My Thoughts on the New Apple iMac Pro
Introduction
As many of you may already know, I'm a Mac nut and Steve Jobs is one of my personal heroes.
Although I use regular Windows PCs too, when it comes to my pro apps (especially for photo editing) I prefer Mac OS over Windows.
Unfortunately in the last five to ten years it has seemed that Apple has been moving away from serving pro users.
Scaling Back on the Pro Teams
Five or six years ago they started gutting the pro app development teams.
Then they started messing around with the apps themselves - simplifying them and make major changes to the long-familiar UIs that people had gotten used to for their workflows.
Aperture was completely discontinued and replaced with a unified Photos app. Many of my friends decried what they were doing with Final Cut and Logic Pro.
To add to this they stopped updating the Mac Pro hardware itself.
The 2013 Mac Pro
A few years ago it appeared they threw us a bone by releasing the new shiny "bin" shaped Mac Pro - sadly this had some major problems - not least of which was the custom design that meant it has not been updated in 3 years.
So it seems like they were only interested in us again for a very short time. When the Mac Pro didn't get the reception they expected they just seemed to give up on it and the hardware is now antiquated in computer terms.
-Not really what you want for your flagship computer.
WWDC 2017 - iMac Pro announcement
Then last week at the WWDC Apple announced an intriguing new product - the iMac Pro.
I must admit as a bit of a mac fanboy I went slightly crazy when I saw this as did some of my friends!
In their typical fashion Apple have also created an awesome website with some amazing tech photography that will have even the most minor technophile drooling.
It all looks very shiny and very pretty but I have had a few days to think about this and get my thoughts in order though and let the excitement die down.
So the question is, what does the iMac Pro represent?
Is Apple back in the Pro game? Is it giving us what we asked for?
To begin let's examine the specs:
Summary of the Headline Features
These are the main specs taken from the Apple website:
- 8-18 Intel Xeon Cores (4.5 GHz Turbo Boost, up to 42MB Cache).
- AMD Radeon Pro Vega Graphics with 8 or 16 GB HBM2 Memory (400 GB/s bandwidth, 11 teraflops single precision).
- Up to 128 GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC RAM.
- Up to 4TB SSD with 3GB/s throughput (NVMe drives?)
- 4 x Thunderbolt 3 ports, 10Gb Ethernet ports.
- 27 inch "Retina" 5K display, P3 Colour Gamut (1bn colours), 500 nits brightness (improved and 43% brighter than before).
- New stereo speaker system.
- Specialised "black" accessories - (keyboard has number pad!), not available separately.
- December release.
- Price $5-16K (according to TWICH podcast).
My Thoughts
These specs certainly look fantastic.
The switch to Xeon cores and ECC memory makes sense for many pro users - even though it does come with a massive price hike.
Due to the Xeon being a niche product you don't get the same economies of scale on pricing.
I was listening to a podcast last week and they were discussing how they tried to spec up an identical (albeit tower) Xeon PC as the entry level iMac Pro and were only able to shave about $300 off the price.
This suggests that Apple are pricing this very competitively and are not applying their usual healthy markup.
$5K may sound a lot for an 8 core machine but remember you are paying Xeon prices - the motherboards alone can cost $700. Then all the components CPU, ECC memory etc are also top line with top line prices.
Thunderbolt 3 and 10GB ethernet are also still very expensive.
Don't forget that gorgeous 5K display either - that alone will cost about $1200 if you source something similar yourself!
Finally add the fact that you have AMD's next generation Vega architecture and the Pro version of that - both factors which carry premium price tags.
Pro GPU cards start at the top end of the consumer price range (around $700) and can rise up to thousands of dollars each.
So to sum up we are getting a PC with the absolute best and hence most expensive parts you can buy. Not only that but it is put together in one of the most beautiful and sleek all-in-one chassis that is on the market. -No ugly towers here.
So it sounds like the perfect machine then right? An instant buy?
Well not quite - I have some reservations:
My Concerns - Cooling and Expansion
Some years back my previous Mac Pro which had served me for many years died.
