iMac Pro: Apple’s biggest surprise and it’s most powerful Mac yet
WWDC keynote was full of notable announcements but one surprise announcement caught most off guard. Apple launched it’s answer to the most powerful Mac ever but it’s not the Mac Pro instead it’s the iMac that gets that achievement and its called the iMac Pro. Apple isn’t kidding around with this one. The new top of the line iMac stands out from the rest of the lineup with an all-new space gray finish that honestly makes the iMac look stellar! That coupled with an all new space gray magic keyboard with numeric keypad(with black keys), magic trackpad 2(optional) and magic mouse 2 only makes it better.
The new iMac Pro is intended, as its name suggests, for Pros and costs like a pro machine starting at US$4,999. But you will be getting a lot of machine for that price. Apple managed to pack an astonishing and mind blowing amount of power and performance into this slim form factor and pulled it off in typical Apple fashion.
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The new iMac Pro alongside the new space gray Magic Mouse 2 and Magic keyboard with numeric keypad.[/caption]
The iMac can now be configured to a whopping(And I do mean whopping) 18 cores with an added turbo boost up to 4.5GHz. Now that’s a powerful computer! It starts off with a 8 core Intel Xeon processor followed by 10 core and the 18 core version. Sticking to the signature feature of the iMac lineup, the iMac Pro continues to carry the new 27-inch 5K Retina display with P3 wide color gamut and 500 nits brightness. Memory or RAM starts at 32GB of DDR4 ECC memory and can be configured all the way to 128GB which sounds expensive but will definitely deliver on performance that the Pro user requires. Storage starts with a 1TB SSD and goes all the way to 4TB SSD. For graphics, Apple is going with AMD’s new Radeon Pro Vega 56 GPU’s with 8GB of HBM2 memory and can be maxed out with a Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB of HBM2 memory. The Vega series is AMD’s newly announced graphics unit.
There will also be a 4K version of this system as well. Apple unusually sustains a good selection of IO on the new iMac’s with a 3.5mm Headphone jack, UHS-II SDXC card slot, 4 USB 3 ports, 4 USB-C Thunderbolt 3 capable ports and a 10GB ethernet port. The new iMac now supports powerful VR technology and Apple is even partnering with Steam VR to provide some stellar content creation and development for VR using the new iMac marking Apple’s first entry into the Virtual Reality sector.
While these may not be the go-to iMac for many, this is an iMac Apple’s Pro users have been asking for in a really long time. The new iMac Pro will be available in December alongside Apple’s new HomePod.
There were much more announcements from WWDC 2017 which you can find here: WWDC 2017 Releases.