Order iMac Pro for testing purposes.

[dannys1]

Just ordered an iMac Pro to see what underlaying architecture changes there. I want to test the secure enclave and what it will and won't let you do from a Mac admin point of view - if we can still boot from external drives and restore in times of need - if it's possible to disable these features in emergencies etc (ala SIP).

Once it's arrived i'll report back here with my findings. If anyone wants to me to try something let me know, should be here first week of Jan.

 

[Brookzy]

I saw an article that showed you could select in some settings panel somewhere various levels of integrity verification on boot, and whether to allow booting from external drives. By default it seems only the latest verified version of macOS will boot and external drive booting is disabled.

The next level allows verified software of any version number to run.

The weakest level turns off all verification.

Looking forward to reading your findings and hope your iMac arrives before the estimated time!

 

[dannys1]

I saw an article that showed you could select in some settings panel somewhere various levels of integrity verification on boot, and whether to allow booting from external drives. By default it seems only the latest verified version of macOS will boot and external drive booting is disabled.

The next level allows verified software of any version number to run.

The weakest level turns off all verification.

Looking forward to reading your findings and hope your iMac arrives before the estimated time!

I thought that might be there, haven't researched yet myself. I assume it'll be like SIP where you have to boot to recovery partition and run something from terminal.

It was easy to circumvent SIP by just booting from an external drive and running whatever admin you needed but obviously that seems impossible out of the box now.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Could you do a step by step unboxing with pictures? I notice all the special people had it already setup from scratch. I want to see whats in the box, first boot and setup process etc.

 

[dannys1]

If it looks any different to standard iMac box I will - I suspect it'll be the same polystyrene packaging with keyboard slot in the top though and the pyramid 27" box.

 

[MH01]

Looking forward to your findings.

See if you can get it to throttle . I'm wondering about its ability to deal with excess heat .

And pics!! It looks very sexy

 

[dannys1]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330

In case anyone has missed in, secure boot article is here - not command line, accessed from recovery partition. Very much SIP++
Easy enough to disable for deployment purposes requires a physical boot with a keyboard to the system first.

 

[FredT2]

Looking forward to your findings.

See if you can get it to throttle . I'm wondering about its ability to deal with excess heat .

And pics!! It looks very sexy

See how fast the processors run with HandBrake.

 

[dannys1]

See how fast the processors run with HandBrake.

Will do - i'll run iStat for some accurate core testing too and i'll run the terminal command to max all the cores out to 100% and see if/when thermal throttling starts.

 

[Earl Urley]

Just ordered an iMac Pro to see what underlaying architecture changes there. I want to test the secure enclave and what it will and won't let you do from a Mac admin point of view - if we can still boot from external drives and restore in times of need - if it's possible to disable these features in emergencies etc (ala SIP).

You can still boot from an external drive, but you'll have to use the Startup Security Utility, available by booting into Recovery Mode and selecting it from the Utilities menu bar:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208198

BTW, the iMac Pro doesn't support NetBoot so take that as you will.

 

[Hitchophilia]

If anyone wants to me to try something let me know, should be here first week of Jan.

Please examine:

1. Fan speed and sound decibels under sustained load
2. Improvement to inbuilt speakers compared with current iMac
3. Screen luminance and colour compared with current iMac
4. File transfer speed from 10Gbit ethernet

Thank you for doing this for the benefit of others.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

Could you do a step by step unboxing with pictures? I notice all the special people had it already setup from scratch. I want to see whats in the box, first boot and setup process etc.

I have to ask you a serious question. (In no way am I trying to be mean or disrespectful you.)

Why? This is a product designed from the ground up for professional use. Danny is trying to offer up tests for professionals to better understand and evaluate this hefty piece of computing hardware. Many of us rely on machines like this to literally pay for the roof over our heads and we need to know the answers to some pretty intensive questions so we can make purchasing decisions that affect our livelihood. Yet, your concern is what the cellophane wrapping looks like?

C'mon man...this isn't an iPhone! We need to know what this beast is capable of.

 

[Mr. Dee]

I have to ask you a serious question. (In no way am I trying to be mean or disrespectful you.)

