“No one was allowed to touch the single iMac Pro that Apple had in its hands-on area following the WWDC keynote today,” Andrew Cunningham writes for Ars Technica. “Big and dark and imposing, the computer is the first step toward making good on Apple’s promises to recommit to its desktop users. It’s not a new Mac Pro (a computer that’s still coming, I’ve been assured), but it is a more concrete commitment to high-end desktops than the (nice, but straightforward) standard iMac refresh we got Tuesday.”
“Intriguing as it is, the iMac Pro is also an odd machine, one that’s unlike pretty much any other computer that exists,” Cunningham writes. “It’s an ultra high-end workstation that includes anywhere from eight to 18 CPU cores (which almost certainly means that it’s using Intel’s new X299 platform and its accompanying Skylake-X processors) and a GPU based on an architecture that is expected to be as big a leap forward for AMD as Pascal was for Nvidia. At the same time, it comes in the form of an all-in-one PC, and one that doesn’t appear to have any user-accessible parts to boot (the RAM hatch present on regular 27-inch iMacs isn’t apparent here, and Apple’s spec sheet doesn’t mention user-accessible memory).”
“Apple ought to be able to update the iMac Pro on a regular cadence if it wants. And an iMac Pro that gets updated regularly can at least partially deflect concerns about its hardware getting stale,” Cunningham writes. “Even if you need to replace the whole thing more frequently, it’s a little more justifiable if you actually have a faster version of the same computer you can upgrade to.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The iMac Pro’s target market, however slim it may be, will flock to this machine.
For all practical purposes, the distance from Bondi Blue to Space Gray is infinite.
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