Apple Previews iMac Pro: The Fastest Mac Ever

[sakar]

The egpu on a MacBook still has internal graphics as well. The X299 support is the key if they get rid of AppleEFI for graphics and switch to industry standard UEFI then we will be good.

Damn it, why does that sound kind of un-Apple-y :/

 

[Techyrod82]

Was a pretty solid keynote. I've been saying to myself they'd use Xeons this time around. I'm excited about Radeon 5xx series and homepod.

 

[zangadao]

Seems that Nvidia is still supporting OSX no matter what.

Nvidia does because they know has a large base of Mac Pros around the world, and thee machines still have a great power CPUs, but weak in GPUs. Major Mac Pros owners needs a new GPU board, and the Nvidia has the solutions. Ah, don't forget the new recent eGPUs solutions for Macs, open a new market for the green force.

 

[SquishyTia]

Two things:
1. You will be able to build Kaby Lake hackintoshes since High Sierra will have native support for them since the new iMacs will ship with them.
2. Apple said that building a comparable PC to the iMac Pro would cost you 7 grand without the display.

Intel's X299 platform, even as an HEDT HCC platform, won't cost me $7k for a comparable computer. Especially once you factor in the externals you'll need to buy to have good storage options for that iMac "Pro".

What we know so far after this keynote, that there's not gonna be more Mac Pro's. I think iMac Pro is sort of a replacement for that.

There'll be new Mac Pros. Question is, just how upgradeable will they be? Apple's all about the throwaway machine now, so I don't see them making the Mac Pros truly user configurable. I'm betting on a heavy dose of the old Apple 68k/PowerPC proprietary approach.

Sexy machine, but...

1. It will probably be a royal PITA to open up and dust out those blower fans when dust builds up in there.
2. Potential of thermal throttling.
3. Potentially noisy.
4. Non-upgradable GPUs.

While very powerful and a very beautiful system, I feel like Apple is still trying to make everything disposable and wants us to buy new machines every 3-4 years.

I hope the Mac Pros will have some sort of Nvidia support.

I really, really like built-in 10GbE!!! Too bad it's not on all new models. It's overdue.

If it has 10 GigE, its foundation lies in X299. That's the only consumer/prosumer platform that has 10 GigE on it. Problem is, lack of equivalant networking hardware in the non-enterprise realm.

Perhaps with their adoption of 10GbE ports they'll also have a new router on the way.

Apple isn't going to make a new router. They're done with that. What surprises me is that these are 10 GigE ports instead of the more common SPF+ ports. Well, actually no, that doesn't surprise me - thinking about it, space matters and SFP+ takes a ton of ingress space on a motherboard. Still, you're likely to find it cheaper to get a Mikrotik router with SFP+ and use an SFP+ 10 GigE module than a router with native 10 GigE, at least in the near term (but you better have a CCNA under your belt - Mikrotik's routers aren't for the faint of heart and have a massive learning curve, and are not NAT/home networking ready out of the box, plus you have to learn RouterOS 7 just to configure it).

Still, I don't think pros are going to start dry humping their desks in anticipation of these "pro" iMacs. They're going to have the same problems with it that they had with the Macbook Pro line from 2016. And as a desktop machine, with no upgradeability and expensive expandability via limited thunderbolt, I don't see it taking off very well. To me this is Apple's "we've shoehorned super hot Xeons into an iMac chassis and hope it won't thermally throttle like the Trashcan Pro did" approach.

And if High Sierra ends up supporting X299 in the near future, I can build an HEDT HCC system for far less than these "pro" iMacs, even factoring in the $2k Core i9.

 

[trs96]

iMacs, in good condition will always have resale value much better than any PC will. Buy one and use it for 3-4 years then sell it and upgrade to the latest greatest model if you are a Pro user. That way you don't have to be stuck with old hardware that you can't upgrade. Better yet buy some Apple stock and hold it five years and it will have paid for a large percentage of what you paid for the 2017 iMac Pro. I work on a lot of old iMacs and it's amazing to see how good the condition of some of these are that have been taken care of properly. A 7 year old 2010 iMac can run the latest macOS Sierra quite well with a ram and SSD upgrade. So hopefully Apple will retain some user upgradeable options that don't have to be installed at the factory. That's the best approach when you buy the consumer iMacs. Buy and hold and upgrade components as needed.

 

[trs96]

Looks like you'll be able to add two more 5k monitors to these via Thunderbolt 3 ports.

 

[vulgo]

How do you know they're using that platform, and not something like Broadwell-EP? 8, 10 and 18 cores, huh. The 10 is odd; they're not spaced out evenly.

Or Coffee Lake?

Edit: Not Coffee Lake, it is delayed until next year. Not 18 core Skylake-X cos they are Xeon cores?

Edit 2: Probably Skylake-X which is anticipated to carry Xeon Bronze and Xeon Silver branding

 

[Torrijos]

Sorry guys, Apple stuck on time. Tell me what kind a professional CGI (animation, motion graphics or moviemaker) will take a locked in a GPU (and processor) for 4 ou 5 years? iMacPro is a great machine, it's true, but keep a macusers in a prision (unless you have a customize best machine money can buy). I will wait for the macPro, to get upgrades. Otherwise, Customacs works better.

That's where the external GPU support and after I/O (Ethernet 10Gb/s & TB3 come in)
But honestly RAM was a huge issue for a lot of professions (Need for big billboards graphiste etc) For final rendering companies have render farms or cloud deals.

If for VR the external box will do.

 

[dh22r]

I'm hoping when the new Mac Pro's roll out, Apple will be delivering a new a 5K (or higher) display.
We in the hackintosh community typically can build a Mac Pro equivalent with higher specs and/or lower costs.
What we (or maybe just me) want is a nice kick ass display.

dh22r

 

[kylec]

Or Coffee Lake?

Edit: Not Coffee Lake, it is delayed until next year. Not 18 core Skylake-X cos they are Xeon cores?

Edit 2: Probably Skylake-X which is anticipated to carry Xeon Bronze and Xeon Silver branding

I agree that it is most likely some flavor of Skylake, but it has not been established for certain, to my knowledge.