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tmorel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 5, 2018
7
7
Hello,

I have an opportunity to buy a brand new iMac Pro (base model) bought in March 2018 for a business project and never used (package still sealed).

The price is 4000€ (instead of 5500€ in Apple Store) with invoice and in Europe warranty is 2 years long. So the iMac Pro will be under warranty until March 2020.

Do you think it is a good deal or do you think I should wait the iMac/iMac Pro refresh which should occurs in 2019.

Today I am only interested by the pro model because I want a silent machine and full SSD (current iMac 5K with 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM is quite the same price than iMac Pro). With 5K I loose silence, ECC RAM and 10 GB Ethernet (my house will be soon plug to 8 GB/s optic fiber thanks to French ISP Free).

Maybe all these advantages will be in the new iMac 5K 2019 but who knows...
 
I say go for it, as a new iMac is at least 4-6 months away. Even though a 2019 iMac will get a considerable CPU upgrade, you still have 8 cores and EEC RAM. Also the GPU (Vega 56) will most likely remain superior. The iMac Pro is an outstanding machine, and still a good buy even though it was released 12 months ago (CPU and GPU development has slowed down anyway these days). I doubt Apple putting the advanced cooling system from the iMac Pro in the regular iMac is likely, given Apple's intensified focus on incremental updates and increasing margins...

FWIW, it's almost guaranteed that the iMac Pro base model will still trump any new 2019 iMac in performance and features, except for its CPU being slightly slower in single threaded operations.
 
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Yes. Go for it.

While it is possible that Geekbench scores of regular iMac (if updated in 2019) will reach iMac Pro levels I think that the actual performance of the 2017iMac Pro in pro apps will still be higher. One reason is quad-channel memory interface which gives iMac Pro a nice boost in many professional apps.
 
I received my iMac Pro 2 days ago.

High Sierra was installed on it as it was an iMac Pro bought in March 2018 but never used (packaging still sealed) and it did not start very well...

I remembered that I had to enable boot from an external disk to install Mojave from a USB key. But the installation stuck in the middle. Finally I booted on recovery mode, re-installed High Sierra, upgraded to Mojave via the App Store.Once Mojave was installed, I erased the disk and installed Mojave from the recovery mode. Not an usual experience from what I experienced in the past with my 2002 iBook, 2007 Macbook Pro, 2008 & 2010 MacBook Air, 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13, 2015 MacBook Retina...

At that point I was a little bit disappointed but from that point I am very satisfied with my iMac Pro : very powerful, no fan noise, love the space grey color, the keyboard, the Magic Trackpad 2, the 5K screen, the speed of the SSD (my previous iMac had a ****** Fusion Drive). The SSD is very fast and will be welcome as I will have soon a 10 Gb/s internet connection (French ISP Free).

I ran Geekbench 4 :

Single Core : 5 290 for my device (where as the average for a 8 core is 5 016). My score is higher than the average for the 10 core (5 216)

Multi-Core : 33 701 for my device (where as the average for a 8 core is 30 524). My score is not very far from the average of the 10 core (35 125).

Best Mac I ever owned and with a 27% discount (4000€ instead of 5500€) I am very happy with my purchase.
 
I received my iMac Pro 2 days ago.

High Sierra was installed on it as it was an iMac Pro bought in March 2018 but never used (packaging still sealed) and it did not start very well...

I remembered that I had to enable boot from an external disk to install Mojave from a USB key. But the installation stuck in the middle. Finally I booted on recovery mode, re-installed High Sierra, upgraded to Mojave via the App Store.Once Mojave was installed, I erased the disk and installed Mojave from the recovery mode. Not an usual experience from what I experienced in the past with my 2002 iBook, 2007 Macbook Pro, 2008 & 2010 MacBook Air, 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 13, 2015 MacBook Retina...

At that point I was a little bit disappointed but from that point I am very satisfied with my iMac Pro : very powerful, no fan noise, love the space grey color, the keyboard, the Magic Trackpad 2, the 5K screen, the speed of the SSD (my previous iMac had a ****** Fusion Drive). The SSD is very fast and will be welcome as I will have soon a 10 Gb/s internet connection (French ISP Free).

I ran Geekbench 4 :

Single Core : 5 290 for my device (where as the average for a 8 core is 5 016). My score is higher than the average for the 10 core (5 216)

Multi-Core : 33 701 for my device (where as the average for a 8 core is 30 524). My score is not very far from the average of the 10 core (35 125).

Best Mac I ever owned and with a 27% discount (4000€ instead of 5500€) I am very happy with my purchase.

I bought one from the Apple Store 5 days ago new and it had High Sierra too. It was so sluggish with updates until Mojave was finally installed (which took a while). Now, it's amazing with multitasking and multi-threaded work.
 
I had an issue installing an initial High Sierra update too back then when I got it in april 2018.. Loading bar was stuck in the middle.. Eventually after running recovery mode, it went through.. Really weird bug, but never experienced it again. Did a fresh install of 10.14 to be sure too.

My favorite iMac too, in spite of software issues, macOS is sadly not what it used to be...
 
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