I think the iMac Pro was originally supposed to replace the Mac Pro after the trash can proved insufficient. Eventually Apple realized that it wasn't expandable enough to satisfy some of their most high-end users so they made the current Mac Pro. Now that that exists, the iMac Pro is squeezed by the tower Mac Pro and normal iMacs—so it makes sense to drop the iMac Pro as the Arm iMacs near production.
"As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do."
The Mac Pro and XDR display were machines that took a long time to build thus the iMac Pro (announced 6 months after that article) was created to fill the gap for two years. I don't think the iMac Pro was ever supposed to replace the Mac Pro, but only a biography of Schiller might clarify what really happened.
To be fair I suspect Apple was aware of the problem long before they made the announcement to that effect.
I remember at the time people were saying how un-Apple-like it was to admit that there was an issue at all. I think it was because at that point they figured the iMac Pro was still six months out and they felt they had to at least do *something* to show them that they still cared about pro users, though in truth I think in hindsight it's become evident that it isn't really a market segment that they're particularly interested in.
> I think in hindsight it's become evident that it isn't really a market segment that they're particularly interested in.
Really? The volume may not be there, but I think Apple has always cherished the prestige associated with being the platform of choice for studio mixing rooms, cinema production, etc. People argued that that's why those ridiculous $20k+ configurations of the Mac Pro even exist— as something for auteurs to demand as a status signal.
While I agree, Apple's interest in satisfying those "pro" audiences is waning, as is the interest in the pros to continue using their products. Apple has realized that it's much easier to market themselves where talent and personality intersect; aka, "the pro-sumer". For every Mac Pro they sell, they sell another thousand iPhones and a hundred Macbooks. Long-term, it makes much more sense for them to optimize around these audiences.
With that being said, I've noticed a startling increase in Linux use among pro workflows. The other day I visited a mixing studio that was entirely driven by Arch and Reaper if you could believe it, a really neat setup to say the least.
Actually, I'd characterize that as short term thinking. Your platform needs developers, and the power users and such eventually lead the rest of the market.
If they think they've got a castle in the sky, they'll find out why it's there if they start burning the pillars as firewood.
The pro-sumer play sort of relies on them plausibly having a reputation for creating things for actual professionals. Over time, as that residual reputation burns off, seems like it may become less effective.
Are you able to name the studio? Now I'm curious about what they're up to since it's exactly the kind of Frankenstein setup that appeals to me. Bitwig is an odd backup to Reaper considering it's a completely different target workflow. It's aiming at Live and made by ex-Ableton devs. Reaper is more like Pro Tools or Cubase.
To my understanding, they mapped all of the CC bindings from their digital mixer into Reaper and then routed the audio through JACK. They had a double monitor setup that seemed to be running a pretty standard Reaper setup (with Bitwig as an optional backup), as well as a smaller integrated monitor in the dashboard of the mixing console (which must have been running a custom UI). They were hooked up to a pretty sizable NAS, and they made a pretty large emphasis on separating project files from the OS. It seemed like the secret to their workflow was weekly backups of the OS partition with redundancy for the mission-critical components. Their round-trip latency was also pretty impressive, with less than 10ms for software sources and 30ms for hardware sources. All of it was running on an older Threadripper workstation.
Just FYI 30ms from hardware sources is terrible, I can achieve under 2.5ms round trip with Dante at 128 buffer settings and the older MADI protocol achieves similar levels.
What am I missing? Those numbers are an order of magnitude higher than I got with a similar Linux studio setup in 2008. We get 30-40ms latency over IP within about 100 miles.
Ironically, their move to their own ARM chips probably killed a lot of music production workflows. Given how slow the music software industry moves, I bet most will stay with their Intel Macs or move to a PC.
Serving the professional creative market is the core of their marketing.
Are they selling a majority of MacBook Pro’s to film studios? Of course not, but they need that prestige to compel Greg the aspiring film student to buy one so he can feel like he has “arrived”.
I have a 27" iMac and a 13" MacBook Pro, both of which are about 5 years old. I'm definitely holding on to see what comes down the road with Apple Silicon. I really don't like the idea of getting another iMac; it seems such a waste given that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my current display but the computer itself is getting long in the tooth for photo and video work.