Why? This is a product designed from the ground up for professional use. Danny is trying to offer up tests for professionals to better understand and evaluate this hefty piece of computing hardware. Many of us rely on machines like this to literally pay for the roof over our heads and we need to know the answers to some pretty intensive questions so we can make purchasing decisions that affect our livelihood. Yet, your concern is what the cellophane wrapping looks like?

C'mon man...this isn't an iPhone! We need to know what this beast is capable of.

The author doesn't have a problem with the question and nobody else prior to you; and you in no way contributed funds to buying one. Someone in the forum said they bought one as a vanity purchase, not for technical reasons. Are you gonna have a problem with them too? I could purchase one myself and have no technical reason to do so. Try not take these things personal, at the end of the day, its producing pointless YouTube videos, independent films that nobody is gonna watch and music that will never make it on a billboard chard or process photos nobody will find riveting.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

The author doesn't have a problem with the question and nobody else prior to you; and you in no way contributed funds to buying one. Someone in the forum said they bought one as a vanity purchase, not for technical reasons. Are you gonna have a problem with them too? I could purchase one myself and have no technical reason to do so. Try not take these things personal, at the end of the day, its producing pointless YouTube videos, independent films that nobody is gonna watch and music that will never make it on a billboard chard or process photos nobody will find riveting.

I think you're misunderstanding me...or perhaps I did a poor job of communicating my intent properly since it was very late at night and I had been out working in the cold. (Probably was me.) But what I'm trying to convey is if we all take a step back for a minute, isn't it funny when somehow we admire how something is boxed up when all that really matters is the product's performance? When it comes down to it, the iMac could be sleeved in a pink pokka-dot wrapper with 50 little images of Tim Cook's face all over it and it still wouldn't matter. (Well, that would be pretty funny.) Anyway, I was just pointing out the silliness of seemingly caring more about how it's boxed up versus the what the iMac can actually do. (Tongue in cheek smiles here...I'm not calling you out personally!)

Also, in answer to your question, I am not concerned in the slightest if someone buys a fully-specced 18-core model to only surf MacRumors and type in MS Word. Good for them, certainly no concern here!

Cheers, and if I could buy you a beer right now, I would!

 

[bplein]

Please examine:

1. Fan speed and sound decibels under sustained load
2. Improvement to inbuilt speakers compared with current iMac
3. Screen luminance and colour compared with current iMac
4. File transfer speed from 10Gbit ethernet

Thank you for doing this for the benefit of others.

File transfer speeds will be dependent on how high of performance he can make the target device. I'm going to set up a 10Gbit-connected VM running a small NFS server backed by some Fusion-io PCIe SSD and give this a try (and use it for additional tier-1 storage). But it will take some tuning on the NFS server (and from what I've read, on the iMac Pro side) to get the most out of 10Gbit NFS.

So be patient with numbers from that last bit, unless you have a known-good high performance NFS server and Mac setup, there are lots of steps to get that number up to where it should be (google "10gbit NFS macOS", lots of links)

In my case, each Fusion-io drive is limited to about the throughput of a single 10Gbit connection, so to make sure they aren't the bottleneck, I'll probably stripe them first.

 

[Mr. Dee]

I think you're misunderstanding me...or perhaps I did a poor job of communicating my intent properly since it was very late at night and I had been out working in the cold. (Probably was me.) But what I'm trying to convey is if we all take a step back for a minute, isn't it funny when somehow we admire how something is boxed up when all that really matters is the product's performance? When it comes down to it, the iMac could be sleeved in a pink pokka-dot wrapper with 50 little images of Tim Cook's face all over it and it still wouldn't matter. (Well, that would be pretty funny.) Anyway, I was just pointing out the silliness of seemingly caring more about how it's boxed up versus the what the iMac can actually do. (Tongue in cheek smiles here...I'm not calling you out personally!)

Also, in answer to your question, I am not concerned in the slightest if someone buys a fully-specced 18-core model to only surf MacRumors and type in MS Word. Good for them, certainly no concern here!

Cheers, and if I could buy you a beer right now, I would!

