iMac Pro in 2019/2020?

[askunk]

Intel's roadmap for Xeon processors is continuously changing, albeit their last official position is to refresh the line every 4/5 quarters. It seems that Cooper Lake will arrive in Q4 2019/Q1 2020, while it seems that Ice Lake 10nm Xeons will have to wait till the end of 2020.

The premise is, of course (and sadly), that Apple will quite surely not switch to AMD's chips given the upcoming ARM transition.

Moreover, there are no high-end GPUs from AMD that can replace Vega, apart from Mac Pro's Vega II.

Therefore, I think, we have three options:

1) Apple comes out with a CPU refresh (Cascade Lake) by the end of the year, keeping the same GPUs and perhaps adding a high-end option with a Vega II.

2) Apple presents a new (smaller bezels!) design with Cooper Lake CPUs and perhaps a high-end Navi (yet still mounted on a PCI-e v3 bus) aside old Vegas. In this case, I would expect the Vega 56 being discontinued.

3) Apple waits till Ice Lake Xeon to come out with a new iMac Pro in late 2020 while proposing the new design for "regular" iMacs with Ice Lake i7/i9 and Navi GPUs (on PCI-e v4) perhaps in early 2020 (no sign of Ice Lake for desktops, so far).

Let me know your thoughts

 

[Strider64]

Well I don't actually expect Apple to go with AMD's Threadripper v3, but one can dream.

 

[Juicy Box]

You should have an option for nothing, as I question if there will be another iMac Pro.

 

[Mikael H]

You should have an option for nothing, as I question if there will be another iMac Pro.

I’d say unless they can bring a base-model Mac Pro down to ~$3500, there’s a considerably larger market for the iMac Pro (Xeon + ECC RAM + a relatively reasonably priced, good (and Apple-branded) screen) than for the Mac Pro.

The iMac with their newly increased core counts will do well for prosumers and some of the pros who don’t see the point in sacrificing some of the top-end speed for stability. The performance overlap will in all likelihood become even larger once they redesign the regular iMac with the cooling system + T2 chip of the iMac Pro, but unless they make Xeons an option on the standard iMac line after such a redesign I don’t hope to see the disappearance of the iMac Pro anytime soon.

 

[askunk]

You should have an option for nothing, as I question if there will be another iMac Pro.

With the appearance of the new Mac Pro, I think that leaving the huge space between iMacs and the Mac Pro would be a big mistake. Furthermore, I don't think Apple invested in the development only to sell one model.

 

[Juicy Box]

I’d say unless they can bring a base-model Mac Pro down to ~$3500, there’s a considerably larger market for the iMac Pro (Xeon + ECC RAM + a relatively reasonably priced, good (and Apple-branded) screen) than for the Mac Pro.


The iMac with their newly increased core counts will do well for prosumers and some of the pros who don’t see the point in sacrificing some of the top-end speed for stability. The performance overlap will in all likelihood become even larger once they redesign the regular iMac with the cooling system + T2 chip of the iMac Pro, but unless they make Xeons an option on the standard iMac line after such a redesign I don’t hope to see the disappearance of the iMac Pro anytime soon.

With the appearance of the new Mac Pro, I think that leaving the huge space between iMacs and the Mac Pro would be a big mistake.

Both good points, but I suspect that the iMac Pro was just a stop gap measure to appease the pro market until the Mac Pro was fully developed.

Judging on the typical time frame of iMac designs, the current iMac is well overdue for a redesign. I wonder if the iMac Pro design was originally, at least in part, a design of the new iMac. After the pro-community backlash from a few years ago, maybe Apple decided to retool the iMac redesign as the iMac Pro just until a new Mac Pro could be developed.

I would bet that when a redesign iMac does come, it will inherit much of the design of the iMac Pro, especially the heat dissipation design. It could inherit some of the workstation aspects of the iMac Pro as well for the BTO options.

Of course, this is all just speculative on my part.

Furthermore, I don't think Apple invested in the development only to sell one model.

There is precedent and it is recent, the 2013 Mac Pro.


Besides, if my speculation on the redesigned iMac is correct, much of the development cost for the iMac Pro would be paid for by the redesigned iMac.



This kind of reminds me of the threads from a year and a half ago, with people stating that they thought Apple would have a new 2018 iMac for the early-spring of 2018, which of course never happened. Back then I thought that Apple wouldn’t release an updated on the iMac until the end of 2018 to the spring of 2019, which many people then said that 2019 would be way too long.

But, who knows? Apple might release an updated iMac Pro tomorrow, I just wouldn’t be surprised if it the iMac Pro was a one-time deal.

 

[askunk]

Well.... actually Phil Schiller was pretty clear during the 2017 press meeting. He stated that the iMac Pro would have addressed a certain group of pro users that the Mac Pro would have not. Therefore, they are meant to stay for a while, at least until Apple understands that Pro users are as important as consumers.

The 2013 Mac Pro was meant to stay "this is the design for the next 10 years" was said on stage by Schiller during WWDC 2013, but it went South. It's quite a peculiar precedent since it includes the first admission of failure in Apple history.

 

[Juicy Box]

Therefore, they are meant to stay for a while, at least until Apple understands that Pro users are as important as consumers.

This could be, and of course having an updated iMac Pro wouldn't be a surprise. But, I was just saying I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't another iMac Pro, also.

Another possibility could be just a spec bump, or dropping of certain BTO options and decreasing the price of others, similar to the 2010 to 2012 Mac Pro.

Similar to what someone else already mentioned, I think that the Xeons could become a BTO option for the non-pro iMac after a redesign.

Or, maybe the iMac Pro will continue to be regularly updated, and keep its place in the Mac line up. I think Apple has been kind of unpredictable lately, at least when it comes to Macs.