I'm not a bit surprised they're doing it. I literally have an iMac Pro, 18 core Xeon with 64 gigs RAM, and a newer M1 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs RAM that was a quarter the price.
The M1 laptop at a quarter the price is faster than the maxed-out Intel-based iMac Pro. Not for everything… I do streaming using software x264 encoding and can set the quality levels way higher on the iMac Pro as it's native and 18 cores (the laptop's running OBS in Rosetta and has 8 cores, four of which are efficiency cores). But for some things the laptop's already a bit faster, consistently, right now. At a quarter of the price.
I'm guessing their experiments with scaling up what's in the initial M1-based Macs to more power vs. just maximum efficiency (for instance, a desktop that doesn't need to get 20 hour battery life and can actively cool itself) are turning out so shocking that they know they've got to kill the current product line, immediately.
I bought my iMac Pro in June 2020. That's a little over half a year ago, and I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development. It's a good thing it has such a nice screen and still has plenty of use, but it's going to be absolutely decimated by what comes out next. It's pretty well decimated now by my little laptop if you count how much energy is wasted, and how for certain tasks the giant 'Pro' monster absolutely cannot keep up with the introductory M1 models running native code, at a quarter or an eighth of the cost.
There is no WAY they can keep selling their current line. Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon.
> I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development
I don't think a Mac Mini M1 replaces an iMac Pro right now. The Mac Mini M1 maxes out at 16GiB of RAM, which means it will aggressively use swap for certain workloads that require a lot of memory. The speed of swap tends to mask the fact that you're swapping a lot more, but I think it puts a lot of wear on the flash. You don't want to do that because that can decrease the lifespan of your storage, and you can't swap the storage out once it's past its useful lifespan.
Because of longevity concerns, if you're running memory-intensive workloads, I'd suggest getting a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory. There's no published timeline on when Apple will release an Apple Silicon-based iMac Pro that can be configured with higher amounts of RAM (i.e., 64GiB). It might happen this year, or you might be waiting more like 2 or 3 years for that to happen.
I don't think anybody who has purchased a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory has gotten any kind of a "raw deal" from Apple.
When Apple formally announced the M1 Macs last June, they committed to replacing their entire lineup within 2 years. I suspect that they plan to do it well within that period.
I would expect that the Mac Pro and a possible iMac Pro equivalent might be the last models replaced. Still, based on their timelines you might see an iMac that could fully replace the iMac Pro as soon as end of this year or early 2022.
...and that tight coupling between RAM and CPU must be a big part of its performance.
I wouldn't really be surprised if they went for a somewhat lazy architecture for the stationary/pro segment that simply (well, "simply", it won't be easy, just maybe less hard than a properly scaled up M1, perhaps much less hard) put n of those units on a shared carrier board with lots of memory slots that would either serve as slower RAM, relegating those 16 GB to an awesome "L4 cache" or maybe even just as one big volatile SSD swapspace.
A "lazy architecture" might appear a bit out of character for Apple, but that pro segment must be so far from their core focus that this approach could work out really well. A conventional strategy whati new tech gets introduced in the pro segment and then trickles down until it eventually appears on the iPhone wouldn't really cut it because the phone is their unquestioned flagship and a "pro board" could make trickling up so easy that they might theoretically even make those things end-user upgradeable.
It's not really tighter coupling than in any other ultra portable laptops. It's just located on the package instead of on the mainboard, because they can. Shorter traces are better, but they don't magically make an incredible difference in performance. The newest x86 laptops run >4000 MT/s just fine through the board. Overclocked desktops run more through a socket, a big ass board, connectors, and full size DIMMs.
Oh, I would have thought that they'd at least get something like massively improved latency, if not something comparable to what dedicated GPU cards do (using completely different memory standards, and likely sacrificing latency for bandwidth). If the M1 units only integrate the RAM for the form factor and to avoid all the hassle supporting a wide range of RAM modules (or the hassle of communicating that they are almost all unsupported) then it's probably not much of a deal just building a bigger module.
A "cluster of MacBooks" style board might still be an interesting approach to offer something to the market segment that hungers for an Apple workstation without relegating the MacBook to a second class device. "For up to four threads it's just as fast as the mighty stationary monstrosity" would be a much better sales pitch than "if the mobile isn't fast enough for you you might be interested in or stationary offering".