I needed a new computer and this was before the "new" compact Mac Pro had actually become available. It had been announced but you could only pre-order it and I didn't have time to wait.
I needed a computer fast so as a kind of stop-gap measure I bought one of their top end fully specced (2013) iMacs.
It is certainly a great computer but it has some problems.
The Heat Issue
One of the biggest problems is that it actually has a tendency to overheat very easily.
When this happens it is incredibly noisy. I suspect the fastest (for the time) Core i7 CPU and the top spec GPU they were providing just aren't designed for such a compact chassis.
The whole system is incapable of dissipating all the heat that is generated under load efficiently.
Now multiply that amount of heat several times by adding up to 18 cores and a Pro GPU and I think there is a legitimate question as to how well the iMac Pro will perform at load.
It is great having those 18 cores but what is the point if they can't operate at full speed and keep getting throttled?
Apple have created a new ventilation system for this computer but the simple fact is that you can't do magic and overcome the laws of physics.
There is a limit to how big those compact fans can be and how much air they will be able to shift.
So it is quite possible that this computer will run very hot and have a tendency to be quite noisy.
We will have to wait until we get actual reviews of the hardware but I would be surprised if this machine can perform as well as a similar specced PC in a conventional tower case.
The Expansion and Repair Issue
The other big problem I have run into with the iMac is the problem with repairing minor failures.
I have had two internal hard-drive failures with it and unlike my old Mac Pro, I could not just take the internal hard drive out and replace it.
Each time I had to send my computer away to Apple for repair and the turn around time from failure to receiving my fixed machine was up to 2 weeks.
That is an annoyance for me but could be catastrophic for a pro user who uses their computer for work.
I think this problem in particular will be a big deal breaker for most Pro users. When a simple hard drive failure can mean you lose your computer for a week or more it is just too great a risk to take.
Expanding the storage has also been a problem - you can use external hard drives but obviously these are not as fast as internal drives and the options are more limited.
Thunderbolt drives can be very fast but they are niche products, with limited options and can cost multiple times what you would pay for an internal hard drive.
Similarly I have not been able to upgrade the GPU which is now several generations out of date.
The increased cost and reduced flexibility when it comes to expansion options is an increased headache that most pro users don't want.
It was one of the main reasons there wasn't great adoption of the 2013 Mac Pro. It was simply not practical.
Conclusion
The iMac Pro certainly looks beautiful but it remains to be seen how well it will be able to function given the potential physical constraints that the form factor creates.
Even if it performs to its full potential and doesn't sound like a 747 taking off when under load I think its lack of expandability/repair is going to rule it out for most pro users.
I understand that Pro users are a niche in the market and probably not a priority for Apple.
With the iMac Pro, Apple seems to have created a niche within that niche and I doubt they will sell very many.
I think it will appeal most to Apple fanboys who absolutely want the fastest Mac that they can get but without an ugly tower chassis. It could be a small volume halo product to demonstrate that Apple are still trying to innovate and surprise people.
That may even be what Apple intended as from what I have heard they are still working on a "proper" Mac Pro product.
I look forward to seeing the first proper reviews though. It is certainly an interesting product and I can't say for certain that I won't be taken over by FOMO and buy one when it gets released.
It certainly looks very pretty with all those black accessories. Sadly there is no cure for being a fanboy!
Thank you for reading
As a lifelong PC user, the repair issue that you mentioned is a huge one for me.
If I were to dip my toe into Mac-land, I'd try going the hackintosh route. For desktops, I can't see any good reasons for paying Apple's markup on the hardware.
I've heard that hackintosh is pretty big in the music industry. Mostly because Apple has phased out a few things that a lot of the production equipment still requires. Don't know how true that is or how widespread it is. .
