To be honest, I don't understand your thinking. You say that the iMac pays for itself because of your work which is fine but why not the Mac Pro? Sure, you might pay a little more (not that much though) but you will have in a way two items that in the long term are way more feasible and economically affordable. AiO solution for pros when mac pro is out seems to be a bit moot point as mentioned. As a pro, your specs requirement can change and in case of iMac Pro you are out of luck. Mac Pro has longer longevity and upgradability so for yourself it is logical item to get if you are willing to spend $10k. With iMac Pro if your requirements get bigger you are getting rid off the whole thing. You simply can't keep the display. So all in all, why would you get AiO solution when you are spending $10k (or more)?
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Will there ever be a new large iMac (Pro)?
- Thread starter krazzix
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One can only hope that the disaster that they call Catalina, will be somewhat solved by then.
You do make a good point, but it's a bit of a myth that the Mac Pro is "super upgradeable". The motherboard is stuck on PCIe rev 3 vs. the newer 4 spec. So right out of the gate, some of your DIY PC computers are a step ahead in technology already; and upgrading a Mac is not like a PC where you just pull out the motherboard, and drop in a new one.
So potentially, you're limited to a CPU upgrade of a specific generation in the Mac Pro. Graphics cards, you get a bit more leeway with, but even still, if you want a card fully supported by Mac OS, you need drivers. When you need drivers, and ROM support on the graphic card level for Mac OS you again rely on Apple. So for best results, you purchase only what cards Apple releases. etc. etc. etc.
The real benefit to the Mac Pro is the range of configuration options for low to super high-end computing performance, with the ability to scale. I'm a software developer doing mostly web and mobile applications, or hardware coding for embedded systems that don't require high levels of computing power.
So again, for my usage case ... yes, it "pays for itself" but that money still comes out of the business expense and if I don't need to spend another $10,000 on a computer for no real reason, it's still wasted money at that point I could use to purchase other things.
I get that but lets just think in span of 10 years.
You will probably recycle 2 iMac Pros in that time or 2 Mac Pros in that time.
With that in mind, you only buy screen once so logically, you will save money if you choose the mac pro path.
Also, wouldn't top iMac be enough for your needs? Or do you really need workstation CPU and ECC ram?
You will probably recycle 2 iMac Pros in that time or 2 Mac Pros in that time.
With that in mind, you only buy screen once so logically, you will save money if you choose the mac pro path.
Also, wouldn't top iMac be enough for your needs? Or do you really need workstation CPU and ECC ram?
The best CPU you can get on the 21.5 is the i7-8700, no?
The question is if Apple will save 10th gen for the 27" models to make them more appealing, considering the base Comet Lake-S i5 performs pretty dang close to the 8700 & 9700
Both 21.5" and 27" appear to have socketed CPUs upon closer inspection with iFixit - obviously that means they can be swapped out for more powerful CPUs from the same family but it's a very fiddly operation and will obviously void warranties which probably explains why it's not more commonly done.
The 2019 iMacs arrived so late in the day that Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs had already started to appear on the scene - that's why the top SKU iMac has 9th generation (Coffee Lake Refresh) i5 K series and i9 BTO option. I seem to recall only the K series top performers had arrived on the scene when the 2019 iMac was launched in March - the K Series CFL-R CPUs were launched in Q4 of 2018. The bread and butter CPUs (i5-9400 for example) arrived not long after that but obviously too late for the iMac of 2019.
Intel also offered F variants of the same CPU (i5-9400F) at deep discounts with the iGPU portion of the CPU disabled. Without a T2 CPU doing the transcoding work that Quicksync would do for AirPlay (and Sidecar) I don't think Apple could offer this CPU even if they had a discrete AMD GPU driving the screen.
Comet Lake S requires a new motherboard design (4xx series, the current Coffee Lake is on 3xx series) - it's not a drop-in design.
While Apple could in theory bump the top two tiers of the 21.5" iMac and the lower and mid tier 27" iMac they can't do the same with the top tier 27" because they're already using the best drop-in CPU.
And any drop-in refresh can't involve the base 21.5" because it's on a dated 7th gen Kaby Lake mobile chipset with a 1080p screen no doubt to hit a price point. If Apple want to streamline supply chain they should consider dropping it and price cutting the other 2 SKUs.
I would have advocated a bit of engineering to use the F series Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs in any early 2020 iMac refresh prior to information arriving about what the Comet Lake S series would be capable of doing.
If you're needing to add T2 CPU to a motherboard you may as well make it a new one to accommodate the next generation of CPUs and one or two refreshes thereafter.
The only fly in that ointment is the Mac mini refresh and the idea in the current climate that just letting assembly lines continue to churn out pretty much the same product from the same parts bin for another 18 months will do.
