With the Apple Online Store page for iMac Pro now sporting a “while supplies last” tagline, Apple appears to be on the verge of discontinuing the iMac Pro. Only the base model with no custom configurations is currently available.
The iMac Pro launched in December 2017, and while there have been a few tweaks to the available configurations over the years, it has received no substantial hardware updates over its lifetime. As a result, we have been recommending for some time that users not purchase the iMac Pro as a high-end standard iMac currently offers a better value.
It’s unclear whether the iMac Pro is being discontinued entirely or if Apple is selling through existing stock in advance of an update, but the unusual note about dwindling supplies suggests that the machine may indeed be on the verge of complete discontinuation.
MacDailyNews Take: Considered by many to be a stopgap machine to assuage “pro” users while Apple scrambled to replace the Mac Pro after Apple’s lamentable “ignore the Mac professionals” period, for which the company eventually apologized, there is no longer a need for the iMac Pro. It’s emblematic of a mistake; a band-aid on a cancer. Sayonara.
Thankfully, Apple eventually woke up and we now have a real Mac Pro (can’t wait until models start dumping Intel for superior Apple Silicon)!
Apple would do well to consult Pro customers before ditching Intel processors in the Pro machines
Why?
You don’t think they do? Besides you?…
I don’t think Apple consults anyone, honestly. Most of the time they are right anyway. Once in a while they are dead wrong.
They are dead wrong!!
You are completely correct.
Would the Mac Mini Pro would be the replacement for the iMac pro? I’ve got my fingers crossed, but I’m afraid it’s going to be stupid-expensive again, and missing the point of what professionals want. (Just like the trashcan mac.).
My current iMac is 8 years old, and came with 8 gig of ram. I had to upgrade it to 24 gig within a year, so I can’t imagine getting a mac with a 16 gig limit.
I don’t have ANY informational hardware details regarding the next generation of M1 chips. However, I would be dumbfounded if the next hardware update to the M series chips were limited to 16 GB RAM limit.
You have the disease of thinking about RAm in Intel terms. It’s different for the M1, you don’t need as much RAM. Guess that needs to be rammed into your brain
People keep saying that. I’ll believe it when I see my apps not slow to a crawl. Apple ships stuff with inadequate ram and storage. It was true 8 years ago, and there is no reason to think that has suddenly changed.
How about ramming this somewhere. It is not a Pro machine without Windows compatibility.
Most of us who owned PowerMac Pros regarded them as pro machines. They did not have usable Windows emulation (although Parallels ran slowly). Windows was more prevalent then than now.
Did Apple miss the point of what professionals want with the latest Mac Pro? Or are you a “professional” who expects Apple to just break even so you can feel special with your pro-labeled toy? I’ll bet the latest M1 Mac Mini runs rings around your 8-year old iMac, even with 8GB of RAM, that or a newer iMac will be a much better fit for you. Expect the Mini Pro to cost at least twice as much as you think it should.
I expect it to cost twice as much as desktop PCs with superior capabilities and more adaptability. The interface and ease-of-use used to be worth it, but Macs have lost that and are no easier to use then PCs these days. My iMac is 8 years old because the new Macs don’t do anything new.
New iMac wish list:
•1. Hard drive slot. If a Sony playstation can have this, there is no excuse for a Mac not having one. External drives with tangles of wires are inelegant and add failure potential, and are also slower.
•2. HDMI input. You’ve got that wonderful 5k screen, why can’t we connect stuff to it? Cable TV, Playstation, live camcorder output, even a second computer. It’s a huge waste of space to need a TV right next to your iMac. (Also, a hardware button for switching inputs.)
•3. Nobody cares about making it a millimeter thinner! Add an inch just to remind yourself that it doesn’t matter, and maybe allow for some heat dissipation.
•4. Front accessible ports for SD cards, USB sticks, and headphones. RCA output for connecting to a stereo. People use this stuff, and having to turn your computer is another risk for damaging wires or unplugging things unexpectedly.
•5. Sliding lens cap for FaceTime camera. You told us once it was unhackable. It never will be.
•6. Real keyboard and mouse. (See Naga hex, lights not necessary. Working drivers are.)
•7. ATA connector. We know it is in there. Why can’t we use it? Anything Thunderbolt is just an ATA device in a box anyway, and USB slows things down relative to directly addressing the drive.
•
New System/finder wish list.
•8. Fix hopelessly neglected finder. It is a slow clumsy waste of space and the find command buries properly spelled results under hundreds of irrelevant “context” hits.
•9. Fix Disk spin-up bug. The whole computer locks up for 15 seconds while a hard drive spins up for no apparent reason. Concentration and work is disrupted.
•10. Mac compatibility. Stop breaking our software.