Yeah, a quarter of the price, a quarter of the screen, a quarter of the RAM, a quarter of the SSD. Of course the price is also a quarter. The CPU isn’t the only part of that ludicrous $5000 price point
> The M1 laptop at a quarter the price is faster than the maxed-out Intel-based iMac Pro.
Even with the "not for everything" guard, this is still some seriously heavy BS.
iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, multiple display outputs (which M1 significantly restricted) and support for large amount of memory
Seriously, let's avoid this type of hyperbole and silly comparisons.
> I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well.
This is why the iMac Pro is going away, it's simply not needed. The upcoming Apple Silicon iMac should be able to span entry level up to iMac Pro level with just BTO options.
I have an imac pro. I bought it so I could make live video recordings without fan noise, and export video quickly.
I bought my assistant an M1 macbook air for editing. It is by definition quieter, and yet reliably beat my imac pro in renders!
I would love a machine with ecc ram though. Way fewer random crashes since I got my imac pro.
As for outputs, I’m certainly waiting for more, though the M1 mac mini isn’t terribly if you get one of those new hubs. It has ethernet, two usb c, two usb a and a dedicated power port.
Yeah there’s are people using the imac pro for super crazy advanced things but many people just wanted a fast quiet computer with ports.
(The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless)
I literally have the 18 core Xeon iMac Pro, with 64 gigs of RAM. I bought the Macbook Pro (not the Air) with 16 gigs of RAM and 1T SSD.
Not as concerned with video editing and renders. The iMac Pro can wreck the Macbook on specifically OBS software x264 encoding, while OBS is not Apple Silicon-native. Repeat, software encoding, not attempting to use the hardware chip (there can be issues streaming to YouTube using it). This is the one case I've found, of anything, where the iMac Pro wins.
I tried Minecraft, as there's an M1-native version out there. My old intel Mini: 70 fps. The iMac Pro: 240 fps. The M1 Macbook: 270 fps.
I'm gonna say it's rare that my M1 Macbook Pro does NOT beat my Xeon iMac Pro at four times the price, four times the RAM. Again, I literally own both. I've even found a purpose (software x264) where the M1 machine can't keep up. It's the only thing I've found so far, where the M1 isn't faster. Everything else about operating this machine is faster than the iMac Pro, which remains my primary desktop I use every day.
Probably not the best word for it, but it’s clear he is emphasizing the fact he owns both machines, and is reporting first-hand experience and not just blurting out an “informed opinion”.
I think Apple users employ the word "literally" to insinuate that they don't actually own the device, but they've seen their favorite apologist tech-tubers run some comparisons and really liked what they saw.
Minor nitpick: the iMac Pro running Minecraft is pushing a lot more pixels than the MacBook at similar frame rates, assuming you used the native resolution of each device. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I didn't. It was windowed, plus on the M1 I was running a different screen resolution so that windowed could be 1920x1080, so that was actually a larger Minecraft window than the native screen resolution (hiDPI) would allow.
I have both too. The M1 is fast, no doubt, but throw a big compilation project at it and it’s smoked by the iMac Pro. Parallelism trumps the M1’s smaller number of cores.
That's fair. I see that in software encoding to x264, in OBS (though admittedly the M1 is running under Rosetta still). The iMac Pro can reliably stream at 'slow' quality level, but the M1 can barely go above 'ultrafast' without choking.
You've nailed it as far as the reason: if you can come up with a task that legitimately needs parallelism that heavy, that's where the Xeon comes into its own. Anything lighter, and the M1 starts to zip ahead.
So these benchmarks are a bit out of date, as at least some of the Adobe apps have gone M1-native, but the iMac Pro does wallop the MacBook Pro in several cases.
My iMac Pro has the Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB. I'm given to understand the absolute top of the line had some kind of problems… still, that's as much in graphics card RAM as exists in the whole RAM of some of the M1s. I'm betting Warhammer makes heavy use of the graphics card and it's that which is walloping the M1-running-Rosetta-emulation.
This probably means there will still be games where a previous version with a fancy enough graphics card will get higher framerates than what the M1 Macs can get. I don't anticipate Apple ever making those kinds of concessions to the gamer market, so that's where you're going to see the only holdouts (in terms of, M1 doing super poorly). And that, mostly with stuff that expects real gamer cards. I don't think the Radeon Pro Vega 56 is nearly top of the line for a gamer card but I can easily believe it's better than the on-board graphics for the initial M1 machines. Remember part of the selling point for the iMac Pros is that they could summon up graphics-card grunt for the purposes of 3d modeling.