A fair bit of it depends on what "pro" workflow you are doing, though.
If I am a software developer or audio engineer, for example, GPU performance is not important to me. I just need CPU cores and memory (and in both areas, what is probably optimal is well below what the Mac Pro's limits are) and a nice screen to look at. And with folks on here using their iMacs in a General Productivity role for upwards of a decade, chances are my initial iMac Pro purchase could last that long, as well.
As such, spending over $17,000 for a similar Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR when a $6600 iMac Pro works just as well would be financially irresponsible of me.
I get that but lets just think in span of 10 years.
You will probably recycle 2 iMac Pros in that time or 2 Mac Pros in that time.
With that in mind, you only buy screen once so logically, you will save money if you choose the mac pro path.
Also, wouldn't top iMac be enough for your needs? Or do you really need workstation CPU and ECC ram?
Potentially yes, you're right. That does make sense with the two screens, but if I buy 2x Mac Pros that's still a sizeable amount more cash than an iMac Pro.
Right now yes, the top end iMac (2019) is what I'm running but only because the iMac Pro can't output 6K resolution on the Pro Display sadly. But, I should really be running a workstation class CPU and ECC ram with more Thunderbolt ports, the better SDcard reader and the other benefits of the iMac Pro.
One other thing I do like, is not having a separate tower. I have the iMac and the XDR on a dual VESA arm, mounted to a sit/stand motorized desk as well. Cleans up the whole desk & setup if I don't need the full-blown power of the Mac Pro ... PLUS, the iMac Pro is noticeably more quiet in everyday operation
Another consideration ... there are many reasons why a new iMac Pro chassis with an upgraded screen would just be for me anyhow the *perfect* setup.Update: returned the iMac and went Mac Pro loaded up. Have to figure out how to get my setup with the standing desk to work ... arg. But, the tradeoff for having 2x Pro Display XDR's and a Mac Pro ... what a beautifully crafted machine. I take it back, the Mac Pro is worth it. Still think a pro-oriented full refresh of the iMac Pro with a matching screen would just be incredible for a lot of people ... but, at this point, incredibly happy I went Mac Pro.
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I did a bit of reading around to see how world RAM prices are doing. It's well understood that Apple could afford to double up SSD sizes for no extra cost due to their buying power and forward hedging of NAND, but could they do the same for RAM?
Articles from mid 2019, almost a year ago, suggested that DDR4 was never so cheap. A quick look at RAM price trackers suggests that the prices have stayed that low with only supply shortages potentially behind price increases.
We might also be getting to the point where buying in 4Gb sticks isn't as economical as 8Gb sticks going forward, and the true refresh model of the iMac may come with 16Gb of RAM as standard and may be planned to arrive in 2021.
If Apple were to leave storage alone they could double up the RAM to 16Gb as you suggest. Buying 16Gb of RAM (2x8) for an iMac 27" costs around £75 from a swift check right on Amazon now (down from around £110 at the time that the iMacs originally came out) - and fitting it in a 27" iMac would leave you with 24Gb. Apple charge £200 to upgrade 8Gb of RAM to 16Gb and they keep your original 8Gb.
Without a T2 CPU to feed, and assuming size of storage is more important than storage speed (SSD) at the same price point then Apple could double the RAM on every model, keeping the complete range on sale. This is obviously quite important for buyers of the 21.5" iMac who can't easily upgrade their RAM.
It might also be easy to believe that the iMac Pro will continue in the current form factor. I've already suggested that, due to price cuts by Intel, NAND price cuts, and the aforementioned cuts in RAM prices that Apple could afford to restructure the iMac line-up and create a lower iMac Pro SKU to sit as a cheaper entry level machine.
So Apple are charging you £200 quid for a stick of 8 gigs. Bare faced cheek. And because iMacs are sealed with cellotape...you 'can't' upgrade it yourself. Hostage to fortune at point of sale.
SSDs are dirt cheap right now. Going for as low as £100.
So, for £175. 16 gigs of ram and a 1TB SSD would make the iMac less apologetic.
The iMac Pro is a £2k-ish machine with a hefty mark up. Sexy dark grey. But how long ago where those specs put out now? Cobwebs in I.T terms.
The mainstream iMac limps along with it's insufficient (if you slightly push it...) cooling system, heavy bezel borders and, being polite, 'modest' specs.
Whether the iMac Pro has it's place or not makes me shrug somewhat. Semantics. It has a different motherboard with superior cooling and Intel's price gauge components which Apple will happily deliver the grim reaper of their mark up upon. The Mac Mini has already had it's 'Pro' make over which makes the silver iMac seem somewhat dated visually. If the iMac gets a paint job the only thing that separates it are the internal specs.
