“I’ve spent the last week with Apple’s new iMac Pro, and in most ways it’s just a faster Mac. It’s the first pro Mac desktop in over three years and the fastest Mac yet made, granted, but still entirely familiar,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld. “And yet in many ways—some noticeable, some entirely invisible—this new Mac is completely different from all past Mac models.”
“The iMac Pro may be an outlier today, but in the future we’ll probably look back on it as the start of a new era for the Mac, all because of the Apple-built T2 chip it carries inside,” Snell writes. “The T2 processor isn’t doing the heavy lifting in the iMac Pro — that’s the Intel Xeon processor with between 8 and 14 processor cores. The T2 is the brain behind that brain, running the subsystems of the iMac Pro from a single piece of Apple-built silicon.”
“The result,” Snell writes, “is a simplified internal design that doesn’t require multiple components from multiple manufacturers… The disk controller is built into the T2 itself. This gives the T2 complete control over internal storage on the iMac Pro. This has some major benefits in terms of speed and security. Every bit of data stored on an iMac Pro’s SSD is encrypted on the fly by the T2… All this encryption happens invisibly, so the SSDs in the iMac Pro still operate at full speed—approximately 3GB per second.”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: With the advent of the T2-equipped iMac Pro, Apple is smartly taking ownership of the primary technologies, as Steve Jobs intended.
I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. — Steve Jobs, October 12, 2004