iMac Pro How generous would time be for an maxed out iMac Pro?

[Minato1990]

Yes I was looking at it, and it would come out to 16,338.00 Canadian

I'm obviously not going to buy it. It's about more or less the same price for a 4 year bachelor degree in Québec(yes we have the cheapest tuition in North America)

But how strong is it maxed out? Like how long till its value starts going down

 

[bxs]

It's value drops the moment you open its box.... unless you can find someone on eBay/Craigslist to pay more than what you paid for it.

 

[Minato1990]

It's value drops the moment you open its box.... unless you can find someone on eBay/Craigslist to pay more than what you paid for it.

Ok, by value I meant like how will it fair against other computers or to be more specific programs/pc games(bootcamp i guess) that will be coming out in the future.
Like how powerful is this thing.
If someone was to invest in this for how long could this baby still be kicking in terms of power for a desktop.

 

[sputnikBA]

@shuttaman it depends heavily on exactly what you want it to do.

- Some apps are heavily single threaded and so may benefit from core with higher clocks.
- some are multithreaded and the more cores you can feed them the better. (eg 3D rendering thats CPU based)
- some are multithreaded up to a point and aren't really optimised beyond say 4 cores (eg Photoshop), so it would depend on how much investment developers are willing to make into multicore beyond that.
- Some aren't really interested in CPU past a certain point and prefer GPU assistance to work their magic

...and a large amount of apps vary depending on exactly what you are doing in the app itself. eg 3D apps like Maya can be very heavily single threaded during modelling but be very heavily multithreaded when rendering. After a lot of reading around, I've basically realised that for high performance computing, only you can really answer "how powerful it is" and whether it is "worth it" based on your exact workload.

Its a lame answer i know, but its the only true one.

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

If you are going to use it for business then the taxation depreciation will make it worthwhile. When I retired Down Under, one could claim 40% of the cost off the first year's taxation, the second year 40% of the remaining balance, the third year 40% of the remaining balance.

The only problem is the value may fall under the trade/sale price when it is time to update again and if you turn a 'profit', it is counted as taxable income and ongoing.

I have always ordered i7's but considering an iMac Pro next month when dividends on Apple shares are paid.

 

[velocityg4]

Ok, by value I meant like how will it fair against other computers or to be more specific programs/pc games(bootcamp i guess) that will be coming out in the future.
Like how powerful is this thing.
If someone was to invest in this for how long could this baby still be kicking in terms of power for a desktop.

As far as gaming goes. A $3000 gaming PC you build yourself (including display) would blow it out of the water. Xeons aren't that great an overclocked i7-8700K would do far better. As for a GPU a GTX 1080 Ti would crush the VEGA 64. Anything over 16GB of RAM is pointless for gaming you could do 32GB to futureproof the gaming PC. 5K is unrealistic for gaming you'd end up using 2560x1440 while the gaming PC would be 4K. As for an SSD testing shows no discernible difference in load times between NVMe and SATA AHCI SSD.

As for heavily multi-threaded workstation tasks or tasks which require a workstation class GPU. For the price of a top spec iMac Pro you could have a dual CPU 44 core (88 thread) Xeon, dual AMD Vega Frontier Edition GPU, 4TB Samsung 960 Pro (2TB x2 in RAID 0), Triple IPS 4K Monitors and 256GB RAM. You could get equivalent workstation specs to the top end iMac Pro for about $9,000. If all you needed was equivalent performance without specifically needing workstation parts even less.

As for holding value. The top spec model will plummet much more rapidly than the entry level. High end equipment always does so. I'm talking about percent change in value not straight dollar amount. Obviously the dollar amount would be higher.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

As far as gaming goes. A $3000 gaming PC you build yourself (including display) would blow it out of the water. Xeons aren't that great an overclocked i7-8700K would do far better. As for a GPU a GTX 1080 Ti would crush the VEGA 64. Anything over 16GB of RAM is pointless for gaming you could do 32GB to futureproof the gaming PC. 5K is unrealistic for gaming you'd end up using 2560x1440 while the gaming PC would be 4K. As for an SSD testing shows no discernible difference in load times between NVMe and SATA AHCI SSD.

As for heavily multi-threaded workstation tasks or tasks which require a workstation class GPU. For the price of a top spec iMac Pro you could have a dual CPU 44 core (88 thread) Xeon, dual AMD Vega Frontier Edition GPU, 4TB Samsung 960 Pro (2TB x2 in RAID 0), Triple IPS 4K Monitors and 256GB RAM. You could get equivalent workstation specs to the top end iMac Pro for about $9,000. If all you needed was equivalent performance without specifically needing workstation parts even less.

You're spot-on in regards to gaming, but comparing an iMac Pro with a 3-year covers-everything warranty to something you cobble together yourself is fallacious for two reasons. One, your time has a value (both in terms of money and opportunity costs) that needs to be included in your calculations. Two, no business worth its salt is going to rely on systems they build themselves that lack an all-inclusive replacement warranty.

I worked at a small multimedia shop that did that decades ago, and we spent fully 15-20% of our time just keeping our PCs running while we burned almost all of the money that the rest of the business made. I literally had no idea from day to day if my PC would be operational, or if it would be on the bench getting cannibalized for parts to fix some more critical system. I reinstalled Win95 on my PC at least once every 2 weeks.

The only machine that company could rely on was a 10 year old Mac IIci. Because it was built like a tank and had nothing that could be usefully cannibalized. It boggles my mind how much the owner of that shop wasted in wages and missed/late customer work just to save a few bucks on his fixed hardware costs.

So the proper comparison is to an HP workstation. Or, if you don't want workstation-class parts, an Alienware gaming rig.

Hint: Every animation studio and game developer that I've ever worked for provided us with real workstations. Often these were a bit slower than the latest consumer hardware, but they never, ever broke down. That's why you buy Xeons and ECC RAM.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

I have always ordered i7's but considering an iMac Pro next month when dividends on Apple shares are paid.

Sweet! You just gave me a great idea on how I can sell the upcoming purchase to my wife! “Honey, last year’s dividend from Apple’s stock paid for this iMac Pro.” (Last year, we received a tad over $12K in AAPL dividends.)

Thanks for the great idea!