Who should buy the new iMac Pro?
To be clear, Apple® created the new iMac Pro® for the professional user.
It’s an astonishing machine, and it’s packed with the most powerful graphics and processors ever in a Mac®, along with the most advanced storage, memory and I/O — all behind a breathtaking Retina® 5K display in a sleek all-in-one design. There’s no debate when Apple bills this as "the most powerful Mac ever built”.
That power starts with the processor, an 8-core Intel Xeon W. If that's not enough performance for you, there are also 10-core, 14-core and 18-core options. Standard RAM is 32 GB, but you can bump it to either 64 GB or 128 GB. The default storage is a 1 TB solid-state drive, but you can increase that to 2 TB or 4 TB. You can't upgrade the iMac Pro in any way yourself, but you can take it to an Apple Store® or an Apple Authorized Service Provider to have additional RAM installed.
The screen is a stunning 27-inch Retina 5K 5120-by-2880 P3 display, and the iMac Pro drives all those pixels with a Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics card with 8 GB of memory. You can get even more graphics processing power from an optional Radeon Pro Vega 64 card with 16 GB.
Most other iMac Pro specs are similar to the existing 27-inch iMac® with Retina display — a 1080p FaceTime® camera, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, an SDXC card slot, four USB 3 ports and a headphone jack. But the new Pro also boasts four Thunderbolt 3 ports for driving external displays and large storage arrays, along with 10 Gb Ethernet for lightning-fast network access.
The vast majority of Apple customers will never need the potency of this iMac Pro. Nor would they pay the eye-popping price tag associated with all this power. The base configuration starts at $4,999, but checking off all the option boxes can bring you to nearly (gasp) $13,000. If building an iMac Pro feels like building a Porsche, you wouldn’t be far off.
So who, then, is the target audience here?
If you are in a profession where increased performance translates directly to increased productivity, the iMac Pro is for you. It’s ideal for video editors who need to work with 8K video, engineers using complex modeling software or developers suffering through long compile times. For example, our client Clum Creative, a corporate video production company, states "it's a perfect solution for any video production company or media services business looking to speed up their operation." Clum and other companies are singing it's praises as the ultimate solution for photographers, video editors, 3D animators and musicians ready to move ideas to concepts to reality. It’s a dream come true for researchers and scientists who work in environments where time is money.
The iMac Pro is a not only new breed of Mac, it’s a declaration by Apple to creatives, developers and science professionals — we’re here, we’ve got what you want and we’re committed to you.