•11. Bring back Quicktime. I recently spend 2 hours stuck trying to figure out how to convert a Garageband song to MP3 because Garageband didn’t support any formats that were standard on Windows. One of the best things about the Mac USED TO BE that every program could input from and output to Quicktime, thus making a huge list of input/output formats available to any program.
•12. Stop truncating file names and other info – this makes makes such displays useless. Instead make type size/thickness adjustable to fit in available space. If this isn’t possible, at least avoid truncating unique parts of file names and remove the common parts instead.
At a minimum.
While we may completely disagree on politics, I could not agree more on your wish list. Well done…
For most practical purposes, the 2019 and 2020 iMacs were replacements for the iMac Pro. As such, I’d not expect a “Mac Mini Pro” for this purpose.
Likewise, to be asking $5000 for a 2017 iMac Pro while on clearance … and for a basically non-upgradable architecture … is at least $3,000 more than its really worth.
FWIW, the customer demographic that you’re probably alluding to is the gap between the iMac & Pro and many of these are the financially well-off serious amateur / hobbyist “ProSumer” whose use is personal, so they can’t write off the cost of a new Mac off of their business taxes.
To this end, their budget limit is as John Dvorak said two decades ago: “the system you really want always costs $5000.
What Apple doesn’t want to hear in the above is the word “system”, since that means desktop with the relevant workflow accoutrements (eg, external HDDs for Time Machine & a Promise R4/R6 for fast storage that’s off of the boot drive, etc).
“Mini Pro” nomenclature makes no sense. Apple has long needed a slim prosumer tower, and they should just call it a Mac. Thus a complete Mac desktop lineup would be:
Mac Mini
iMac
Mac (a half size tower for prosumers)
Mac Pro
The iMac Pro was only a half-assed bridge before Apple finally pulled their heads out of their asses and finally delivered the 2019 tower Mac worthy of the Pro name. It did offer dramatically better multicore performance than the plain jane iMacs, but the all in one form factor makes no sense for many professionals (and consumers, for that matter).
This is probably another casualty of Intel’s inability to substantially update their chips in the last few years.
I’m ready to switch all my Apple computers over to Apple Silicon. Those Intel chips are outdated and they run too hot. I’ll buy Apple Silicon computers with 32GB RAM if Apple offers it and that will be that. All my current computers only have 16GB of RAM and that’s plenty for the type of things I do on a computer. My computers usually use about 11GB maximum with plenty of RAM left over and that’s with the latest version of Big Sur installed. 32GB RAM would be a luxury for me, but if Apple offers it, I’ll get it just to be on the safe side. It’s usually safer to have more memory than less memory than you need. That should potentially lessen all the swap file problems, if such a problem actually exists.
I briefly had an iMac Pro and it wasn’t discernibly better than a 27” iMac for even prosumer applications. Perhaps if I’d been rendering 3D viideos it would have been useful, but even Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, it felt like a lazy system. Given that it was twice the price I was happy to eBay it and get a new iMac. That it was never seriously tweaked hardware wise made it even more sad
Try running Windows 10 under Parallels to do heavy duty Spice simulation and see if you need only a dab of memory!!
Since the M-series of chips, EVERY Mac is now a ‘truck’.
Apple clearly thinks it’s time to redefine (again) what hardware pro’s actually need.
Whether they are right or not, only time will tell.
Be ready for a rough ride and a lot of upset pros before the transition is done.
It will be at least a couple years before users find out what software is lost in the transition, which graphics or processing issues occur, and what hardware Apple will introduce and continue to support going forward.
Not to mention what mistakes Apple makes. They have OFTEN been prone to “thermal corners”. The fanless models, the Mac Cube, the Trashcan, and most of the iMac models have all been throttled because Apple chose fashion over performance. For any desktop Mac, that is simply unacceptable. It remains to be seen how Apple intends to cool a unified multicore CPU/GPU chip when it is challenged with a whole array of different user demands, which may be very different than the use cases that Apple designers have considered.
Finally, for as much scorn as the peanut gallery has thrown on other chipmakers, the fact is that Intel and AMD and NVIDIA still make the most POWERFUL and VERSATILE chips. If Apple intends to get serious about professional level computing or gaming, it will take more time. Apple hasn’t shown any leadership intent to even play in those markets, however, so let’s not declare the M chips to be professional yet.
FWIW, I will never buy any model of iMac again. Our hotel has only had trouble with them… they do not last. However, the Mini’s do quite well. The issue with the iMac is the screen in almost all cases. Having a separate monitor that you can use for anything that needs a monitor is a big plus. The iMac is a dead horse to me. It’s a sexy and cool dead horse, but… that’s all it has going for it as far as I am concerned.