All the iMac Pro announcement tells me is that Hackintoshes will have some more life. And, I suppose, that Apple is back to at least trying to make Mac users happy. Still, this thing seems to be like a stop-gap at best. It's something Apple is rushing out for December after (suddenly) just a couple months ago realizing that Pros were pissed off. It might stem the bleeding, and I'm glad they announced it now instead of waiting another 6 months, but it's doubtful they even have a prototype working yet.
The fact is, we haven't had any benchmarks, we haven't had any reviews. We have no idea what it sounds like or what thermal throttling it might be doing. We're still probably 18 months out from the new new Mac Pro, and Apple never even guaranteed a release in 2018.
Actually, I've thought of something this tells us about the next Mac Pro. It won't be like the cMP. If Apple is suddenly willing to take modern components and stick them in an existing case and paint it a new color, like with the iMac Pro, then Apple could obviously do the same this year with the old cheese grater box. The fact that Apple isn't doing that should tell us something about what the Mac Pro will look like. It also tells us something about what Apple thinks Pros want from a Mac Pro. Would anyone here be truly unsatisfied with a standard tower from Apple with PCI slots and a few internal drive bays? Apple could announce and release one like that by the end of the year. They've proven that with the iMac Pro, which surely takes more hardware design work than a standard tower and roughly the same amount of firmware and driver work. Nope, Apple's working on something different. Will we like what they come up with? Remains to be seen.
What the iMac Pro tells me, just about the company, is that they might be willing to add new Mac models again. Maybe iPads aren't selling as well as they'd hoped and Macs are selling better than they have previously, and Apple's willing to devote more resources to the Mac. The religion of mobile may be coming to an end. Assuming they'll sell iMac Pros and Mac Pros side-by-side in the future, this effectively marks a new model. Will we see a headless "Mac", using consumer-grade CPUs with PCI slots and more than one internal drive bay, with the same general case as the "Mac Pro"? Is Apple going to announce next year not just one new line next year, but three? The Mac Mini, Mac, and Mac Pro? Even if the three models don't sell as well as their MacBooks and iMacs, it does help them stay relevant, helps them boost the ecosystem, and it sends a powerful message to content creators and app developers. Maybe I'm just dreaming. It's still way too early to tell.
