Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iMac Pro Works With Apple's New Pro Display XDR, But Limited to 5K Resolution
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If you include the cost of a 5K display, there's a $2,000 difference which is not insignificant even at those prices. I'd argue the Mac Pro (without display) really should start at the same price as the iMac Pro, however - and that's before we consider a lower-priced model with some compromises.
What makes you think that 5K panel costs $2000? 5K monitor from the Apple store costs $1300 and the panel itself costs under $500. It would be much cheaper since Apple can buy tons of those panels once.
Also, the price for Mac Pro 2019's basic version can not be that cheap. All components without the motherboard and the case costs $3100. The case might cost more than $500 since the copied version costs $250. The motherboard with 8 PCIe slots, 12 RAM slots, Thunderbolt 3 controllers, T2 security chip, MPX slots, and more.
But seriously, users can not replace any parts by themselves with iMac Pro and that's a huge problem. Also, the cooling performance isn't great compared to Mac Pro 2019.
Apple has been selling the own branded display for over 2 decades and what makes you think that suddenly a few quarters of weaker demand and sales is a good idea to concede the market for other company. The fact is sales will be far better If Apple updates the thunderbolt display to 5K in conjunction with the launch of cylindrical mac pro.
I'm not talking about the price difference for Apple, but the price difference for potential buyers (retail). The iMac Pro is essentially $2,000 cheaper so this new Mac Pro is not a direct replacement for it.
Mac Pro + 5K display is over $7,000. The 5K display isn't necessary for the iMac as it's already built-in.
You missed a lot of features that iMac Pro doesnt even have or lack of.
- The cooling system is obviously bad on iMac Pro. I wouldn't use that for serious works.
- Cant upgrade any parts on iMac Pro.
- Zero maintenance. You cant even clean dust and replace the thermal paste.
- The 5K monitor itself is poor and never changed since 2015. Who wanna buy that which lacks a true 10-bit color?
If people pay $5000 for that, then they are wasting their own money. Clearly, there are only few all in one workstation due to those issues.
$2000 cheaper doesnt mean better. A workstation is meant for professional works and yet iMac Pro didnt update for 2 years.
Except plenty of people are buying the iMac Pro because the modularity of the Mac Pro is too expensive to justify for their needs.
It's not a huge problem for all the people buying it. And it isn't great compared to the Mac Pro 2019, but then the maximum thermal load of an iMac Pro is significantly less than that of a Mac Pro so it doesn't need to be as robust to be effective.
Over 80% of all Macs sold are laptops and of the 20% that are desktops, over 80% of them come with a display already (as they are members of the iMac family). Certainly some portion of laptop and iMac users plug their machines into secondary monitors, but evidently not enough to justify continuing to make a separate monitor (and lest we forget, one of the main designed use cases for the Thunderbolt Display was to connect it to a portable since it acted as a port replicator for MacBook Pros and a dock for MacBook Airs).
Plenty of people do, so...
The CPU, RAM and SSDs are upgradeable (not easily, but they are upgradeable).
Show me a better display for $1800 (base price of the iMac 5K). Even the LG Ultrafine with the same panel is not as good since LG doesn't calibrate it to the level Apple does.
Intel didn't release an updated CPU nor AMD an updated GPU for two years. Now they both have and the iMac Pro should see an update by WWDC 2020.
And yet, there is iMac.
It does. It constantly reaches 100 degrees Celcius and that's really not acceptable for desktop.
Not many. Also, it sacrificed its performance for the cooling system.
That's a different story. If you cant open the panel by yourself, what's the point? SSD is NOT upgradable because of the T2 security chip. Do you really think most people can upgrade those parts by themselves? I think not. What about thermal paste which you need to replace it one day? Gosh.
There are tons of display which is better than iMac's display. Resolution is not the only factor to decide whether it's good or not. How come Eizo monitors with 2K costs $3000? BenQ is a great example. Hardware calibration, 14 bit LUT, true 10 bit color, monitor hood, matte display, panel quality, monitor setups, color space preset mode, and more for only $1100.
For GPU, Radeon VII, was available on early 2019. How come iMac Pro didnt refreshed when Mac Pro released? Logically doesnt make sense.
For CPU, don't expect a new-gen Xeon-W in 2020 because technically, they are the same CPU with lower prices. How come? They aren't able to make new CPUs with 14nm.
