“I’ve been inspired to make a few predictions after spending the morning looking at some of the powerful applications you can now run on a midrange iMac Pro,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld. “”
“Apple sees the way the industry is going. It’s decision last year to recommit to the pro Mac market followed years of criticism, but now it has made that declaration, it seems deadly serious in its determination to ensure that if PCs are going to be trucks, then it wants some of the most powerful trucks on the road to be Macs,” Evans writes. “The powerful iMac Pro represents the company’s first physical articulation of its promise, and already it has so much to offer to so many industries.”
Evans writes, “If we see the iMac Pro as Apple’s desiderata promise of what’s to come, the Mac Pro (when it finally does appear) will become the de rigeur enterprise workstation, equipped with the kind of chops it takes to deliver on the digital transformation projects the world’s biggest businesses are now engaged upon.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iMac Pro. For when you absolutely, positively have to sequence the human genome before morning coffee.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s powerful new iMac Pro is actually cheaper than the original Mac – February 7, 2018
Aerospace engineer Dr. Craig Hunter reviews Apple’s 18-core iMac Pro: A bargain at $11,199 – February 3, 2018
Apple begins shipping 18-core iMac Pro units to customers – January 31, 2018
Apple’s monstrously potent iMac Pro is for these professional computer users – December 14, 2017
iMac Pro is overkill for most Enterprise tasks, certainly for a standard desktop solution, but it’s nice to have the option of that vs a regular iMac. As it will having a Mac Pro worth buying, assuming they make one up to snuff (and not just a dismissive sniff) this year – hopefully available and shipping WAY before Dec. 31, 2018. The thing is for Apple they would have had been moving heaven and earth since last April to do that and they don’t normally do that for non-iPhone devices.
Yes, the snobbish pecking order at Apple puts iPhone on the pinnacle of the rigid hierarchy, with Pipeline its biggest promoter and, as CEO, also its biggest influencer.
It’s less snobbishness than sound business sense, according to Tim Cook. iPhone is Apple’s best-selling computer, and as such deserves the attention paid to it by financial analysts and the advertising Apple spends on it. Apple has always been a life-style company. Originally the Apple II and Macintosh computers embraced that message, but more recently computing has gone mobile: in the pocket and on the wrist. Across the world, more data are being exchanged through mobile devices than through static desktop units. Apple is hardly blind to this trend; they spurred it. If traditionalist desktop fans like you and I feel dejected by this development, more’s the pity. Ya can’t stop progress.
Just because you don’t need a Mac Pro for your work doesn’t mean other people in other occupations wouldn’t.
I DO need a Mac Pro. An iMac Pro is simply not good enough for many pro situations long term and for other reasons. Assuming costs won’t be that much different who wouldn’t want the advantages of an upgradable professional Mac machine? The iMac Pro is cool but doesn’t fit my paradigm.
The iMac Pro is a niche product Apple created for a non existent niche. This Mac is far too expensive for a base model and is not meant for user preformed upgrade.
Apple has created what they believe will be a cash cow for them. A machine that the user will have to go to Apple to upgrade where Apple will charge up to 3 times the cost for memory and drives.
Since they’re selling them as fast as they can make them, I think you’re incorrect. My company recently purchased 6, and I got one for the home office. It’s the quiet performance that’s truly impressive, it makes virtually no sound. And, up front cost aside, we’ll keep these for at least 5 years like the Mac Pro’s they replaced (which were also around the same price 6 years ago. It’s an awesome product and exactly what we needed. Are there people who need something else? Sure. And they’ll be buying a new Mac Pro when it comes out, that’s why options exist.
Please, tell us how many iMac Pro starting at $5,000 is Apple selling compared to a high end $1,500 iMac?
WOW, your company purchased 6 iMac Pro’s. As I said, niche market.
That price is nothing! I remember when low power no color no cd not enough RAM and hard drive space had to buy scanners external hard drive‘s external cd players and still wait forever for Photoshop to open up.
I paid $2700 for a Macintosh SE 2/20
Another 950 bucks for a 17 inch black-and-white monitor. And external hard drive for $500 bumped up the ram to 4 MB. You get the idea. Computers today with that kind of power are a bargain compared to what we grew up with. No ethernet built in. Networking was a joke back then. Modems slow. Printers have better scanners then we used to buy separately. Oh and don’t forget we had to buy back up tapes slide scanners the speakers sucked no built-in FaceTime cameras. Color monitors and post script printers were another arm and leg. I think we’re getting a lot for our money today.
