What are the chances we see an all new design later this year to by mid next year? Can someone give me a logical opinion with no bias or emotion.
I think this update happened for one of two reasons.
1.) They have been waiting on Intel and AMD to get around to updating their CPUs and GPUs and simply could wait no longer and went with what was available. The fact that 8th-gen CPUs are standard is interesting and suggests that the 9th-gen are not available in enough quantity to be standard yet for Apple. Navi is rumored to be delayed until the Fall, so we get Polaris GPUs, including the 580x which is likely identical to what the old iMac had at a higher clock speed. All this adds up to having to put out something now and settling for what was available as a stopgap.
In this scenario I could see a new iMac that is redesigned coming in the Fall when presumably most of the hardware they would want would be available.
2.) This is the last Intel iMac and they need something to hold them over until summer 2020. All speculation from here. I think it is possible that anything without "Pro" in its name could be running on ARM next year. It is possible that the iMac Pro, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro stay on Intel for a while longer and the MacBook, MacBook Air, and iMac all move to ARM next year. The mini is a wild card. It lines up with this small spec bump that still leaves the iMac behind current Mac standards, the Mac Pro being released this year (it will have to be Intel), and the MacBook not receiving any meaningful updates. I can't see why they would release an all new Mac Pro design only to ditch it a year later.
In this scenario I think we see a MacBook and iMac introduced summer of 2020 running on ARM.
In either case, I think it is obvious that this was an update out of necessity and that this iMac will not be around for long before it is superseded. It definitely feels like a stopgap. Of course it could be the 2014 mini all over again which would be pretty upsetting.