Yeah, I really feel you there...I am a mac user, but I prettymuch just buy 2013 MBP's at the moment, for all my family too. Because they're still modular, you can still replace drives, upgrade ram, etc. I haven't been excited about eventually having to move to a machine that I can't fix =(
That makes a lot of sense. One of the main uses for me for the Mac was for music making as I prefered Logic Pro to the alternatives. That is also something that my friends use it for and some of them are still holding on to the old Mac Pros because of the various internal cards that they still use. I think for many of them a Hackintosh would require too much work.
Really? Like the PCMCIA standard? I belive I had that in my first 2009 MBP.
I think you are mistaken. That has been obsolete for over a decade.
Hmm I can't seem to find it on the internet but it does have little door. I gave it to my brother. It's a slot for cards, not SD card but for something like PCMCIA, I forgot the actual name. 2017-2009 = 8 years so what could it be?
I think it is an express card slot.
Yes! That is it! Thanks for reminding me, I could not remember the name. But I do remember about Echo having cards for that slot. I used to use BeOS you see and there were drivers for those cards. So we both make music, nice to hear! I just have an MBA and a cheap USB soundcard but still it is possible to make good tunes. For me it is all about the inspiration, take Pianoteq for example, amazing how alive this software can sound. And Strum by AAS.. really fun to play.
Your insights in to this are similar to my own @thecryptofiend. I'm also an unapologetic Apple fanboy, and I did what fanboy's do when this was announced during WWDC. For the most part, this is a stop-gap attempt to not be abandoned my the pro market. Phil Schiller had that apology meeting with 5 tech journalists to admit that they made a bad call with the trash can Mac Pro. I think this is meant to hold pro users over until the next Mac Pro is announced some time in 2018. For me, though, I've been at about 90% of my usual work flow on my iPad Pro. With the upcoming iOS 11 features and Affinity Photo [...which I'm reviewing now for a Steemit post], I think that last 10% will be filled. Nothing would make me happier than being able to bring an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to the coffee shop and get ALL of my work done.
Interesting. I haven't tried the Ipad Pro yet. I think I will look into it. I'm assuming for more advanced retouching - frequency separation and so on you still need to use a laptop or desktop?
@thecryptofiend I do pretty involved editing and retouching in Photoshop on the desktop. The Adobe CC apps on iOS are awful [...I'm convinced they're intentionally withheld because the company is afraid they'll cannibalize their desktop apps of they make them TOO good]. In the first few days of testing, I can do everything on Affinity Photo for iPad, just with a step or two more. You really should look in to an iPad Pro. I love mine. Actually, selling my previous model on CraigsList this week and buying the new model next Friday when it's in the stores.
I have not come across Affinity Photo - I will need to have look.
Great review. I used to be an apple fanatic, Iphone, Ipad, Imac, Ipod, Macbook. Two years ago I sold everything, I became frustrated from all the updates, which you couldn't downgrade again. I now like Huawei, strange right? In my opinion a middle way between android and ios. Perfect in use. But somewhere, deep inside me, I must admit: apple is making such wonderful designs!! And your post makes me think again.. Maybe, one day, I'll change everything back...... lol.
Yes those updates can be very irritating especially when you have to close everything and restart. It is not as bad as Windows but seems to be getting there. I did try Android phones for a while but it was tricky because everything else is Apple for me and they make it hard to go outside the ecosystem!
Yes the desire for those pretty things can be strong!
Yes, its like an addiction. Actually, I forget to mention I bought a telephone just for work -> Iphone again. But its for work.. lol.
:)
@thecryotofiend, I love the way you analyze things. You are the reason I'm not on Polionex, and I'm glad I'm not. Been enjoying bittrex.
Anyways, I never thought of having mac because I don't have enough money for it.
Good update.
Thank you that is very kind. Maybe you don't have the money now but in the future you may do;)
@thecryptofiend, thanks very much for the good wishes. I hope I'll have more money in the future.
I appreciate your quality contents here.
Unfortunately in the last five to ten years it has seemed that Apple has been moving away from serving pro users.
I thought it was a huge bummer when they removed the iMac 27" Retinas support for being usable as a separate monitor, and turned it into just a restricted all-in-one. It's been hard to find a good value proposition since then for the larger displays at resolutions like 5K.