I should try some Blender experiments and see what's snappier, there's a possibility the iMac Pro will make a decent showing for itself for that reason :)
What I've found over the years is that Apple's marketing can often lead people to buy tools they don't necessarily need. For every consummate Macbook professional I've found, there's always another savant who prefers to spend their money on a 15 year old Thinkpad and a 2-year supply of Four Loko. It's a somewhat ironic equilibrium in my eyes, but I think that's part of the ultimate joy of programming.
However, I mostly agree with you. I think Apple's marketing does a pretty poor job of communicating the difference in their products, and it's certainly intentional. One of my friends ended up buying the iMac Pro for development, and I can't understand for the life of me why. Similarly, he also derides me for not buying a Mac Mini already and ditching my Linux ecosystem for good. C'est va, I suppose.
Replaced a 10 core, 64 GB RAM iMac Pro with a maxed-out M1 MacBook Air and very happy with that choice. Kept the iMac for Windows and "just in case" the Air doesn't work out. But it's just sitting in a closet now. It isn't just whether or not the speed tests look certain ways, you're right. It's also the fact that the Air is just a really great laptop. It's so good at being a laptop that, after years of compromising via a dual machine setup, the Air has allowed me to return to all the great things laptops used to represent, while providing comparable-to-desktop speed in the same machine. It can easily balance in all sorts of couch potato positions, functions as my main input to a larger screen, and can sit on my lap without burning me or giving me "build anxiety" like other laptops, where I'd dread the fan noise and heat of building. I'm not looking forward to having to decide to even have a desktop again because of however much faster the Apple Silicon desktops will be. Because having this much power in the same setup that I can take everywhere is really enticing and differs from past laptop offerings in the aforementioned improvements (and others like battery life or even the maybe somewhat silly option to run the Dyson iPhone app to control my office fan).
PS: I think you might be thinking of the Mac Pro re the accelerator card, no?
I don't think we've even remotely scratched the surface of what the Neural Engine can do. Also, the battery life is incredible and stays up to the hyperbole I've seen online. 10 hours of heavy work and takes it like a champ.
I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.
>Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon.
A lot of companies are still providing employees with Intel MacBooks. I know mine doesn't have M1 variants in the line yet. The reality is that IT cares a lot more about support effort than they are about providing employees with the latest and greatest. You can't really blame them.
A good IT team wouldn’t jump on the latest Tech until they’ve ensured it’s comparable and safe with the enterprises current tech. If enterprise that had people working from home have everyone a new M1, they would’ve been ass out to see that Cisco AnyConnect did not work (though it was due to Big Sur)
> I bought my iMac Pro in June 2020. That's a little over half a year ago, and I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development.
I would be too.
On the other hand there are people who really needed that machine then for whom it was worth the money not to have to wait a year.
you can expand the ram, though, right? for some workloads, that's still going to be key. but yeah, I hear the frustration. I've been on the fence about getting a refurb 27" iMac. have been mostly laptop based for years, but the pandemic made me reconsider a desktop system again. Then... M1 news came out and... it's all up in the air.
Ehh kind of. The 27" iMac (non Pro) has a RAM door, and RAM is fully user serviceable.
The iMac Pro has slotted RAM, but it has no door and is not considered a user-serviceable part by Apple. So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty.
I believe you can also pay Apple an obscene amount of money to do it and keep your warranty, although you'd have to use their RAM.
> So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty.
If you are in the US, this is not correct. It's a common misunderstanding, which probably makes manufacturers happy, but it is not true.
Disassembling your product does not violate your warranty -- even if you have to puncture a (very un-Apple-like) sticker that says "VOID IF REMOVED OR DAMAGED", etc.
However: damaging your product via disassembly, or anything else, allows the warrantor (Apple) to choose not to honor their warranty if the damage is directly related to the issue being repaired under warranty.
But if you cause no damage, or if the damage is cosmetic or unrelated to the warranteed part, you are free to do as you like. And so is a third-party repair shop.
I'm interested in seeing what the next iteration of laptops is like. I have an iMac and MacBook Pro which are both over 5 years old and it would be nice to upgrade both to a new ARM laptop even if it's a bit less travel friendly than my current system. (I usually travel with my Chromebook anyway.)
