RE: My Thoughts on the New Apple iMac Pro
IMO this iMac is a stop gap to whatever future Mac Pro replacement they're likely cooking up.
Based on the meeting Craig Federighi and Phil Schiller had with prominent mac journalists the other month, they knew fairly early on that the 2013 Mac Pro was fatally flawed. Due to executive incompetence, apathy, or naiveté, they thought they could serve the pro market (specifically: video and sound editing, motion graphics, 3d animation, and scientific data) with iMacs and or MacBook Pros whose performance would be bolstered by a robust 3rd party market for Thunderbolt devices.
This 3rd party market for Thunderbolt devices never materialized, and as a result the aforementioned pro market has largely had to shift to PCs to stay relevant/productive, especially so with the explosion of 4k video content and the high cost it puts on computing resources.
The abysmal response to the 2016 MacBook Pro was the straw that broke the camel's back. Apple knew then that if they didn't act quickly they would lose the high end pro market for the foreseeable future.
This iMac Pro, then, is not the intended final offering, in my opinion, but rather a stop gap until they can create a proper Mac Pro that is modular and expandable enough to suit the needs of the pro market. As soon as I heard 10Gb ethernet, I knew they were trying to throw out just enough bones for studios and pro users to stomach buying an iMac Pro (because they've likely been using and buying up used 2009-2012 mac pros for some time and needed more/newer machines).
The exorbitant amount of cores offered iMac Pro caters directly to the editing/motion graphics/3d/data computation industries, as those types of processing demands are highly parallelizable. However, as others including OP have noted, expandability and upgradability (or even basic customization) is a huge concern with these machines.
That is why I believe Apple is ultimately just trying to buy time. They know this isn't the ideal machine for Pros, but they had to do something or risk losing (more) of them forever.
I'm excited that Apple appears to be caring about pro users again, now how about updating the Mac Mini!?!?
Great points! I think you may be right. A new Mac Mini would be cool too - I was wanting to get one as a music server.
There are many applications for the Mac Mini, media serving being one of them. The low profile and relatively low power use is interesting for a lot of things, although I do suspect the rise of small microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi might be affecting the market.