Unless Apple are going to do a radical 'do-over' of the iMac Pro to look like the Apple Pro Display.
I guess I'm saying the Mac Pro could have a different less exotic motherboard with non Xeon/EEC ram to justify such a hefty price. And sell a tower close to £2000. But that isn't Apple's business model.
iMac customer in 2008 and 2012 (should have waited a bit longer on that last round...) and a tower with access to a 5k screen would be better from my point of view and I'm sure the needs of a great many creatives.
But, as ever. Me or others are waiting to see what Apple will do. 6 years only for the next Mac tower to double the price and add £1k on top. That sure taught me a lesson.
Dual Mac / PC set up this time. With a better value many Core PC tower to do the heavy lifting this time. We'll see what 'Mac' Apple released this year 'iMac' wise.
But it won't pay me to hold my breath.
Azrael.
Don't fall into the trap that PC folks commonly fall into - Apple's SSDs should only be compared to an NVME Samsung 970 Pro costing around £300 retail at Amazon today. This is in terms of raw performance but probably also in terms of read/write longevity.
You can call them out on the commodity RAM they buy though which is probably partly behind their reasoning behind going to 8Gb sticks if they are planning ahead to October 2021 for example. They need to price up for the next couple of years while they sell these parts if they decide to make the 2019 iMac linger on.
Comet Lake S - if that's what they end up using - will inevitably need even faster DDR4 RAM but that's for another day when we've found out what speed RAM that is.
Ironically, the Samsung 970 Pro has remained roughly the same price for a year in the retail channel - but our understanding right now is that Apple's advance hedging and economies of scale ensure that they can afford to double the amount of SSD in relevant products.
Your example 'shock' price of 1Tb + 16Gb of RAM actually costs a little under £400 in the retail channel, not £175, because Apple's SSD is the best of the best even if their RAM is cheap. Incidentally it can afford to be cheap on the RAM because RAM performance doesn't really matter on Intel CPUs. AMD's Ryzen CPUs are much more sensitive to RAM speeds and specific makes and models. Apple's habit of buying commodity RAM wouldn't help Ryzen bench marks at all and if consumers then tried to insert their own RAM in a 27" iMac with Ryzen it could actually be make it fail to boot.
If the iMac was just going for a mild RAM/Storage bump using existing parts it needs to get done ASAP before Comet Lake S CPUs start arriving in PCs. If Apple wanted to wait until October 2021 instead they might be looking at Rocket Lake (or Comet Lake H) and RDNA2 graphics in whatever refresh form factor they decide is appropriate.
And the iMac Pro actually was worth every penny of the parts that went into make the base £4899 model at the time of release in 2017. This was again based on prices of the parts in the retail channel (including some pretty high GPU pricing at the height of the GPU craze at the time). But Linus says in the video, it's the price of the parts that Apple chose to put into the iMac Pro at the time - not what PC builders would necessarily go for.
The retail price of the parts has clearly changed in the course of the last couple of years, with the Intel's price cuts under duress from AMD, RAM price drop over 3 years, Apple's well known NAND price advantages, and so on.
As from my theorising about why the iMac Pro is here - well, two years down the road we see the top SKU Comet Lake S CPUs likely to exceed the published 95w TDP - we're easily in the realms of 125w K series parts - thanks to Intel throwing more cores and higher sustained turbo speeds.
It's all too tempting to believe that the iMac redesign has actually been staring us in the face since 2017. The key change here being locking the RAM access port away - just like the 21.5" iMac.
The iMac Pro is ready any time now for a Xeon based refresh assuming Apple are happy to go with RDNA graphics (AMD Pro 5700 for example) over the impending RDNA2 graphics.
Apple could choose to go with Comet Lake S CPUs for iMacs to deliver up to 10 cores/20 threads with 125w TDP but that will clearly disrupt the iMac Pro as a value proposition.
Instead, the aforementioned price cuts three years down the line leave the iMac Pro ripe for a price cut which could bring it squarely into traditional iMac territory - albeit traditional heavily upgraded iMac territory.
If Apple make 16Gb the standard RAM for iMacs this year then they have to continue that into products going forward from 2021 - could that mean a redesigned iMac next year loses the RAM access in return for superior cooling in a smaller form factor?
We're then back at the clarion call for many Mac enthusiasts who have always wanted a cheaper headless Mac option - they watched as the 2006 Mac Pro doubled the price of entry level G5s at the time, then got even more expensive with the 2013 Mac Pro before going into the stratosphere with the 2019 Mac Pro.
The Mac mini may have gotten a stay of execution as long as it stayed in that convenient case size for the Colocation guys at the expense of a dGPU that enthusiasts wanted. Even today it's the best option for enthusiasts but once you've added the pricey eGPU on top it's not cheap any more - even after the recent storage doubling.
