iMac Pro (2017): Everything you need to know about Apple’s 2017 iMac Pro
The iMac Pro is Apple’s most powerful desktop PC ever and, six months after its announcement, it’s nearly available to buy for the the most demanding Mac users on earth. Here’s everything you need to know about the £4,999 iMac Pro including the latest specs, release date and price details.
We’ve been waiting a while for Apple’s latest iMac Pro, but it’s finally here. Read on for all you need to know about the new 2017 iMac Pro.
iMac Pro Release date and Price: When does the new iMac Pro come out?
The December 14 release date lives up to Apple’s promise to release the product before the end of 2017.
That’s significant, given firm has whiffed on a couple of these pledges in the last two years. AirPods were delayed by a few weeks in late 2016, and now HomePod is being held back until early 2018. Apple cited the need for a little extra time to perfect both.
Apple has announced its long-awaited, super-powered iMac Pro will go on sale on December 14, meeting its target to get it to power-hungry Mac lovers before the end of 2017,
The all-in-one desktop Mac, was announced way back at WWDC in June and is designed for creative professionals, such as those working in high-end video/photo editing and graphic design.
The remarkably slim iMac Pro, which runs the latest macOS High Sierra software, is also the first Mac to offer support for virtual reality headsets. It’s compatible with the HTC Vice upon launch.
iMac Pro Specs: Latest news and details
The iMac Pro starts at $4,999/£4,999, which will get you an 8-core Xeon processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. You’ll also get a Redeon Vega GPU with 8GB of RAM.
The top-end models, which are yet to be priced, will arrive in the new year. That’ll feature an 18-core Xeon processor and an incredible 128GB RAM. The hard drive is 4TB and the Redeon Vega GPU comes with 16GB of RAM.
We’ve also got word the Mac Pro has a new T2 co-processor, building on the T1 chip used to manage the TouchPad and Touch ID within the newer MacBook Pro models.
Seeing as the iMac Pro doesn’t have the TouchPad or Touch ID features, the new-generation T2 silicon will perform different tasks. Cable Sasser, a Mac app developer, has the skinny.
iMac Pro Specs: What do they actually mean?
At its most basic, the iMac Pro is a high-end workstation. This means the lowest-cost modelgets one of Intel’s top-end Xeon CPUs with a minimum of eight CPU cores, all the way up to 18 cores. That’s a monstrous specification, but keep in mind that Xeon processors are more sedate than the rip-roaring 18-core Core i9 chips announced at Computex 2017. Still, for multi-threaded tasks such as rendering and audio production, this thing is an absolute whizzkid.
The graphics department is a real treat as well. In fact, the GPU tech is so cutting-edge that we don’t even know what the exact specification will be. That’s because it’s using AMD’s latest Vega graphics architecture, which isn’t even out yet. It’s toting 11 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per section) of GPU power, which is far and away the most powerful graphics chip ever seen in an all-in-one PC. You’ll get up to 16GB of high-bandwidth memory with your graphics chip, and up to 128GB of ultra-reliable error correcting code (ECC) memory.
All this has been made possible by a new thermal design, which Apple says increases cooling capacity by 80% over the standard iMacs. The SSDs have maximum read speed of 3GB/s. That’s even faster than the storage used on the latest MacBook Pros.
On the back, Apple has added four ThunderBolt 3 connectors for ultra-high-end peripherals, and on the front is a 27-inch 5K display that ticks all the boxes when it comes to colour coverage, including the moviemaker-friendly DCI P3 colour gamut. There’s also 10Gbps Ethernet, a rare thing indeed on computers, and 10 times faster than your standard gigabit Ethernet found on most other PCs.
iMac Pro Design: How will the 2017 iMac Pro look?
With all of that power, it’s hardly surprising the 27-inch iMac Pro has a little more girth on the back end, compared to the standard iMacs that have come to resemble flatscreen TVs in recent times.
The iMac Pro also arrives with a new, exclusive colour. It’s Space Gray, matching the options for some MacBooks, iPads and iPhone devices. Accessories like the Magic Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad.
iMac Pro: What’s in the box?
Interestingly, according to noted YouTuber Marques Brownlee, Apple is also furnishing iMac Pro buyers with a black lightning cable, which are currently unavailable to buy separately.
This matches the ‘space gray’ accessories like the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad.
9to5Mac points out the lightning cable is still USB-A at the other end, rather than the USB-C tech that’s also integrated into the MacBook Pro.
(trustedreviews.com, https://goo.gl/M6AZEZ)