Its not even performance that matters at the end of the day, its what "you" the user does with it. You can have a speced put iMac Pro but are just as useless with it as someone with pencil and paper. I saw a video of a guy who uses Excel to make magnificent illustrations that would put any Adobe Illustrator veteran to shame.

At the end of the day, packaging is a critical part of the product experience. You think Jony Ive cares anything about 18 cores and GB networking? Yet, its the design of the product that is a major reason why this is getting so much buzz. There are folks who are buying this thing just for the space gray mouse and keyboard.

At the end of the day, the Internet is big enough for questions like mine. I wasn't wasting anyones bandwidth but mine asking for whats in the box. The OP could have gladly ignored it and I would not have cared either way. Just try not to make these over emotional zero in on someones comments. A sarcastic chuckle would have been enough.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

Its not even performance that matters at the end of the day, its what "you" the user does with it. You can have a speced put iMac Pro but are just as useless with it as someone with pencil and paper. I saw a video of a guy who uses Excel to make magnificent illustrations that would put any Adobe Illustrator veteran to shame.

At the end of the day, packaging is a critical part of the product experience. You think Jony Ive cares anything about 18 cores and GB networking? Yet, its the design of the product that is a major reason why this is getting so much buzz. There are folks who are buying this thing just for the space gray mouse and keyboard.

At the end of the day, the Internet is big enough for questions like mine. I wasn't wasting anyones bandwidth but mine asking for whats in the box. The OP could have gladly ignored it and I would not have cared either way. Just try not to make these over emotional zero in on someones comments. A sarcastic chuckle would have been enough.

It was never about you. Buy the iMac Pro for whatever makes you happy, whether it’s the packaging, the exterior color, or the actual performance. It’s all good.

Enjoy! I’m excited about getting one too.

 

[dannys1]

Please examine:

1. Fan speed and sound decibels under sustained load
2. Improvement to inbuilt speakers compared with current iMac
3. Screen luminance and colour compared with current iMac
4. File transfer speed from 10Gbit ethernet

Thank you for doing this for the benefit of others.

1 and 2, no problem, I have current 27" iMac to test against, will check three but i'm 99% certain it's exactly the same screen as in current iMac.
Unfortunately can't do number 4 as I don't currently have any other 10Gbit equipment though i'd be really interested to see those results too. Shame there ins't a Thunderbolt 3 to 10Gbit Ethernet adapter to test with (that i'm aware of)

 

[bxs]

1 and 2, no problem, I have current 27" iMac to test against, will check three but i'm 99% certain it's exactly the same screen as in current iMac.
Unfortunately can't do number 4 as I don't currently have any other 10Gbit equipment though i'd be really interested to see those results too. Shame there ins't a Thunderbolt 3 to 10Gbit Ethernet adapter to test with (that i'm aware of)

If you have another Mac with a Thunderbolt port you could try and see how the Thunderbolt Bridge networking performs. You may need an adapter Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 adapter for doin this. I use this method for connecting three MP6,1s in our office and see transfer rates (using SMB) around 700 MBytes/sec which is close to what one might get with a 10 GbE network.

You could also simply plug in a CAT6 ethernet cable into the iMac Pro and connect the other end to a Mac with 1 GbE ethernet port to see how well that works in addition to the Thunderbolt Bridge networking.

You setup and configure the Thunderbolt Bridge using the System Prefs -> Network panel. Click on the gear widget at bottom of side panel and select "Manage Virtual Interfaces...". Post back if you need further instructions for this. Good luck.

 

[bplein]

I'll do some 10Gbit testing, although the other end will be a VM under ESXi and I don't have anything else to A/B test it or to set a baseline with. But we'll get some numbers. Give me a week, I need to first get some clean benchmarks for other things before adding my software, transferring apps and other priorities before I go onto network performance testing which with 10Gbit can require lots of server and client side optimizations to get the best performance.

 

[dannys1]

If you have another Mac with a Thunderbolt port you could try and see how the Thunderbolt Bridge networking performs. You may need an adapter Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 adapter for doin this. I use this method for connecting three MP6,1s in our office and see transfer rates (using SMB) around 700 MBytes/sec which is close to what one might get with a 10 GbE network.