Overall, Apple is still selling iMac Pro for $5000 which is 2 years old and doesn't worth more than $3500 base on eBay and Facebook. Did they ever drop the price? Not yet all.
Which fits the needs for the vast majority of Apple desktop users. But there are those who need more cores, more graphics power or more memory than an iMac can offer. For them, there is iMac Pro and Mac Pro.
I still believe the iMac Pro was meant to be the 2013 Mac Pro's replacement before they had their "Come to Jesus" moment in April of 2017 and the Mac Pro seems to be aimed primarily at video and audio professionals working on massive projects. Software developers - those who have not gone MacBook Pro - seem to favor the iMac Pro as it has sufficient performance at a significantly lower entry price.
Based on thermal load testing I have seen, only when you have all eight cores maxed at 100% and have the GPU pegged for scores of minutes before they hit that temperature, which is still within the listed operating range of the chip per Intel's documents.
And frankly, if you're transcoding hours of 4K or 8K video (which does peg the CPUs), you're a core candidate for the Mac Pro, anyway.
Radeon VII was an expensive, short-lived interim solution until Navi was ready. AMD themselves EOL'd it within months of release and I do not believe they ever offered a version suitable for the iMac Pro. The W5700 just launched in the new MacBook Pro and is coming to the Mac Pro early next year, so I expect it to be the next GPU family for the iMac Pro.
The W-2200 series Xeon was launched last month and is the successor to the W-2100 series in the current iMac Pro. They are a fair bit cheaper than the W-2100 series (thanks, AMD), though I'm not expecting serious price reductions from Apple (would be nice, though) and they have higher clock speeds and faster memory speeds (as well as supporting more overall memory capacities) as well as WiFi-6 support (via new chipsets).
Evidently? Do you even get what you are trying to interpret? It got nothing to do with 80% or 20% product sold for justifying the continuation of making the thunderbolt display. They didn't update it during the launch of cylindrical mac pro and so it wasn't a surprise if the sales didn't increase.
You missed the point. When nearly all of Apple’s customers are buying computers with built in displays, few are left to buy an external.
Apple could update the thing every six months and it wouldn’t really make a difference. They last 10 or 15 years, no one replaces it just because a newer model is released.
That isn't the logical reason to stop updating a new iteration of thunderbolt display and assume every customer wouldn't consider purchasing a new external display. In fact, you are absolutely ridiculous since there are lots of people buy an iPhone have earpods as part of the package so you probably think Apple should stop producing beats headphones as well.
Again, you completely missed the point. When nearly all of your customers are buying computers with built in displays, who is left to buy an external? The fact the displays last for a decade or more only decreases demand even further.
If people lost them all the time like headphones or bought another one because they were relatively cheap and they liked the cool new color, at least that would increase demand. But neither of those apply to Thunderbolt monitors, correct?
The whole point is utterly related and what who left to buy an external?? Do you even know what you are thinking???? People will still buy an output display devices regardless if they bought a product with an integrated display that might not be good enough for their needs.
Sure, some will. How many? The answer is apparently “not enough”.
It’s no different than the iPhone SE, Xserve, Time Machine, 12” MacBook, AirPort or any other product Apple discontinues. Apple thinks there’s a market, and introduces a product they hope (enough) people will buy.
If a sufficient number of customers don’t want it to make it a viable product, Apple can’t force them to buy. You can argue that Apple didn’t give them the features they wanted, the price they wanted to pay, or that Apple merely didn’t know how to properly market it.
Any or all of those may be true, but for whatever reason the product failed in the marketplace, and was discontinued. It happens; Apple’s not perfect, right?
Don't bring up other product that barely related to the discussion and you just like to agree with every decision made by Apple even if it doesn't make any sense to the people and construct other useless point or irrelevant anecdotes by replying to people's posts in the thread.
Last edited:
If you don’t want people to reply to your posts, stop posting them in a public forum. If you post, expect replies. Some will agree with you, others won’t. That’s how public forums work.
Regarding the monitor you want Apple to build you: Apple is under no obligation to make you what you want. You’re not entitled to the product you want for the price you want to pay for it.
LG makes a 27” 5K Thunderbolt monitor that sells for $1,300. Apple sells it in their store. As far as I know, that’s the closest product available to what you want. Buy it or don’t, suit yourself. But you can’t buy what’s not for sale.
