Apple begins shipping first iMac Pro orders
Apple's new premium, professional grade all-in-one desktop, the iMac Pro, is now shipping to customers, though deliveries from China are not expected to arrive before Christmas.
Early iMac Pro adopters were informed Thursday morning that their new system is now on its way. Orders seen by AppleInsider are estimated to arrive on Dec. 28 via UPS.
Currently, the $4,999-and-up systems are in Shanghai, where they are awaiting "final release" from a clearing agency.
Reports have suggested that some iMac Pro units could show up in Apple's own retail stores this week. However, no inventory was listed available at the company's biggest stores as of Thursday.
The new 27-inch iMac Pro with Retina 5K display is intended for high-end demands, featuring a base configuration with an 8-core processor running at 3.2 gigahertz, 32 gigabytes of ECC DDR4 2666 RAM, a Vega 56 GPU with 8 gigabytes of VRAM, and a terabyte of flash storage. More powerful configurations, including an 18-core CPU model, ship in 2018.
AppleInsider partners Adorama and B&H, both Apple authorized resellers, are currently taking pre-orders for the iMac Pro with no sales tax charged on purchases shipped outside New York and New Jersey, potentially saving customers between $400 and $1,055. A full list of deals can be found in our iMac Pro Price Guide.
Early iMac Pro adopters were informed Thursday morning that their new system is now on its way. Orders seen by AppleInsider are estimated to arrive on Dec. 28 via UPS.
Currently, the $4,999-and-up systems are in Shanghai, where they are awaiting "final release" from a clearing agency.
Reports have suggested that some iMac Pro units could show up in Apple's own retail stores this week. However, no inventory was listed available at the company's biggest stores as of Thursday.
The new 27-inch iMac Pro with Retina 5K display is intended for high-end demands, featuring a base configuration with an 8-core processor running at 3.2 gigahertz, 32 gigabytes of ECC DDR4 2666 RAM, a Vega 56 GPU with 8 gigabytes of VRAM, and a terabyte of flash storage. More powerful configurations, including an 18-core CPU model, ship in 2018.
AppleInsider partners Adorama and B&H, both Apple authorized resellers, are currently taking pre-orders for the iMac Pro with no sales tax charged on purchases shipped outside New York and New Jersey, potentially saving customers between $400 and $1,055. A full list of deals can be found in our iMac Pro Price Guide.
Comments
I'd love to have one too, unfortunately I can not justify such a cost for what I do.
I just hope that iMac Pro numbers aren't compared to the regular iMac because that just isn't a fair comparison. A better comparison would be it versus Mac Pro sales. I'm sure we'll see a story shortly after the new year about some analyst who spoke with the mail boy at one of the parts manufacturers to try and get some initial iMac Pro sales numbers so they can a negative FUD article about how iMac Pro sales aren't going as Apple expected, as if they really know the true numbers and what Apple expected in the first place.
Some people are STILL stuck on the fact that you as the consumer cannot change the RAM or the storage which somehow makes it not a Pro Mac. Some don't know that you CAN upgrade the RAM in an iMac Pro, you just need to have Apple or an Authorized Apple Service Center do it for you. I was never given the book of guidelines of what constitutes as a Pro Mac so I guess I can't be sure on that one.
Either way, Tim Cook should be fired! If they weren't shipping it would just be yet ANOTHER missed ship date by Apple!
And can people seriously stop complaining that this machine isn't upgradable? 99.9% of people in the world never make a single hardware change to their computer. Just because we live in the 0.1% group who do doesn't mean designers should cater every damn computer to us.
I was skeptical when we first heard about it, but I'm warming up to it.
My primary concern was thermal capacity/noise. It seems it might actually be OK in this regard, though I'm not sure if people have really pushed the GPUs AND CPUs at the same time too much. It seems they've under-clocked them enough to keep things safe, at least on paper. (If, it doesn't, say, damage the screen or other internal components.)
Also, while this might not be the ideal machine for me, it might very well be the ideal machine for a lot of studios who'll just buy it and write it off over 5 years anyway... and the very cheap (in this case) AppleCare covers what, like 3 years of that?
My initial read on it (before the details were out) was that it was a pacification move by Apple that would satisfy somewhat the same crowd that the new MacBook Pros did (i.e. 'pro' users in the sense of people making a lot of $$$ who want fancy equipment that they really don't push all that hard).
If people can push this thing, and it remains reliable, then it will be a pretty nice pro machine for some good portion of the real pros (as well as the 'pros' with lots of money who want something fancy). I still don't really want an iMac form factor, as I'd rather have a display with inputs. But, that's more me and my situation.
Yea, I really could care less what the sales #s are, as this is the kind of thing Apple needs to have even if they only sell 100 of them. As with the analogy I've used before, this is kind of the Ford GT40 in the lineup. And, I'm sure they will sell a LOT more of them than that. At least from my perspective, I've been critical of Apple for caring way too much how many of something they sell... and seemingly giving a similar percentage of attention as the pie-chart of sales numbers indicate.
re: upgradability - I'd agree that isn't really what makes something pro or not. The main issues are probably GPU, then RAM. The RAM was just what people were used to... i.e.: buying minimum amounts, then adding on their own. That's easily solved.
But, the GPU issue (for the 'trash can') was a different kind of problem. Pros who use the GPUs need to keep up as that field is still advancing very rapidly (unlike CPU, RAM, storage, etc.). If you can't upgrade the GPU, or pick the right GPU technology for your application, you can lose serious time and money.
Just from hearing the reports of demos of this thing, it seems they are solving that by putting a pretty good GPU in there in the first place (though they tried to do that with the 'trash can' as well), but then running your GPU of choice in external boxes for expandability. I've read in several of the reports about people checking out the iMac Pro that had a couple boxes with nVidid GPUs in them running externally. While still compromised (TB3 isn't really fast enough), it might be good enough.