But it's the option that's on the table.
Only the iMac 4K. On the iMac 5K, RAM is user-replaceable via an access panel on the back.
Well not like I.T. can get something faster from someone else as Intel and AMD only within recent months have released upgraded versions of the CPU and GPU inside the 2017 iMac Pro. And Apple is rumored to be rolling those upgrades into the 2020 iMac Pro later this year.
This assumes that Apple are just going to do a straight up refresh of the iMac 27"
The iMac Pro style would be one way of updating the iMac 27" but only makes sense to re-use the (dated) case if they switched to Xeon CPUs (unless they are somehow adding more USB-C ports instead of offering 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports) with SSD as well. And we all know the iMac Pro locks away the RAM just like the 21.5" iMac does.
It probably makes sense that users will want 16Gb RAM for the next 5 years, but moreover that 4Gbx2 configurations may become less cost effective in the future for purely supply chain reasons.
Literally the only thing holding me back is the bezel and SSD in the base model, just a SSD refresh would probably get me to cave
I hope there's a better webcam this time around. I understand the challenges of squeezing a good one into a laptop while maintaining thinness but there's no excuse for the 720p camera in the current iMacs (1080p in the Pros). Having Face ID would be a nice perk too.
Yeah the iMac should have gone to 1080p in 2017 considering the iMac Pro did. Heck, the more cameras they buy the cheaper they get them for.
Evidently the current iPhone and iPad Pro FaceID sensor is too think to fit in the current iMac and MacBook family bezels, but the tech might shrink over time.
Evidently the current iPhone and iPad Pro FaceID sensor is too think to fit in the current iMac and MacBook family bezels, but the tech might shrink over time.
It's probably easy to excuse the 1080p camera in the iMac Pro as being part of the design spec for that machine while the 720p camera in the standard iMac is simply a continuation of the design that was established years ago.
The iPhone and iPad FaceTime cameras are directly connected to the digital signal processor in those iOS devices whereas the ones in Macs are connected by a slower USB interface to a CPU that's not optimised for processing that kind of information. There's a Linus Tech Tips video that explains the differences between phone cameras and laptop cameras while Apple confirms that they use the T2 CPU to process video from the FaceTime HD camera.
In the laptops, of course, there's a space reason for not going FaceTime HD, but you might logically conclude that a FaceTime HD camera is coming when Apple add a T2 CPU to the iMac.
The iPhone and iPad FaceTime cameras are directly connected to the digital signal processor in those iOS devices whereas the ones in Macs are connected by a slower USB interface to a CPU that's not optimised for processing that kind of information. There's a Linus Tech Tips video that explains the differences between phone cameras and laptop cameras while Apple confirms that they use the T2 CPU to process video from the FaceTime HD camera.
In the laptops, of course, there's a space reason for not going FaceTime HD, but you might logically conclude that a FaceTime HD camera is coming when Apple add a T2 CPU to the iMac.
I can understand it not fitting in the MacBook, the lid is quite thin, but the iMac? It seems like there’d be more room, at least in the bezel.
I think a good indication is that normally there are TONs of iMacs in the Refurbished section on the Apple Store...now there are only 3. Hopefully this means something good is coming soon.
I think a good indication is that normally there are TONs of iMacs in the Refurbished section on the Apple Store...now there are only 3. Hopefully this means something good is coming soon.
I just wonder if supply has dried up as new shipments have slowed down and people have tightened their belts in recent weeks?
I would think the same if all the other products were drying up too...they aren’t.
I am also waiting on the new models. I am still using my 2013 iMac. Hopefully soon we will see them. The biggest design feature I really want to see is make the stand height adjustable like the pro display. I am tired of using clunky monitor risers cluttering my desk.
I don't need a redesign. All i want is to not spend my 5k€ on a machine with hardware from a year ago. Q_Q
I think a good indication is that normally there are TONs of iMacs in the Refurbished section on the Apple Store...now there are only 3. Hopefully this means something good is coming soon.
I feel that there is a new version coming soon but also there is a huge demand for machines like the iMac. There are tons of people forced to work from home and not all can take office equipment home. Those that have laptops are likely getting frustrated by now and want a nice home setup. Stimulus payments are flowing and companies are sending out stipends for people to purchase equipment for home. An iMac and a refurbished iMac/Mac mini is a perfect machine for many. The refurb Mac minis sold so fast.
I bought an iMac Pro refurb for that reason.
But Apple charges $1000 for that feature stand. You think they'll offer that on the cheap?
I'd love that too, but I suspect they'll simply keep the same iconic 'L' shape stand and slap on a new smaller bezeled display.