn't what it is cracked up to be in real world use. Maybe the M1 pro will be at some point, but don't buy the hype.
I think we are all waiting to see what’s next, as this is the time for Macs to break from all-in-one desktops and expensive workstation that can be customize, to several solutions using Apple Silicone. Everyone here looks at the multiple laptops you can choose from but desktop/workstations, what happened in the last decade?
Well, there was no RX 5800 and the RX6900 is almost completely vaporware at this point (haven’t found one model that is In Stock over the past few months, typical AMD). The Vega VII consumed too much power for the iMac regardless if it could have fit in the iMac Pro chassis. I love AMD, but they’re not a reliable partner for new GPUs as evidenced by their glacial pace of introductions and tiny numbers in the wild.
Again, the confluence of Intel’s process woes and AMD’s “explosive growth” product shortages made it impossible for Apple to continue relying on them for arguably the two most important components in a computer. Complaints about Apple not upgrading the iMac Pro fail to grasp the actual components Apple was left to work with in the Pro space as it was moving toward the Apple Silicon transition. Intel is still flopping around like a dying fish without any end in sight.
I assume you buy for the 80% of the work that you do and the other 20% is left to work within the confines of the machine you own?
The fact is if you run a successful business and you procure a piece of kit to make a profit and it does, and performs past that, then you always have the budget. if you don't run a business successfully then no you don't have a budget at all. But I have not seen a post from an iMac Pro OWNER that bought it for business that has complained.
My business has no need of finance, never made anyone redundant even during lockdowns.
Been in the business a very very long time, right back to Apple Lisa.
Even CNN is reporting about the discontinuation of the iMac Pro.
www.cnn.com
Apple is discontinuing the iMac Pro
Apple is no longer making the iMac Pro, once the most-powerful computer the company offered.
Yes, definitely. The regular iMac is already as capable as the iMac Pro, which is definitely not worth it at this point. Apple's silicon is going to deliver superior performance. The iMac Pro was only released so people could have something to rely on while the new Mac Pro was not released. It is probably not going to be missed. I like the iMac in black, though, it is very edgy and I hope Apple keeps the color.
It is a 4-year product that was never a best-seller. Were it a product by any other company, it would probably have gone unnoticed.Even CNN is reporting about the discontinuation of the iMac Pro.
Apple is discontinuing the iMac Pro
Apple is no longer making the iMac Pro, once the most-powerful computer the company offered.
But that matte black finish though! I really hope it’s an option in future iMacs that are Apple Silicon based.
Funny how just in 14yrs or less we’re seeing and saying the same thing that Apple saw with the Power PC architecture.
Smart decision, really smart and it will work for you in the least costly way!
I've always thought of the iMac as the quintessential consumer desktop computer (maybe because of how it was originally marketed in the PowerPC era). It was weird seeing it repurposed as the top-of-the-line desktop Mac for Pro users. We'll see what Apple does now.