Also, I don't think Apple is too keen on supporting expansion and repair in general. I think they are happy with users accepting aesthetics over durability and running pretty regular replacement.
Then again, maybe I'm just saying that because Universal Studios security broke my girlfriend's iPhone.
That is crazy.
True but that was why the old tower Mac Pros were so good.
What happened?
Agreed on the old Mac Pros.
They have massive security to get into Universal Studios now. It's not that far off airport TSA if you remove the body scanner - full pat-down and everything. They force you to empty all your personal objects and put them in crappy little plastic bins sized for something like paper clips. Then they slide things down a table to you after you go through metal detectors and, guess what, they take no responsibility for when they rocket them straight off the table and your (obnoxiously fragile) phone explodes from its first-ever glancing blow from 2 feet, 4 inches up.
Darn things are miraculously thin and light, though!
OK yes I have experienced the "pleasure" of the TSA. I generally get enhanced attention because I look like a terrorist or criminal lol but to be honest it is horrible for everyone. I wonder how much money the airlines lose because people avoid travelling that way.
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.
Great post, and I can only speak from the experience of owning numerous iterations of the iPad, and iPhone. Two products that in their time represented a paradigm shift in their own areas, the iPhone took cell phones and personal music players and put them together in a package that made me drool when looking at them, opening my first iPod box felt like being at my own gala opening.
The iPad , in my opinion, was the pinnacle of tablet tech, but only for a while. Don’t get me wrong I have an iPad air 2 and it’s awesome, but both products have been suffering from Incrementalism for a long time, I think apple is a company that’s kinda resting on the laurels of a great line of products but not pushing and driving to keep on innovating and blowing the opposition out of the water.
What epitomises that for me is what Steve Jobs said about stencils and iPad, if you have a stencil then you have lost already, or words to that effect.
I hope I am wrong, but that crazy drive to be innovative and the first to do stuff, or take existing tech and make it breath taking seems to be slightly off course. As much as I love my iPad it still seems at this stage it should be something else so much better…
Great response. I think I feel the same way in many respects. The revolutionary trend setting nature seems to have gone. They still have great design but they no longer seem to lead and I can't help but think that it is because Jobs is gone. That "X" factor is missing and that was the genius of the man I think.
That's exactly what i think, Jobs drove them to surpass themselves and i think he would be shocked by this lazy, oh lets give them a slightly faster CPU mind set. Its annoying that the iPad 4 had the best battery i have ever seen and the iPad air 2 seems to die after watching a Youtube video, okay so that's more to do with battery technology being rooted in the 80s, how we havent improved that i don't know.
But certainly the dynamism and the futuristic feel has gone from Apple, i remember the first time using an iPad and thought i was on the bridge if the enterprise, it seems there are no tech imagineers and leaders out there and everyone is chasing everyone elses tails, round and round and ever getting out to something that could be amazing again and that's what apple tech was at the beginning.
Yes. I agree I think battery technology is really holding us back. Also agree the future feel has gone, not sure where they can really go but I think Jobs would have known.
We lost a genius when he passed. A real shame.
Yes.
wow.New apple imac pro is amazing. Thanks a lot.
I almost went full fanboy too when they started announcing the iMac Pro. I was holding my breath for them to announce that it has a touch screen that could be used with a pencil/drawing stylus. This would have been a perfect illustration computer/device all in one that would have killed the Surface Studio in its tracks. Would have been a fun gift for my artistic children :)
Definitely love the specs/raw power this machine has, oh and the space grey too!
Thanks - is it space grey? I keep calling it black. I prefer it to the silver!
I could have sworn that he called it space grey in the keynote. I'll check :)
I think it sounds right because I have heard other people say it too. I still haven't watched the full video I just forwarded to the bits about the iMac and could easily have missed when they said.
Really detailed article. Im an apple fun but am stucknto the old versions
Thank you. Well I have old models myself.