You could also simply plug in a CAT6 ethernet cable into the iMac Pro and connect the other end to a Mac with 1 GbE ethernet port to see how well that works in addition to the Thunderbolt Bridge networking.

You setup and configure the Thunderbolt Bridge using the System Prefs -> Network panel. Click on the gear widget at bottom of side panel and select "Manage Virtual Interfaces...". Post back if you need further instructions for this. Good luck.

Ill try Thunderbolt 3 bridging, though I don't expect it to be great, it was always really poor under T1 and T2, maybe T3 get's it right. I'll give it a go with the MacBook Pro and see what sort of throughput I can get.

 

[Mac32]

It would be interesting to see how the 8 core works with turbo boost, considering the low base clock - ie. how the turbo boost will work through sustained loads and how high it goes. Thanks!

 

[Trebuin]

It would be interesting to see how the 8 core works with HyperThreading, considering the low base clock - ie. how the HyperThreading will work through sustained loads and how high it goes. Thanks!

Hyperthreading will work just as it has. Any unused cycles will be available for the hyperthreaded processors. Turboboost will be a bit more valuable as I have seen in the first benchmarks. Regardless of how Intel clocked the chips 3.2 vs 3.5 or whatever, the benchmark had it running at 3.9 continuously...which means regardless of the base frequency, there should be no difference in the chips.

 

[dannys1]

Ok it arrived today.

No benchmark or stress testing yet as I haven't even really booted into macOS - plenty of quirks.

First of all - exterior box is the same as 27" iMac but inside has had a new redesign, gone is the white polystyrene which has been replaced with a recyclable cardboard instead. The power cable no longer is stuff into a bit of polystyrene and often bouncing around but in it's own cardboard box, light lighting cables in iPhones wrapped with cardboard. I suspect next iMac refresh will follow this boxing as Apple tries to reduce non-recycable packaging materials.

As I suspected and argued with people on here the iMac Pro is indeed a much darker shade of "Space Grey" than the MacBook Pro.

First boot quirk - now you hold the key to get to startup menus AFTER the see the Apple logo. This appears to have replaced the old "chime" period - you see the Apple logo, press and hold what you want and the logo will flash and load that screen (be it recovery or disk selection etc)

Obviously as we know you can' boot to external drives out of the box, I did try it and got a "disk needs to be updated" which then failed and told me I had to disable the security in recovery mode.

Now the most annoying quirk. Unlike SIP, you can't just boot into recovery mode out of the box and disable the boot disk security - the tool asks for an admin account password and with no admin accounts you can't do anything - you first have to finish setup assistant before you can do anything.
I think this is silly and an oversight for Mac Admins. If you have physical access to the machine and there are no admin accounts on it, it's obviously brand new and it's no additional security to make you create an account following setup assistant than just letting you disabled it straight away (and no you can't create an account from terminal in recovery mode) - if a machine has no admin accounts on I think it the security boot utility to should be open to use, if the machine does have a admin account then obviously it's in use and at this point it makes sense to protect the machines and ask for the admin password when accessing the utility.

I'll file a radar but don't expect this behaviour to be changed unfortunately - it would be nice if admins could order machines with it disabled as default.

So having created a dummy admin account, rebooting back into recovery mode I disabled everything. I still couldn't boot from my external drive as the iMac Pro ONLY supports APFS. Plus it has a build of High Sierra which Apple have made available on Apple Downloads not the Mac App store - the only way to get it from recovery mode (which as we all know takes ages to download for some odd reason).

You can't install this to a HFS disk either, you get the message that you can only install High Sierra to APFS volumes on this machine - so I had to convert my admin disk to this and it's currently downloading that version to install. Hopefully then i'll be able to boot from my external drive.

More to follow...

 

[Mac32]

Hyperthreading will work just as it has. Any unused cycles will be available for the hyperthreaded processors. Turboboost will be a bit more valuable as I have seen in the first benchmarks. Regardless of how Intel clocked the chips 3.2 vs 3.5 or whatever, the benchmark had it running at 3.9 continuously...which means regardless of the base frequency, there should be no difference in the chips.

Oops, I ment turbo boost. Don't know what happened there...