What are the chances of an updates iMac Pro this year??
Nobody knows - and I don't think there have even been any suggestive leaks. As for speculation and numerology:
- the lifecycle of Xeon/Workstation-class hardware tends to be a bit slower than the mainstream, desktop hardware anyway, which is partly OK because this stuff is as much about stability as raw performance. The lifecycle of
Apple's high-end hardware resembles that of an unlikely hybrid of a mayfly and a giant sequoia... (6 years and counting for the Mac Pro, while the 15" MacBook Pro got a GPU bump after 4 months...)
- the regular iMac is overdue an update based on past cycles (but that's about the
only evidence) but its going to start to smell if its not updated this year. There's no 'past cycle' to consider for the iMac Pro.
- the MMMP (Mythical Modular Mac Pro) has been
promised for 2019 (my guess would be pre-announcement at WWDC and a late-2019 launch as happened with both the current Mac Pro and the iMac Pro - so based on that experience don't count on getting your mitts on one before next January. Nobody has the faintest clue what its specs or price will be, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that its not gonna be an "impulse buy"... It seems unlikely that a Mac Pro + 5k display (+ 1TB SSD and eGPU if the design falls that way) will cost less than an iMac Pro, so I'd expect it to be the thick end of $4000.
- double underline the "nobody knows" but the idea that the current iMac Pro was just a stop-gap until the MMMP comes out, and will never get updated, seems horribly plausible to me. Maybe it will get a price cut (if I'd been in the US some of the cut-price offers on the iMP would have had me tempted) - and maybe Hades will win the bid for the next Winter Olympics.
- It is very, very frustrating that the current iMac hasn't been updated to 8th gen processors (with extra cores) and newer GPUs - but its a solid machine that should thrash your 13" MBP and the flipside is that it hasn't been updated to non-user-upgradeable RAM, 'Bridge OS' errors and excitingly higher prices.
- The new Mac Mini offers good bangs per buck, but any upgrade from baseline is expensive and your probably gonna need an eGPU - and if you want a 5k display it will have to be one of the reassuringly expensive Apple/BlackMagic ones (I'd probably go with a cheaper option + a pair of 4k displays, or one 32"+ one).
You can get one without Xeon and without ECC memory and without NVMe SSD capable of 3,000 MB/sec, but then it's a different machine, not feature comparable.
OK, so the thread starter has now explicitly said that Windows isn't an option for them so this is a bit moot, but...
The thing with the iMac Pro vs. Windows isn't that Xeon/ECC PCs with workstation-class graphics are dramatically cheaper, but that Apple doesn't really offer anything between the i7 + mobile-class graphics in the iMac and the workstation-class iMac Pro. There are some jobs for which an i7/i9 mini-tower with a decent midrange PCIe GPU and
your choice of display(s) is the right tool.
Plus, although the 5k display makes the iMacs look like better value, that's largely because 5k displays have become an Apple-only thing due to the way Mac OS handles screen scaling - and hence have stayed expensive. Although the variable-DPI feature in Windows has its faults (i.e. apps that don't implement it properly) it does mostly work, and means that you don't need an ultra-expensive 5k screen just to get your icons and system text at a sensible size.
The new Mini does add some new options - but eGPUs and external SSD housings really are an expensive solution to an unnecessary problem caused by making the computer ridiculously tiny. Its a perfect solution to high density Mac Mini co-location though, so both people still doing that will be happy (though not so much that Apple have thrown OS X Server under the bus).
