Apple’s iMac Pro is a love letter to developers

Matthew Panzarino for TechCrunch:

The iMac Pro exists because it turns out that there is a lot of air underneath the aging Mac Pro and above the incredibly popular MacBook Pro. A single-digit percentage of Mac customers buy the Mac Pro and, in recent years, Apple had been seeing a major rise in “pro” customers of all shades purchasing iMacs because of their incredible screens, all-in-one form factor and overall ease of deployment.

Ports-a-plenty:

The rear ports are definitely different, of course. You have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, which run on two separate controllers, 2 ports each. So you should get blazing speeds on those whether they’re used for e-GPUs or storage or displays. There are 4 USB 3.0 A ports and SD slot and, for the first time ever, a 10 Gigabit ethernet port right on the back.

Configurations:

Not every configuration of the iMac Pro will be available to order today online and in stores next week. You’ll be able to get the 8 and 10-core Intel Xeon W versions of the machine with any other memory, graphics or storage options you like, but the 14 and 18-core editions are just orderable now for delivery in January. Those new core configurations are previously unannounced options. Each has 1MB of L2 and 1.365MB of L3 cache.

This thing sounds incredible. I’d love to have one, but it’s way beyond me. It should be a nice stopgap while developers seeking even more power (or a purely standalone Mac) await the completely-redesigned Mac Pro. I bet the space grey accessories will go for a pretty penny on eBay since you can’t buy them separately.

Originally published at One-Tech Mind.