Succinctly (most likely):
- 28-29.5 in. display
- M1X with 12, 16 and 32 cores
- Chin and light coloured bezels
- No ”Pro” model
- Similar price structure as the current 27in.
Well, like most Max Tech videos, this comes over as plausible, reasoned speculation wrapped in clickbait. It all makes perfect sense and I wouldn't bet against any of it. The trouble with "reliable inside sources" is that anybody breaching NDAs or commercial confidentiality is, by definition, not reliable (we're not talking whistleblowing to protect the public and expose wrongdoing here...)
Personally, I was far more interested in the hint of a $3000 Mac (not iMac) Pro, which would end my interest in getting another iMac.
Makes sense - the iMac doesn't need to get any bigger overall and 28" would almost fit in the current size, with half-size bezels. 29.5 wound need to be bigger, but you'd only notice if you put it side-by-side with a 27".
- M1X with 12, 16 and 32 cores
I think that was
GPU cores. No talk of CPU cores, but presumably we're looking at at least 8 performance cores... No talk as to whether these are going to be on-die or on-package. As for "only one" processor choice ("M1X") - if that covers everything from 12 to 32 GPU cores and maybe several choices of CPU core permutations, that's getting into "what's in a name" territory. I can believe that the current 8-core vs. 7-core GPU option comes down to binning but 12 vs. 32 core is starting to sound like "deliberately disabling half the cores to create artificial scarcity" and will infuriate everybody but the shareholders...
- Chin and light coloured bezels
Well, apart from speculating that Apple could decide to split their range into consumer (up to iMac 24" with the iMac 24"/rumoured new Macbook Air "Hello Kitty"* design language) and pro ranges (14/16" MBP, 30" iMac, Mac Pro with "steampunk" design language) following the 24" iMac Design seems more likely than not.
...in that case, the chin is needed, because that's where the computer is, and with M1 tech the hottest thing in the computer will probably be the display.
If they're going to "scale" the thickness, maybe it'll be thick enough to fit in a proper ethernet connector and maybe even do away with the silly power brick (Sorry, folks, but in the last 25 years of using twisted-pair ethernet, everybody has solved the issue of running a patch cable to the desktop - having it plug into the power brick only sounds like a good idea if your ethernet wall socket is right by the power socket
and that power socket is within range of the fixed-length, proprietary, magnetic power cord. Otherwise it's going to be a right pain in the neck).
(* Meow....
)
White bezels are just wrong - they could reflect the colours of surrounding objects and lighting which could affect your perception of colours on the screen - but I won't call them a deal breaker until I make the effort of hanging a black/grey curtain behind my desk (don't hold your breath).
Aesthetically, my problem has always been not so much the white bezels but the combination of this with the coloured chin... but frankly the only colour option I'd choose would be the silver (maybe we can hope for a space grey option on the higher-end Macs), so who cares.
Irrelevant - a 16 CPU core, 32 GPU core M1X is going to be batting in the iMac Pro league whether or not it says "Pro" on the box. The distinguishing features of the iMac Pro were:
(a) Xeon vs. Core i - not relevant in an Apple Silicon world as long as the M1X delivers enough cores and I/O lanes (which everybody expect to be an improvement over the M1) to do the job.
(b) Improved cooling design - again, M1X should solve the cooling problem across the range.
(c) Higher end GPUs - over to Apple to show what the 32-core Apple Silicon GPU can do.
(d) ECC memory - about the only thing left that could distinguish an ASi iMac Pro from a regular ASi iMac. I suspect the intersection between customers who run long computing jobs that need the stability of ECC and the people who want that in a large-screen all-in-one is fairly small. Anyway, the "cost" of ECC support was partly an artificial Intel Xeon thing.
- Similar price structure as the current 27in.
Which, let's not forget, starts at $1800 and ends at an eye-watering $8600 - or, at least, around $4000 if you just max out the CPU, GPU and stick with a "modest" 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD config. There's a lot of expensive BTO options for CPU and GPU hiding behind the three headline prices.
Or is the video is suggesting that Apple will prune these down to (say) $1800, $2000 and $2300 models - covering all the available CPU/GPU options - with only extra RAM and storage as BTO options? Which would be roughly consistent with the 24" range.
