“In early April of this year, Apple executives met with several specially selected tech journalists in efforts to reassure professional users that they still had the love,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “That came with the admission that the 2013 Mac Pro redesign was a misfire, though those words weren’t used. But it was promised that a new Mac Pro is under development, but it won’t arrive this year.”
“Also promised was a version of the iMac with pro options, which implies models with higher-end configurations,” Steinberg writes. “As it stands, the iMac is made up of basically notebook-grade components, largely to keep things from running too hot. But that doesn’t mean an iMac isn’t a powerful computer. When topped out with the fastest available CPU, it can beat the Mac Pro in canned benchmarks, except for apps that can exploit more than four cores.”
“Now it certainly hasn’t been verified, but a forum post at a tech site, AnandTech, claims to contain leaks about forthcoming Intel i9 CPUs, sporting up to 12 cores and 24 threads,” Steinberg writes. ” With the claim that the most powerful chips would have power requirements equivalent to comparable Xeons, I suspect there would be concerns over whether an iMac in its current form could handle such heavy-duty needs. I suppose it’s possible that Apple could redesign the iMac with a heftier power supply and more elaborate cooling to accommodate more powerful parts, all without seriously changing the basic form factor.”
Apple iMac (Mid-2011)MacDailyNews Take: We still have a few 27-inch iMacs (Mid 2011) running just fine here. That’s because, as usual, we maxed them out when we bought them (with 3.4GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB). The end result is that, yes, we spent more than your typical iMac buyer on these machines, but these babies just turned six years old and they still have plenty more life in them! ($3506.94 divided by 6 years = $584.49 per year; $3298.93 divided by 7 years = $500.99 per year; etcetera.)
TCO. Macintosh is unmatched.
That said, a new iMac from Apple with the right specs and we’ll be convinced it’s time to upgrade our older iMacs (and maybe even our newer ones) in mere seconds!
