I don't think iMac theft is all that rampant. Seems a lot of work to go through for something that will be of little use to very very few.
I'm sure we're going to see a ton of articles guessing at random functions that may be possible with an A10 chip in the iMac Pro. "Might allow cellphone calls!", "Might allow you to checkin at your desk on Foursquare!", "Might allow running iOS apps!", "Might allow backup internet connection through LTE!"
I wanted to get an iMac at work once, but we'd been broken into before so they insisted it had to be a laptop that I take home with me. Honestly, I would have thought they'd had some kind of insurance, but they gave me a top-spec MBP with Touch Bar instead, which was a much newer and faster machine, so I didn't bother asking.
I find it hard to believe that that's a common situation, though. Maybe they are also targeting the semi-pro/vlogger crowd who might buy one for their home? Wouldn't they also have insurance?
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I think people are missing the big picture. Apple certainly has the engineering resources to stuff workstation grade components into an iMac shell and call it a day. Ditto with contemporary modular components into a MacPro 2012 chassis. I mean, hell, people do it with Hackintoshes all the time.
My hypothesis is that Apple is not interested in getting back into the workstation market unless they can do something truly different/cool/strategic. After all, you can bitch all you want about a workstation costing $5K (you shouldn't if you actually use these machines for a living) but the business line these machines will amount to for Apple will amount to a rounding error. Maybe less so. So the offering has to be strategic in nature.
This speculation about an ARM chip being integrated into a workstation makes me think Apple is dipping a toe into the world of Macs ultimately co-running off A-series processors. The deal would work like this - OS level apps such as iCloud and Siri and simple apps such as Mail, Safari, iTunes, etc. would all run off the ARM coprocessor to leave those precious Intel cores to do the heavy lifting in compute-intensive tasks such as rendering 4K video, 3d modeling, compiling, etc. Why waste some of those precious (and expensive) Xeon compute cycles to handle all that boring stuff? When I'm rendering a 4K video - yeah, I kinda want to be able to write emails, clean up my DropBox, etc. but not at the expense of slowing down my render (time is money after all) so to me, this is actually a pretty brilliant solution.
Native Apple apps will be the first to get this ARM-ifited MacOS treatment but my guess is that other developers will soon follow suit. Does that mean Adobe will make a full version of Premiere Pro to run on an ARM processor or iOS? No. But maybe it gets them preparing (even if they never release it, they will get ready for it) to run Photoshop on it. Especially after a lot of other developers get their software to run on both Intel and ARM processors in a desktop setting.. and then this crosses over to iOS...
That's a game-changer that's snuck in like Trojan horse right there. Just the kind of thing Apple does. Remember, the iPhone was launched as just a better smartphone until they unleashed the App capability a few months later.
It's a nice idea, but ultimately, I'm sorry to say but I don't think so.
People are reading way too much in to this being an ARM chip. The way this is going to work is almost certainly just like the Touch Bar works -- i.e. as a USB device. The most important thing this chip will do is manage its Secure Enclave, totally apart from the rest of the system. Apple may also use it as a controller for other pieces of hardware - for example, the camera and microphone, rather than have them directly connected to the host. This would allow them to run more advanced image/audio processing to improve quality, as well as have always-on services like "hey, Siri" or motion alarms (or FaceID, in the future).
But it isn't going to run Apps. What you're talking about - about the system remaining responsive even if there are compute-heavy tasks going on - is already "solved" by multicore processors and a well-designed Operating System. Individual applications may become unresponsive at times (because they haven't been parallelised effectively by their developers - nothing you can do about that), but the system as a whole never just hangs for me.
Also, the Apps that you mention are pretty heavy. Mail on macOS is very different to iOS, and opening it can take several GBs of RAM on my computer; there's no way it's going to run smoothly on an A10 with only 512MB. Safari is also very far from being a simple application - nobody would accept a version where tabs constantly reloaded because it couldn't use the 128GB of RAM you otherwise have on the system. iTunes is almost a miniature operating system by itself.
If they're going to have an ARM Mac, they're just going to make an ARM Mac. It's going to start at the low-end where there is actually a reasonable business case (they could build smaller, cheaper, more power-efficient Macs), and work up from there. Imagine a MacBook as thin as an iPad, for prices that are more in line with an iPad. That's a device people might actually want to buy.
for a modular pro, there is long term value, this is just the worlds most expensive AiO that once AppleCare is gone, is waiting to be replaced if an issue occurs . Cooks disposable macs are disappointing long term, great for users who buy into AppleCare for 3 years.