>Apple hasn’t made an official announcement the iMac Pro’s future, but the Mac’s product page speaks volumes. As first reported by MacRumors, the configurable models of the iMac Pro are no longer available for purchase. The only remaining iMac Pro on Apple’s online store is the $4,999 base configuration, which Apple notes prominently at the top of the page will only remain available ‘While supplies last.’
What a crappy article. Of course it has stopped with new Intel iMac Pros.
Any new iMac Pro will have to wait for the ARM version.
Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.
MacRumors got a follow up from Apple confirming that it has been discontinued. I suspect with the upcoming performance of the Apple silicon, lines between an iMac and iMac Pro were about to get blurry... but that's just a hunch.
From MacRumors:
"We've since confirmed with Apple that when supplies run out, the iMac Pro will no longer be available whatsoever. Apple says the latest 27-inch iMac introduced in August is the preferred choice for the vast majority of pro iMac users, and said customers who need even more performance and expandability can choose the Mac Pro."
ANY Apple Silicon iMac is going to kill, just kill, the top of the line Intel Xeon iMac Pros. Blurry is not the word. It's gonna leapfrog the Xeons for almost any purpose rendering the whole thing ridiculous.
Source: I literally have an 18-core, 64 gig RAM Xeon iMac Pro and one of the new laptops (Macbook pro, 16 gig RAM). If they don't have to get 20 hours of battery life and they do literally anything to expand the processing from what they have, they're going to obliterate the discontinued ones so hard that it'd be insane or criminally misleading to continue selling the iMac Pros.
They've already quit selling the machine I have, and I kinda wish they had half a year ago… because I spent more than $8000 in the belief that I was going to put a stake in the ground and rely on that computer for a goodly number of years and that it was relevant to where Apple was headed.
Now (if Linus Tech Tips is to be believed) I can get a baseline Macbook Air, pop the back off, put a thermal conductive pad to vent heat away from the heatsink to the aluminum surface of the laptop, and get observably better performance on at least some realworld tasks for literally one EIGHTH the price.
I won't say I feel ripped off, but I feel extremely blindsided and that's only going to get worse as Apple continues to put out more products. Not sure people quite understand how inferior Apple's 'top line' products from the last generation, are to what they're currently producing.
Right now if you need heavy processing of VERY specific types involving many cores and many gigs of physical RAM but that doesn't fit into a category Apple's covering already with the M1s, such as 4k and 8k video editing that's better done on any M1 machine, that's the last known good use of the iMac Pros and Mac Pros. Only the heaviest of heavy lifting that's not covered by the strong suits of the M1…
I give it four months before Apple has something maybe at the $2000-3000 price point that absolutely destroys all the previous machines, no matter how 'Pro', at any price. And this is why they've got to kill off the previous lines. People will be really angry when this becomes apparent. Better to not even try and sell the machines, much less try to market them as 'more performance'. Expandability, yeah, there's that.
Yeah, I had a hunch something like this was going to happen which is why I opted for a refurbished base model iMac Pro over something new. Still expensive (~$3500), but not nearly as bad for the period of time I was able to get use out of it. Will probably trade it in along with a 2017 MBP 15" to pay for the majority of a Mac Pro Mini or ARM MBP 16" and hopefully one of the lower-cost displays they're rumored to be releasing this year.
>Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.
They have done the same thing time and again during similar transitions or new designs. The eat through the stock, and then the item is not available at all, until at some point a new design/version hits.
In fact, reports of "stock dwindling" and "while stocks last" etc and Apple stopping selling an item on the web Applestore are things Apple-focused news websites explicitly use to tell that a new version of some product is in the works or soon to land...
In this case, the iMac Pro is niche enough, that the new version is not soon to land, as other more staple products have a priority for the Apple Silicon treatment. That doesn't mean it's not in the works.
Huh? They’re not dropping configuration and listing “while supplies last” on any of their other Intel products. This is exactly how Apple kills a product line.
>They’re not dropping configuration and listing “while supplies last” on any of their other Intel products.
That's because they have plenty of supplies to their other Intel products, and continue to build them even because they are crucial to tens of millions of customers, whereas the iMac Pro is a limited units higher-end product -- whose stock has dwindled and whose any replacement will come after 2021 and more pressing ARM releases (the standard iMac, the 16" Macbook Pro, the Mac Pro, and so on).
