Apple has finally announced, after a good few years of selling the infamous ‘black bin’ Mac Pro, that a new one is on the way.
Coming our way December 2017, it will be called the Apple iMac Pro.
Apple are touting this with the strapline ‘The Most Powerful Mac Ever” – and the specs seems to back that up. This 27-inch space grey workstation class computer will feature (for around $4999 / £3845)
- A retina 5K display
- A Xeon-Pro CPU with up to 18 cores(!)
- AMD’s Radeon Vega GPU
- Up to 128GB RAM
- Up to 4TB of SSD HD
- 4 x Thunderbolt 3 Ports which can support up to two 5K displays
- 1080p FaceTime Camera
- 10GB Ethernet
Having the Xeon V4 class CPU, this is definitely aimed at the Pro user – those interested in graphic modelling or video production work.
The $4999 price tag is for the ‘base’ model with an 8 core Xeon CPU (E5-2620 V4 @ 2.1GHz possibly, but Apple is yet to confirm), an 8GB Radeon Vega GPU, 32GB of 2666Mhz DDR4 ECC RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.
The maxed-out version can have an 18 core Xeon Pro CPU, 16GB Radeon Vega GPU, 128GB 2666Mhz DDR4 ECC RAM and a 4TB SSD HD. Looking at this maxed-out spec, you can expect to spend…wait for it! Around $17k!!
This will put this version of the new iMac Pro out of the reach of the average user, but it’s enough to turn even the most modest geek into a quivering wreck.
To sum up, Fully-equipped, the machine Apple will be selling will unquestionably be very expensive — at least for a traditional desktop. But if you consider this to be a professional production workstation, it’s not overly expensive. But if you’re a film company, and it’s time to make another big movie, a $17k workstation (or 4!) is not overly expensive.
EDIT: Apple has a page up on their website for the new iMac Pro, but don’t expect any extra information until the big reveal!