“Do we need the Mac Pro at all? After all, isn’t the iMac the… well… pro desktop Mac?” Peter Cohen asks for iMore.
“Topping out with a a $2000 price tag before you get fancy, it’s easy to look at the 27-inch iMac and conclude that it is a suitable replacement for a Mac Pro, at least for most Mac users,” Cohen writes. “Inside the high-end 27-inch iMac model is a speedy quad-core Intel Core i5 processor clocked at 3.2 GHz, with a blazing fast 3.4 GHz i7 as a configure to order option; RAM configurable to 32 GB, up to 3 terabytes of storage space in a combination SSD/hard disk ‘Fusion Drive;’ a speedy Nvidia GeForce GTX 675MX graphics subsystem with 1TB of video memory. There aren’t a lot of compromises inside the iMac.”
Cohen writes, “But despite all those attributes, it’s clear that the iMac is designed to suit a fundamentally different audience than the Mac Pro. It’s certainly a machine suited to a fairly wide swath of professionals, but at its heart, the iMac remains a consumer-focused machine. Inside that slim case is a system architecture that’s designed around parts for laptops. Nvidia intended the GTX 675M graphics chip specifically for laptops, for example. Apple’s certainly blurred the line between consumer and professional workstations with the iMac, but it hasn’t erased it.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]