They have stopped selling items that became available again in new versions/designs many times in the past, with similar "while supplies last" fashion.
Remember how the Mac Pro wasn't renewed for 5+ years and there were similar cries, and then a new model came out, with an updated "recycle bin" design, that Apple has been working on for the best part of those years?
There is a difference between telling its customers "While Supplies last" and Stock draining to literally zero without notice.
There is a difference between stock draining to zero and actually announcing a product to be discontinued.
I dont even remember a single Mac product that has gone under a similar treatment. Although one could argue this was forced confirmation when media pushed for it.
> If you were hoping to buy an iMac Pro for some serious work, you'd better act quickly. 9to5Mac reports (and Apple has confirmed to Engadget) that Apple is winding down sales of its all-in-one workstation. You can still buy one, but it's limited to the base 10-core Xeon configuration and only available "while supplies last." You'll have to be patient, too, as orders are taking three to four weeks as we write this.
And at quite the discount. You give up ECC RAM, and I think the fans on the non-Pro iMac ramp up like turboprop, but that iMac Pro was getting long in the tooth.
I am a bit out of the Xeon loop; was there even an appropriate Xeon to update the Pro?
You also 10-gig ethernet and 4 TB3 ports which is pretty nice as well, given TB3 is only way to expand the computer if you want PCI-E devices (more likely if you are a serious customer for a 5k computer...). The standard iMac only has two, of which one will likely be used up powering an external monitor in a professional workstation. For a "Pro" machine, these kind of things often matter. My current top-of-line iMac (non-pro) setup has both TB3 ports consumed with just an eGPU and a monitor, but I would otherwise agree for cost conscious buyers its the better machine.
I'm not sure if the updated 2020 non-pro iMac ever got the T2 line rate encryption feature the iMac Pro has either.
The current model iMac is a monster and a pretty good deal, too. The 10g ethernet option is only $100, half the price of a thunderbolt 10g peripheral, and 1/3rd the price of a 10g add-in card like the Intel X550 or X710. The main thing you give up is ECC memory.
Well new X540-T2's are usually available for < $100 from various sources. For a newer design the Aquantia/Marvell boards are generally in the ~$90 range too, although I don't know if anyone has mac drivers for them.
No. The iMac Pro has the latest Cascade Lake parts. Arguably the “Gen 2 Refresh” bunch of Xeon SP parts are newer, but in workstation scenarios they’re not really faster.
My real hope is Apple releases the rumored "Mac Pro mini" to fill this gap. My desktop is still a 6 core Xeon 2010 Mac Pro, which now has 32GB RAM, 2 SATA SSDs, two HDDs, and with PCIe a NVMe SSD, Radeon RX 570 that can drive 3 displays, and USB-C card, all of which were surprisingly affordable upgrades. It even runs Catalina with OpenCore (amazing software btw).
Apple really needs something in between the $700 Mac Mini and $6000 Mac Pro. A somewhat larger case that opens easily and some expansion slots should not carry a $5000 premium, and no I don't want a built in display.
Apple has been removing expansion slots for 10 years. I wouldn’t hold your breath for the mythical priced like a dell with user upgradable parts but running OSX without hackintosh.
Bought the base iMac Pro right around release time. Still does everything I need at the moment. I pretty much have it maxed out with about 19 USB cables running off of it(synthisizers, midi interfaces, external drives, software dongles, 13 port hub) they add up. I dont ever hear the fan, and it can do full 24-48 track multi track audio + Plugins with no sweat. That said, in 3 more years I suspect it will get an M1 based replacement.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an exact replacement, but an M-series iMac might still be a good replacement.
Apple announced a two year transition time from x86_64 to Apple Silicon. The MacBook Air, Mac Mini and 13” MacBook Pro have made the jump. That leaves the Mac Pro, 16” MacBook Pro, the 21.5” iMac and 27” iMac left to make the jump or otherwise be discontinued.
> I'm guessing their experiments with scaling up what's in the initial M1-based Macs to more power vs. just maximum efficiency (for instance, a desktop that doesn't need to get 20 hour battery life and can actively cool itself) are turning out so shocking that they know they've got to kill the current product line, immediately.