You might want to write to Tim Cook or Phil Schiller, maybe they will change their mind 🤞
You are flat out wrong about the people. Most people have no problem to let others reply to its post as long as it provides reasonably good opinion of the product instead of you trying to convince other people post through useless point or irrelevant anecdotes.
It got nothing to do with the product that people want or don't want which you are referring to and people can continue to have every right to complain whatever they think it makes sense to the public. So the people who bought it can and will like to share its thought on the future product might not be the same as you who seem to agree with every decision made by Apple even if it doesn't make any sense to the people.
Apple already made the 6K output display and it won't take a century to continue update another model and most people are not satisfy with color accuracy and cheap material that cost slightly more than the thunderbolt display made by LG and it doesn't work well with the mac. So you get some sense why people want to complaint against Apple rather than accepting your horrible rhetoric of 5000 posts in this forum.
You try to convince that Apple should make you your $1,000 27” 5K monitor, I explain why I think Apple isn’t doing what you want. You can disagree with my opinion, that’s fine. But I can disagree with yours, too. If you don’t wish to discuss these matters, don’t post them on a public forum. If you do post, some will agree with you. But don’t be surprised that some don’t.
Complaining might feel good, but it’s not particularly effective in getting you what you want. Instead of whining here to people who can’t help you achieve your goal, you might consider writing to Tim Cook or Phil Schiller. Or go to www.apple.com/feedback and make your suggestion there. That way, your voice can be heard by those in a position to do something about it.
Most people share what is right and complain if something is wrong NOT about feeling bad or anything! Your horrible rhetoric and it's inaccurate to think like you that Apple should make this or another model because they are plenty of who owns the product think it makes sense if it should continue to update the model instead of recommending the customer to purchase a substitute that doesn't work well and look inferior.
What was there to update? It used Thunderbolt 2 as a connector and that was what the 2013 Mac Pro had so you could plug six of them into the Mac Pro if you wanted (since it had six TB2 ports).
Moving the TBD to a 5K panel while TB2 was still the Law of the Land would have meant needing two TB2 cables to connect it which meant the only machine that could really have used it was the 2013 Mac Pro since it had enough spare ports (iMacs only had 2 and most Mac portables of the time had one or even none).
So realistically the 5K TBD could not exist until TB3 launched and was a significant portion of the Mac installed base. That would have been around 2018-2019 and by then Apple knew how well (or not) the LG 5K Ultrafine was selling and I'm guessing those sales were either so robust that there was little marketshare left or were so poor that launching an even more expensive model into the space would have been a financial failure. Either way, that meant an Apple 5K TBD would not have earned it's keep on the RoI scale.
You are wrong to think some products like output display will continue to sell the same quantity if it doesn't get an update and Apple usually doesn't use market share as a way to gauge the success of its product so you can stop bring up ROI that isn't related to the point. Eventually, most of the newer user have thunderbolt 2+3 wouldn't have compatibility issues if you think that's what you think about it.
Last edited by a moderator:
If market share didn't matter to Apple, we'd still have iPods, Airports, Time Machines and other items.
And again, you can't update a product if there are technical limitations preventing it. Thunderbolt 2 cannot send a 5K signal over a single cable, much less a 5K signal, power and USB data. It would have had to have two TB2 cables hanging off it and it only would have worked with the 2013 Mac Pro, the 2012+ iMac, the 2014 Mac Mini (maybe - the iGPU might not have been powerful enough to drive it) and the 2012+ MacBook Pro as they all had two TB2 ports. And the 5K TBD could not actually offer any TB ports (lack of bandwidth) so that meant you could have the display or Thunderbolt peripherals, but not both.
Once Thunderbolt 3 arrived, a 5K signal could be carried over a single cable. But that doesn't help with any Mac that is still on Thunderbolt 2 and it was not until 2017 that TB3 Macs were available (the late 2016 MacBook Pro). iMac did not gain USB3 until mid-2017, Mac Mini until mid-2018, MacBook Air until late 2018 and Mac Pro in late 2019. So the time for Apple to release a 5K display was not before WWDC 2018 at the earliest when you had the MBP, the iMac/iMac Pro and Mac Mini available with the MacBook Air waiting in the wings.
Last edited by a moderator: