I was thinking the same thing reading the arguments. They got the space to do both in my opinion but I'd take cheap/accessible RAM over iMac Pro style cooling. Have never heard my iMac, I have run out of ram. Maybe the 5700 XT will change that opinion.
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Will there ever be a new large iMac (Pro)?
- Thread starter krazzix
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Aye. I love Vram. Is that two sticks of VRAM in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?
Like all those mobile cpu phone chip makers tried to convince us we didn't need a 64 bit chip in a phone...when Apple did it.
VII with 16 gig. Was a decent card by AMD considering the circumstances. It was a resourceful product. And performed decently.
Azrael.
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Agreed.
Azrael.
The iMac Pro case is a dual edged sword. The cooling is much better. The effective RAM prices for a price sensitive consumer is far higher. That latter is more consumer hostile than just keeping the same cooling system ( which is cheaper. ) .
It depends upon where Apple is primarily aiming this iMac . At the $1,700- 2,400 price zone or the $3,000+ price zone. I suspect most of 27" iMac sales are in that first group and not the second one. Keep the RAM door ( and just keep the deep pocketed corp folks who "have to" buy the RAM on one purchase order with the iMac in one shot. ) .
It is one reason why Apple was so remiss to get off of HDD. There was a significant enough market demand for affordability. Apple didn't drop the price of the SSDs ( still in the $400 per TB range) so had to shrink cost of components elsewhere to keep the same price points as before ( or as close as they could ... without dropping the profit margin).
Folks who want better AIO cooling have to move up to the iMac Pro . ( and Apple gets more money. )
That said , from a design perspective it is more than a bit lame that Apple couldn't have flipped the one fan to the other side of the case midline and used some of that 3.5" HDD space to insert a bigger fan. They are so dogmatically in "reuse stuff we already have" mode that can't even move the fan mount points on case and perhaps rejigger the power supply orientation. The internals here just scream that someone handed down a "reuse as much stuff from other Macs as possible" design restriction here. [ The industrial design team probably is a timeline choke point so there is that upside too of avoiding them for any case mods. ]
Not too 'weird' decision as much as "keep the profit margins as high as possible" . It is just a different dimension from design. And yeah in this case they are leaning heavily on Intel to deliver better CPU package heat transfer efficiencies to pull off coasting on the same old case.
Also not too 'weird' in that Apple is probably applying more R&D resources to the Apple Silicon iMacs that will come after this. This system is more of a stop-gap to hold the fort in the price range for a 1-1.5 years. In part because the Mac Industrial design allocation probably doesn't all them to do much "walk and chew gum at the same time". Only a subset of the Mac line up can be upgraded per year ( a path they have been on for last 6-8 years. )
The cooling isn't what some folks want it to be , but the new tech is viable in the case. Some of the higher BTO parts leave some potential "horsepower" on the floor when pushed hard, but still work better if moving up from a 4-5+ year old models.
or the iMac Pro, with nice cooling but 3 year old components - at the same price, of course. Which, in my country, is exactly 6356 US dollars, and that's because it's discounted a bit. Worth it for a Vega 56?
the Price should have dropped pragmatically as Apple moves the high core count down into the "old" prices. That is actually a change.
There isn't any substantively new Intel solutions to move to. Xeon W 2100 -> 2200 change was far more so a price drop than new tech. Apple appears to not even taken the new tech but finally got to passing along the price drop.
IMHO it won't be surprising to perhaps see a "kick the can" iMac Pro update to appear later that bumps the GPUs. That too would be leveraged by Apple to coast another 1-1.5 years to a Apple Silicon solution.
Apple both doesn't want to get rid of the iMac Pro but also it isn't a high priority. After squatting on the Mac Pro for 6 years , it won't be surprising if Apple ends up squatting on the iMac Pro for 4-5 years also. 2021 MPX GPU updates for the Mac Pro and coast on that too until well into 2022.
Every time you say your order has updated, it's only a matter of time before mine follows suit, I hope it does this time as well! Thursday the 13th is a lot nicer than the 19th but Monday makes sense. Had a keyboard come from Beijing on August 1 and it got here in San Diego on August 4.
We're on the cusp of great tech' change. Ampere/RDNA2. RDNA2 in a console for £399 with ray tracing in games no less.
Intel are between a rock and a hard place of their own making.
ARM. Tsunami.
Apple have offered a tantalising view of what 'A' can do at 2020. Professional workloads on consumer Apple Macs. Consumer Macs with sound gpu performance. A seismic shudder as the Mac enters a market with tens of thousands of devs and millions of apps.
AS is coming. Mouth watering anticipation. We don't have long to wait until October.
Apple will be there come the breaking of the dawn.
In the meantime...I'll be grateful for a massively priced cut iMac Pro at £3400. 10 cores. And a 'decent' gpu with 16 gigs of Vram. (What's that, Azrael? You get SSDs now?)
But I have to provide my own cooling solution...*humps* iFridge upstairs...
Azrael.
Decent post.
Kick the Can. Well, the Mac Dev Team had to be playing...Cough...I mean doing something in the last 12 years...
There's probably a BTO on the RDNA2 coming for the iMac Pro.
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The 10 core is lookin' pricey. And that gpu...is a bit long in the tooth...still, it's got that sexy grey paint and extra cooling fan.
Azrael.
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18th-20th, Whiteman007.
I wouldn't say 'no' to it being moved up either...
i am seeing 17 - 24 as someone who ordered days later than you guys.
My order status says 20th of August.
Its in the processing part of the order status (green bar...)
There was a slight security hitch with the bank (good thing...as £3400 is no small potatoes...) but when I run Apple they said it won't affect anything. They've taken the money now. I might ring them in a little while just to check everything is a-ok.
'We'll update your order when it is preparing to ship...'
Azrael.
No doubt. Ideally I would love the Mac Pro with a Core CPU over Xeon, a consumer grade motherboard setup( don’t need all the crazy amount expansion slots) with room for a MPX module to make it all affordable.
Performance for me hasn’t been much of an issue on my i9. I usually manually max out the fan as I value keeping the components cool over noise as I wear headphones which mask the fan noise. Then again the games I play hit the Vega 48 hard and my limiting factor and the i9 is barely loaded. Temps for both usually in the 70-80 degree range. But I would have to imagine if both were loaded at full crank I would get some throttling as the heat from both heat soaks the one heat sink.
It just would have been nice for Apple to do something with that extra space with the HD’s gone to do some tweaking to the cooling system.
Same for me. It surly has a number in the production line. Maybe i can catch up some because i payed for express shipping.
Yeah.
Would have been nice... *Looks at price of the iMac.*
Still. We've had some 'victories' on this iMac.
Although, with AS iMac on the horizon...they may turn out to be pyrrhic victories.
Azrael.
Same for me. It surly has a number in the production line. Maybe i can catch up some because i payed for express shipping.
Quite a few have had their orders moved up. So that's great for them. Clearly the current 'situation' does affect the 'new' iMac at all. (Despite all our theories...)
Hope you catch up. It will be nice for you to get your iRig. You've sustained the torture along with us.
Azrael.
A consumer grade Mac Pro and Retina display in the $5K range for the whole package would be killer, but it would be enough for most and Apple wants as many specced up $12K towers and $6K displays going out as much as possible even if not needed. Maybe AS will get us there.
Mac Pro (for mortals.)
£1500. £2000. £2500.
Displays.
4k. £500.
5k. £1000.
6k. £2000.
8k. £3500.
The only hope for any rationality for future Macs is AS.
Because the current desktop is a hubris, boutique train wreck.
The iMac is the best value going. It's effectively an iMac Pro with a massive price cut and sans cooling.
None of my suggestions are 'cheap.' That's premium pricing for a tower w/out monitor.
Then you add the monitor...and you're on your way to £3.5k or more.
Azrael.
12k towers and 6k displays. 18k? *goes out to buy a lottery ticket...*
Meanwhile, in the real world...
£1.5-3k tower and affordable displays? Why hath thy forsaken us, Apple?
Azrael.
With Nano Glass you might even argue that it exiles the iMac Pro. But well, who cares, i get what i won't. Worst case i have someone take the computer apart, drill a hole in the chase and install a cooling block were the HDD used to be. xD
Maybe they’re on the same plane! I’m up the coast in Oregon.
They didn't delay the fix to the MBP keyboards for 4 years. Apple was dogmatically stuck on making the butterfly to work for 1.5-2.5 years. It is only after they switched. When Apple makes a hard call on where the future is going , that's where they are going. Thinner notebooks are the likely the future Apple is moving to. They had to give a bit for now on the butterfly keyboard but that will probably result in them stripping out height some other way in the future . ( dumping x86 solutions will be part of that.)
SATA drives are the "past". The only reason the Mac Pro 2019 got some SATA ability is because they already had to buy the Intel I/O chipset (PCH) that had it anyway. So since paid for and there was "extra" internal space they added the sockets. But if there was no space it would have been dropped.
Apple Silicon is not going to natively support SATA. iOS and iPad devices don't need it so it isn't coming.
APFS file geared toward HDDs at all. It probably begrudgingly got some HDD and Fusion support but the basic operations of the file system are not geared to HDDs at all. APFS on HDDs is at minimum awkward. Selling entry level Macs with APFS layered on HDDs is selling pain points.
Apple has been on the "Flash drive is the future" track for more than several years now. If the Mini is dumping SATA then the iMac was inevitable.
When Apple Silicon Arrives internal SATA drives were going to disappear. The Mac Pro may be a very narrow corner case with an discrete SATA/USB controller added to he logicboard.
the iMac isn't going away. There were iMacs with PPC CPUs in them before. When Apple switched the x86 there was still iMacs. There really isn't a good upside in Apple tossing the "iMac" brand away in the trash can. Yeah they have mumbled something about no new "i" prefixed products, but the iMac as a brand name is not new. They could try to use simple "Mac" as a product but the major problem there is that "Mac" is pragmatically the name of the product line ( at least the short version).
Something like "asMas" would be silly. They have a good name for the midrange desktop Mac product. There are exceedingly few reasons to throw it away just because the internals are changing.
It is not strange at all if they aren't going to have a 27' class iMac Apple Silicon solution for another 1-1.5 years. If the laptop range is changing more rapidly they are going to need to have something substantive to "hold" the desktop market in the mean time.
So pour all the other desktop stuff in 1080 webcam . 10 cores from iMac Pro. 10Gb/e from Mini and Pro . etc. That will help keep the Osborne effect from casusing problems during the somewhat lengthy wait to get to the other.
Then Intel transition was a "Big Bang" one that happened quickly. That was enabled in large part by two things. First Intel has a full can complete line up of x86 CPU packages to move to . Even more than Apple was going to every buy. It was a relatively huge line of CPU options from which Apple coud select a specific subset.
Second, they could lean on Intel to do some of the work to get the new logic boards across. Intel hands out "reference design" boards for the CPU production. Can have a generic working system up fast so all the individual system vendors have to do is built a board that is a variation of what Intel provides. Some rumors that appears on this site even hinted that Intel did most of the Mac Pro 2016 work. That is one reason why the board had more mainstream features. SATA routing about the same. Pretty standard ATX form factor. etc. Even more so leaning on the XServe.
[ Intel didn't have a good 64-bit laptop processor to shirt to. But they had something halfway decent if limited to 32-bits. ]
Both of those allowed Apple to under promise and over deliver. ( give themselves two years. And finish in about 15 months for vast majority of the line up and 18 to finish it all; non-GUI, single-user XServe trailing on the tail end. )
Neither of those are present here at all. Apple has no full line up of Apple Silicon to move to at all. They hare very little history of doing any such that at all. The bulk of their iOS and iPadOS products all operation on "hand me down" processors. When the do a new SoC it goes into all the new products that year. While iPhone 11 ( and 2020 SE ) line up. One single SoC. Watch? One single SoC. .. same exact configuration. iPad Pro ... 12X -> 12Z . Exact same die with on GPU "core" turned on in over a 1 year deployment. All of that is not a vendor that is providing timely, concurrent, broad ecosystem CPU packages for a highly diverse set of products.
So pretty likely that Apple will do a gradual roll out of Apple Silicon. They will do a really good laptop SoC. Pause and then do a really good mid range SoC. Pause and then do a really good high end SoC. Then repeat the cycle.
And even if there was a full line up there is no broad spectrum "dot the i's and cross the t's" service to provide reference designs and run down a wide sprectrum of compatibility problems. Every new Mac on these first transitions is going to be pretty close to a "greenfield" move. No reference designs to "crib notes" off of. Yes, Apples designers aren't inexperiences. But Apple also tends to take having their own Silicon as a new opportunity to drive the product into a new "painted into corner" that the hardware now has to bail them out of . The combination doesn't lend itself to be timely.
[ The deeply pipelined and concurrent iPhone development process heavily masks the issue that those designs take a long while to come out. They aren't worked on sequentially. ]
In contrast, the Mac line up seems to have a "walk and chew gum at the same time" issues. if the MBP is being iterated on then the MBA can't change much. new Mini , no iMac. new iMac Pro , no Mac Pro. New Mac Pro ... no new iMac Pro . There are lots of indications that Mac have a finite set of resources allotted to them. ( some fixed subset of the industrial design , some subset of the OS core team , etc. )
So this time when Apple says " about 2 years" there is pretty good chance that will slide a bit over 24 months just as much as a bit under 24 months.
That will also give the folks who "have to have " SATA , m.2 slots , Bootcamp (bare metal) Windows/Linux , etc. time to adjust to what is going to disappear.
That may be in part more Intel and AMD than Apple having nothing to "jump to". I wouldn't bet on the iMac Pro disappearing. If there Navi 2 shipping now they would be something to move the iMac Pro to. Likewise if Intel had delivered what might be coming early 2021 in the Xeon W series ( an Ice Lake variant of Xeon W ).
With Apple Silicon there probably is still room for a iMac Pro. ( higher capacity and ECC RAM. Better screen , higher core count. ) that is the AIO price range just below the still ~$6K Mac Pro.
High probability that Apple will use Apple Silicon to move to smaller , 'slimer' systems . The Mac Pro is relatively just pain big in the Mac line up. Apple will be looking for something smaller and better literal fit on top of the desktop.
Beautiful! Looking forward to Ampere, RDNA 2 and the new consoles later this year.
NVIDIA might also launch GeForce RTX Ampere graphics card with 20GB of memory - VideoCardz.com
NVIDIA is allegedly planning to introduce at least three memory variants of the PG132 board. NVIDIA PG132: 24GB, 20GB and 10GB It is rumored that NVIDIA might launch three variants based on the PG132 reference board. This board is rumored to be using NVIDIA GA102 GPU, the flagship gaming...videocardz.com
20/24(?!) gig of Vram?
Just when I was getting that 'superior' feeling about having 16...VRAM. (I remember the iMac days when Apple skimped on GPU Vram...)
Well. There's always a bigger iBanana...
Azrael.
A few decisions to be made... Oh, and the new iPhone and Apple Watch may be of interest too
Thanks Dec, for taking the time, interesting and useful thoughts and facts.
I have made a typo, I had in mind to write "So, if the intel iMac is a dying product, because of the AS coming, why bother after all these years?..." forgot the "intel", sorry.
Anyway, as you have noted about Mac naming, I think that Apple has an opportunity to introduce new names for the AS Mac lines, AS is a significant milestone, to make them easily recognisable and separate them from the intel past, all or some of them.
This has also happened back in 2006 PowerMac -> MacPro, Powerbook -> MacBook, of course the iMac and Mac mini retained their names.
It might also be an indicator that the iMac Pro will get this option in a refresh in due course too.
Pretty much highest upsell possible in the highest tier except nano glass, ram and "only" 2TB SSD.
New names are not easily recognisable, they are the opposite of that, they are completely unfamiliar. They would have to go to the trouble of educating the public on what the new names mean, and to what end? Better to use familiar, well established product names but simply present new generations of them with differentiated features to mark the advancement.
And it’s not in Apple’s culture to couple product names with internal technology. They tend to try to mask that. It would also be highly unprofessional and disrespectful to a key partner to make too big a fuss over the switch from Intel. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple focus on features and outcomes and benefits and barely mention Intel if at all.
When Intel was killing it ten years ago with Core Duo, everyone thought AMD was done. Intel will come out of this.
ARM is not the be all end all of the microprocessor design. Have you looked into the debate with RISC-V vs ARM? NVIDIA is using RISC-V based controllers in its GPU design.
Will AMD/Intel move from CISC to RISC design? Probably not but who knows what ideas they are cooking up in advancing the CISC architecture to compete with ARM. Whatever changes they will make to the future architecture won't happen independently as there are too many interests involved.
i.e. one of AMD's initiatives - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a...k0XrllUxWkVQseUyiSNCYaXSmqxFdhVu8Z_7mEDSbCKUA
As for the Intel shares, have you looked at their share price trend since when it first listed in 1980? Just about every company's share has tanked since mid-March due to COVID, intel is no different. With exception to Tesla, they killed it!!!
Too many posts on here remind of Chicken Little's the sky is falling. Do some sound research before pounding your chest.
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