I totally agree. I believe this is the only reason, why Apple "upgraded" the MacBook pro 13". The new MacBook Air smashed it, so Apple had to do something in the 13" range.
MacBook 16" has the distinctive advantage of a better screen.
I am totally excited about Apple's new MacBook lineup coming later this year. This is going to be really huge.
> MacBook 16" has the distinctive advantage of a better screen.
Even the MacBook Pro 16" base models have too many ports and too much graphic performance for the original M1 to replace them. The base 13" already had enough limitations that they could replace it without making any of its specs worse (and leave the existing Intel 13" in the range with no changes for the 4-port model)
One hypothesis is that they know that what they have coming next on Apple Silicon is so much faster that the people who bought the (newly overpriced) Intel-based ones would be extremely annoyed.
Because the value proposition for the current iMac Pro at its current prices was already a bit iffy compared to the new iMacs. Raising the price would just mean the decision to buy a current iMac is much easier.
FWIW I got the latest 27in iMac when it released last August and it fits all my needs (Plus I did want the Boot Camp support). Granted, if we knew M1 and Rosetta was going to be this good I may have reconsidered.
That said I may get the rumored 14in MacBook Pro with an M1X as well.
It was always super confusing to me that the "Mac Pro" and the "iMac Pro" were very different products, and the latter occupied an awkward spot from a power perspective too. It makes sense to drop it imo
This is a little sad. Announcing it discontinued partly confirms iMac Pro as a product category wont exist in their next line up. i.e There wont be any iMac Style All in one design with Apple Silicon, ECC memory and 10Gbps Ethernet. If you want that you will need to go Mac Pro.
While we have always known iMac Pro was a stopgap solution. Seeing an All in One design capable of dissipating ~600W TDP Max is quite amazing. And I have always wished Apple moved that design to its consumer iMac range with powerful CPU and GPU hardware.
Hopefully there will still be a place for 32 Core Apple Silicon within the upcoming iMac lineup.
One of the issues with it as a product was that there was little they could actually do in terms of releasing newer, higher-performance models (given a relative lack of processor options). Eventually the high-end, non-Pro iMac basically caught up, so I expect sales have basically been nonexistent for some time now.
We could easily see an ARM version later on - for the people who want a high-end desktop without requiring the excessive Mac Pro. But it could equally be the case that there’s not much space in the product lineup any more and it’s quietly replaced by a high-end ARM iMac.
I wonder if they decide to confirm this simply because it was used as a professional tools.
One of the biggest critics during the Mac Pro trash can era was Apple not sharing or updating professionals about their future lineup. Or if they will abandoned Mac Pro completely. So they are giving a rare notice for any professionals to stock them up if they need.
I was guessing that we are seeing a simplification of the Mac lineup because the variety of processors available is going to be constrained. Right now we have the M1 and I would expect and M1X or M2 coming up. I don't think they will have the part count Intel has had.
Oh yeah, that could be it. Apple's Pro Display XDR with an ARM processor would be interesting, though the question is are the M SoCs ready to drive those yet?
Hmm, the discrete GPU would be interesting, but I don't think would go back to that. The SoC model has been working out great for Apple, I can't see them seceding control to get a discrete 3rd-party GPU working.
> I can't see them seceding control to get a discrete 3rd-party GPU working.
Nobody said the discrete GPU would be 3rd party. I suspect Apple will release their own discrete GPU before long. SoC works well for the long end, but I can't see it being worth it at the Mac Pro level.
Hmm the X Chip difference makes sense, because they are the same chip with the regular one built to be mobile. But in case of M2, the same distinction doesn't make sense because they are built for larger devices by default. Though I guess, they could have two completely separate chips and just use the X as convention.
You’re arguing about naming conventions for a product that hasn’t been released, and where names are all speculative. What you think is an m1x may be called an m2, or a m2x or a dp2fgh.
Well, I would expect that might be an option depending on what powers the Mac Pro going forward. I wonder if Apple is at the multi-CPU stage. I am expecting external RAM and I hope ECC for the next Mac Pro.
Apple lost touch with their clients, it became the large tyrannical IBM that Steve Jobs hated so much. Companies always suffer when their quintessential soul is lost. Business schools should learn from Elon Musk and drop the middle manager / politically correct agenda. Be what you want to be, not what society forces you to be.
