I don't see Apple needing to wait until WWDC to announce new consumer iMacs. They've already announced new Mac portables via press release so they can do the same with the iMacs.
MCK says the 2020 iMac Pro won't release until Fall so if it is the only iMac getting a miniLED display, they can announce it at WWDC (perhaps along with a 16" MBP refresh with miniLED and 10th Generation CPUs).
£1500 for an Apple tower. That's the example I used. It's unlikely though. And sure, let's be 'realistic.' You can get a PC tower for £1300 with a 5700XT and 12 core Ryzen that will smash the iMac or Mac Pro entry model. So I gave Apple's old 'bit extra' room for error. As they used to sell said G3 tower and G4 Towers and even G5 towers for 'said' give or take.
A 5700XT 8Gb card costs between £400-600. A 12 core, 24 thread Ryzen 3900X costs £440 (not my choice you you did say 12 core, I assume you're not going after a Threadripper). I wouldn't spend under £100 on a PSU which I believe to be one of the most important parts of the system, a good motherboard and 16Gb of quality RAM (because we've picked Ryzen we can't pick cheap rubbish RAM) is probably going to be £250. Samsung 970 Pro 1Tb NVME M2 (not SATA 3 rubbish) is about £300. So that's just about reached your £1300 limit.
But crucially, I'm not going to cheap out on a case because a £50 rattly thing isn't ever going to match a decent Mac for build quality. I'm going to select a Fractal Design case costing about £150 because I like my quiet cases. And 'll probably do away with the stock cooler because I want a name brand heatsink on the CPU for silent running for that's another 50 quid (at the very least, for a Noctua).
Oh yes, I haven't put Windows 10 Pro on it yet, so that's an extra £100. I'll pass on the garish RGB, onboard sound is probably good enough for most people but I had a top class Soundblaster in my last PC and my sound card is now external.
Total price? Over £2.1k. And I have to build it myself. If were inclined to go to town silencing my PC more than I already have I could easily spend a lot more.
And yes, this will cane the average Mac even in my chosen price bracket. But it's not a Mac.
In all my years of building PCs and upgrading Macs, the main thing I did with the Macs was put hard drives into the internal drive bays and maybe upgrade the RAM later when I could afford it and where there were free slots. Occasionally I bought PCI expansion to add USB2 ports to a G4. The only thing I ever did to my G5 was fill it with hard drives and RAM so the slots in there generally went to waste.
Same story with the PCs, except I added sound cards too but nowadays I have an external USB sound cards which I have transferred between various Macs and PCs.
My point is, once the RAM was bought and drive bays filled I really didn't tinker with the insides of my machines. What I really appreciated with the PCs was the ability to replace standard parts when they failed. Luckily, this was a rare event. I had one power supply go on me in a personal PC - hence my latter-day preference for name brand quality PSUs. Otherwise I never really tinkered.
I did like the idea of being able to clean the dust filters on the PC and keep the inside clean and running efficiently. More on this later.
So a modern Mac mini probably ought to be up my street, right? I could spend 20 minutes upgrading a Mini to 64Gb and call it a day.
I'll grumble about having to put my external storage into (expensive) NAS drives and not have it directly connected any more (I will laud the flexibility offered by the NAS drives to have decentralised storage available though.)
I don't like the idea of spending hundreds of quid on an eGPU only for the experience to be sub-par by many accounts. While I do edit video I don't think it's worth the money it would cost to expand a Mini with an eGPU even if I could - theoretically - upgrade the GPU with an AMD card off the Apple support page.
Essentially, most users who buy a desktop PC aren't really going to fill their PCI slots with anything other than a graphics card. If I could source a silent and vibration free PC case with tons of drive bays I've happily unretire some of my old hard drives for use as cheap PC storage.
Back on topic with the iMacs though, with their on board GPU, excellent screens, and decent storage options. The 27" currently (see what I did there?
) has upgradable RAM which is nice. What stops me from getting it is the prospect of not being able to easily clean the insides which get dusty.
I'm never going to play games on a Mac though, that's what a PC or games console would be bought for. So I can understand why the iGPU would be enough for most people using their Mac for the most basic of stuff. When I'm just browsing Safari or doing some non video editing work the iGPU is just fine on a couple of 1440p screens. I appreciate that daily driving higher res panels could mean a bit of lag.
And a dGPU will speed up rendering on Final Cut Pro - no complaints there. But I'm hardly going to spend hundreds on an eGPU to enable that. I'd rather buy an iMac if it became an issue, but I'm now thinking about iPads and ARM, especially with Apple possibly porting that software over to iOS.