Right! Our first external HD cost $1,450…a whopping 1 GB!
Very true, prices were way higher, back in the day. Storage in particular was astronomical. Kids today are spoilt rotten.
I don’t need the new Mac Pro, but it is nice to know that there is a real market out there for something besides entertainment delivery devices.
It’s called a COMPUTER…… imagine that.
The fact that entertainment device kiddies don’t recognize that is …….not surprising, and also irrelevant.
And its limited capacity to upgrade really make a mockery of the term “Pro”.
Pshaw, “Pro” is just a marketing slogan, and always has been, for every manufacturer. Real pros ignore marketing hype (or try to) and just focus on the performance specs. With this model, the specs are righteous.. Upgradeability is not a spec. It’s a cost benefit for individuals, or for companies with limited budgets. All the large companies I consulted for had programs that discouraged upgrades in favour of wholesale replacement.. granted, most of them benefited from contracts with Dell and similar die-stampers, not with Apple. It’s the smaller shops that want to squeeze more life from their hardware investment by upgrading internal components. Apple has signalled to these folks (and has, all along, really) that they should regard a computer as a common appliance. Does anyone upgrade their refrigerator or automobile? No, they trade it in for a newer model.
You’re exactly correct. But try explaining this to people and they don’t understand it, it is actually cheaper to purchase these things every several years completely built than upgrading parts along the way. Like I said above, these replaced Mac Pro’s, and they’ll last a very long time. The person who changed the subject to “$1,500 iMacs” is either deliberately deflecting or doesn’t understand how the workstation market works.
Apple designed a product for a nonexistent need? Well, isn’t that stupid. You must have been chief engineer in this project.
To boldly go….
Or to go were angels fear to tread.
Maybe when compared to some home-built Windows PC gaming machine the iMac Pro is overpriced but I still think it’s a fair value even when bought with AppleCare. I don’t have the skills or patience to be troubleshooting some custom-built desktop computer if something goes wrong. I just want my main home desktop to run 24/7, 365 trouble-free even if Apple isn’t able to wring 120% processing power out of it. I no longer want to be looking into a computer and swapping parts. I just want it to run non-stop.
It’s just my personal opinion even if I’m in the minority. My Macs have never let me down and always lasted many, many useful years.
I am proud of Apple for at least offering a new Xeon machine with a good number of BTO options. If one of those configurations lines up with your use case and you don’t need future expansion, then the iMac Pro is not overpriced. It’s pointless to try to guess who needs it an who doesn’t. Buying computer hardware is always a guessing game of how much power you will need for the next several years.
This is Apple’s weakness. Apple continues to make the deliberate decision to hamstring the long term value of its products by sealing them. Without internal expansion or cost effective repair, all-in-ones do fall obsolete when the competition raises the bar on any aspect of the hardware. Apple continues to think that macOS is the magic that justifies the price. They are wrong, as the market share shows. OS wars are over, Apple lost that battle — companies make their purchase decisions based on hardware and application capability and performance, not the OS.
Apple proves again that they have zero intention to allow the user to keep pace on GPU and CPU technology gains in the future. Apple expects you to fall behind in real performance terms until 2023 or so when the next iMac version is launched. Pretty stupid strategy for a desktop product competing in what is still a fast moving industry.
I am waiting for a true Mac Pro tower that allows for internal expansion and an array of displays of my choosing. YMMV.
I think the external GPU support sort of mitigates that issue with these particular machines. Since they two independent thunderbolt controllers, you can have an external GPU enclosure that uses both and wrings out 80gbps/10GBs of throughput. That’s the same as an internal PCI-E slot, so I don’t think people will be left wanting several years down the road, that’s the determination that we made. Now, like I said before, are there people who need something different? Sure, and they’ll wait for the new Mac Pro, because they’ve probably maxed out their 2012’s at this point with components. that’s why options exist, and these products are on a much longer cycle than regular consumer gear.
Re the cost, remember that some users will save hundreds of dollars with an iMac Pro because they won’t need to buy a stack of messy, awkward, invariably unreliable adapters.
iMac Pro might be ready for the enterprise, but is the enterprise ready for a machine whose maker has demonstrated a very unreliable record around updating similarly specced machines and maintaining first-party enterprise-grade management features?
HP just announced that it stepped up to the plate to support and manage Apple products but it was not clear if it’s also prepared to do specifically what you desire.
What enterprise? More like for R&D and high level experimental stuff, not mainstream corporate businesses. Microsoft/Intel/AMD locked that market up years ago.