Agree...However, hopefully, Apple provides the customer the choice of not only standard colour but also space grey!
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iMac Pro No Longer Custom Configurable, Available 'While Supplies Last'
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time to update the imac with its ancient, 15-year-old design. get rid of the giant bezel!
Disagree...Gratefully, the updated m1 Mac mini is faster than Intel and which works with Apple 6K XDR display!
Possibly because the new iMacs will have colors including gray, new design and new size and m1x which definitely over-shine these pros anytime.
You mean I can't be productive on my M1 Mini? News to me. Software is being updated on a daily basis and what isn't still works.
Well, to be fair, Apple now sells the iMac Pro with the 10-core Xeon W processor, instead of the 8-core Intel Xeon W that equipped it at launch. So it is kind of a small silent upgrade. If you configure an iMac with similar specs, you will have it priced at $3,999, which is cheaper but not by much.
First keep in mind that according to Apple, the ARM transition is supposed to take two years to completion.
We currently have 4+4 cores, 8 GPUs, 16 GB of RAM for entry level machines. That will be increased soonish to 8+4 cores, 8 or 16 GPUs, 32 GB of RAM. That can be done without having to do anything clever, just by making the chip bigger. And a lot easier than putting two of the existing chips in a computer.
Then two separate things would be (a) multiple chips and (b) RAM outside the chip. On-chip RAM is a major performance booster. RAM outside the chip only makes sense if it is massive. So that would probably mean massive external RAM, and the on-chip RAM would be limited to 8GB and used as cache memory. Multiple chips also makes sense only for massive systems. And there's cost for communication between the chips.
I wonder what the difference is between this. Apple making there own iMac Pro’s for you to buy. Non configurable. Trash.
This is an outdated product and shouldn't be purchased if you a) are actually in its target demo and b) can wait a bit. The ASi refresh of the iMac lineup will either render it irrelevant for the money or instead bring an outright replacement, in which case it will be rendered irrelevant for the performance.
Agree...However, since technology is rapidly advancing, Apple maintains their high, initial price and strive to make as much revenue as possible!...The technology customer's ONLY choice is to either quickly purchase if needed or wait until the next release...
As I remember, it was a fill in for the Mac Pro, in between the Trashcan and the current model?
My suspicion is that it was going to be the next Mac Pro but was rejected by key customers/developers. Its quite well developed for a stop-gap - even though it is basically iMac shaped, non-trivial work went into the cooling re-design. It also carries many of the fingerprints of the trashcan: particularly, heavily dependent on a particular processor and GPU models with no real update roadmap.
At the time of the famous "future of the Mac Pro" press conference in April 2017, where the camera was carefully avoiding the blood on the carpet, the iMac Pro would already have been in quite an advanced stage of development - just a couple of months away from announcement at WWDC, while the then-mythical "modular" Mac Pro was pretty clearly nowhere. Methinks the new iMac Pro had grown up in an echo-chamber until they showed it to a few key partners in early 2017 and got laughed at - hence the U-turn. Still, just guessing...
That's the big problem with the Mac Pro - you pay a hefty premium for a chassis with the potential to be upgraded to a 28 core, quad-GPU, 1.5TB monster. If you're happy with a mere 16-core, a piddling 256GB of RAM, a single high-end GPU that leaves change from 2 grand, and could slum it with a mere 2-3 full-width PCIe slots, then you're wasting money on a grossly over-specified (not to mention grossly over-engineered and not particularly well designed) chassis.
OTOH the "value for money" of the whole iMac range rather hinges on that display being "worth" about $1200. If you didn't want a built-in, 27", 5k, P3 display, that display is worth $0 - or less, since you're left with a computer entirely built around a display you don't want.
I believe it's not the CPU as such but the Thunderbolt controller chips - support for DisplayPort 1.4 over Thunderbolt (which the 6k display needs) was only added with the Titan Ridge chips in 2018.
Those are two very interesting questions which won't be answered until we see the M2 (or whatever it will be called) chip. I find it hard to imagine that we'll see more than ~64GB of RAM mounted "on-package" M1 style - but there's no reason why an "M2" couldn't just use regular (non-low power) "external" RAM instead of/as well as on-package LPDDR.
We'll presumably get a new integrated - either on-chip or on-die - GPU to give any single dGPU a run for its money, but I suspect the route for 2- or 4- GPU monsters is either (a) multiple Apple Silicon processors or (b) just support AMD etc. GPUs via PCIe...
Multiple CPUs are a thing (see the whole"scaleable" Xeon range - plenty of workstations out there with 2 x 28 core Xeons - heck, the original Mac Pro 1,1 had dual Xeon CPUs) and it would be up to Apple to build the necessary capability into future Apple Silicon processors and MacOS frameworks. I'm not saying that it isn't rocket surgery - but Apple are big enough and ugly enough to employ rocket surgeons.
M1 is primarily a chip for the MacBook Air and its successors, and isn't going to cut it in the higher-end MBPs, let alone an (i)Mac Pro replacement. So it is not really about whether the M1 has features to support muti-processors.
You can build a cluster computer out of almost anything (and Apple used to have a software product - XGrid - for exactly that). Its really a case of how much effort goes into providing high-speed CPU interconnects and smart software to make it look more like one big computer. The applications being run on current high-end x86 workstations are already pretty dependent on parallelism for performance, anyway.
I'd guess that it is quite likely that a future high-end Mac Pro will feature multiple Apple Silicon SoCs based on the chips in lower-end Macs - because the alternative would be for Apple to produce a dedicated high-end Xeon-killer chip just for the relatively tiny top sliver of the Mac market, which would be hugely expensive.
A lot of folks here are delusional to think Apple will lead the world in CPU and GPU advances.
You are correct. Only the delusional think Apple will do it.
The rest of us know Apple have already started this with the A series and now the M series.
That‘s pretty vague, there’s practically nothing of either substance or relevance. Did you feel better after sticking your head out the window?
The 2019 MacPro has the best designed tower case Apple has ever made. Super easy to get into to swap/add RAM, add PCI cards, etc etc.
I seriously doubt anyone in the high end pro market cares whether iMacPro's live or die.
I seriously doubt anyone in the high end pro market cares whether iMacPro's live or die.
$5000 US is absolute madness for that machine. it's a very nice display, but not a $4000 display
$5000!!! The new M1 iMac will probably twice as fast and half of the price!
No its not the most expensive. people seldom compare apples with apples. As an owner of the iMac Pro it has served me really well and earned more than its keep. You don't buy an iMac Pro for a hobby, it is there to do a job of work, and its performed admirably in those tasks. never had a problem with it.
When you suggest its the most expensive, no doubt you are not including the fact it is a complete desktop, with all the cards you need, all the memory, and it includes the monitor.
Now when you get your high end PC, you get a box, with a CPU in it, and many upgrade to a different video card, different ethernet, additional PCI or other boards, all of which give the potential for some serious complications in configuring a working machine, something I experienced first hand when my daughter was given a works machine with a high end spec., but NOTHING ON it could be said to be standard, as with a PC very little is standard, its configured with different bits.
All those bits cost money, the monitor costs money, the cables cost money and the time to configure it and get it working without a problem costs money.
The iMac Pro plugged in and did its job from the day I received it. So from late December 2017 its been an absolute workhorse, and you can write off computer systems in the first year for tax, so I'd say its been a great machine and its by no means finished now. It will carry on being a workhorse until its no longer viable for the heavy work it was engaged in, and then it will be redeployed on other tasks like my other machines.
A really nice machine but in my opinion with the advent of new Silicon, GPU/CPU, and every other spec change that occurs in the new iMac range, the iMac Pro as a separately engineered and designed piece of kit will be no more.
This is clearly a point of view from someone who hasn't bought one to do a specific job of business. Everyone I know who bought the iMac Pro has been really pleased with the way they have performed.
- "accessible" USB-C and power on the top of a case that will quite likely be kept under a desk.
- Have to unplug every last cable from the rear before removing cover (...e.g. to re-seat PCIe card that you unseated when plugging the cable in...) - but, hey, you had to pull it out from under the desk anyhow...
- Nothing to keep dust out.
- Does it really, really need that elaborate and expensive 3D aluminium sculpture on the front?
- ...or PCIe slot covers machined from solid aluminium?
- Needs special, custom power connector kit ti use standard PCIe cards.
- MPX modules... nice and neat way of avoiding flying power/Thunderbolt cables, but still just PCIe under the hood, and mainly a device to sell marked-up custom expansion cards that won't work in regular PCIe slots.
- Wheels with no brake. Seriously? At $700 a set?
- Internal hard drive expansion... located right in the thermal exhaust of the CPU, Mounting cage/cables not included & only sold bundled with third-party HDs.
- Rack version leaves the RAM slots underneath the unit
- Rack version lacks redundant PSU, lights-out etc. that would make it suitable for data-center use.
- Rack version would make more sense in an AV studio environment, except it is far too deep and heavy for typical AV equipment racks... (avoidably so - hugely over-engineered for something that's going to be protected by a rack, huge space behind the front panel...)
- Vastly over-specified "one size fits all" chassis/motherboard giving the lower-end configurations a lousy price/performance ratio - twice the entry price of previous Mac Pro models.
Give me the old "Mac Pro" tower any day (sides flip off in-situ, useful connectors on front panel, fully stocked with almost-tool-free HD sleds, half the price...).
Good question, yes they do. There are 2 newer generations that could be used. The iMac Pro uses the Intel 2100 series Xeon-W CPUs, released in Q3, 2017. Newer gens (that Apple never implemented) are the 3200 series released in Q2, 2019, 2200 series in Q4, 2019. Then there's the most recent 10-series released in Q2, 2020, a mobile version, but with turbo at 5.3GHz!
With that said, although better performing the newer CPUs are not all that much faster - perhaps not enough of a jump to warrant the update.