I bought my 2020 10-core i9 iMac last August with the intent that it will be my last Intel Mac. Running x86 is mandatory as I use Windows for some development tools and for testing. I wish it were available in the iMac Pro's space gray. It's a beautify finish.
By the time I am ready to retire this machine, ASi will have been fully baked and software for the most part will be fully ported to ARM. I will never get off of the x86 platform as some tools I know will never be ported over so I'll have some x86 something running somewhere for those rare times I need that functionality.
I'm very excited to see where ASi is in a few years!
Retirement could be some time away of course. My 2009 iMac is still strong and so I thought of going the way too that you have but at this stage, hopefully, the Apple Silicon iMac isn't far away.
I think people are underestimating how quickly this transition is occurring. When they said 2-year, I think they meant from the JUN 2020 WWDC. By this time next year all we'll be waiting on is the MacPro, which will likely be announced at the JUN 2022 WWDC, just 15 months away now.
I'm happy I ditched my 13" INTEL MBP 32GB RAM and 2TB hard drive for an M1. What a world of difference. Losing Windows kid of sucks but I really only used it for Windows support.
I think people are underestimating how quickly this transition is occurring. When they said 2-year, I think they meant from the JUN 2020 WWDC. By this time next year all we'll be waiting on is the MacPro, which will likely be announced at the JUN 2022 WWDC, just 15 months away now.
I'm happy I ditched my 13" INTEL MBP 32GB RAM and 2TB hard drive for an M1. What a world of difference. Losing Windows kid of sucks but I really only used it for Windows support.
I highly doubt we’ll have to wait until WWDC2022 for an all Apple Silicon Mac lineup.
I think people are underestimating how quickly this transition is occurring. When they said 2-year, I think they meant from the JUN 2020 WWDC. By this time next year all we'll be waiting on is the MacPro, which will likely be announced at the JUN 2022 WWDC, just 15 months away now.
I'm happy I ditched my 13" INTEL MBP 32GB RAM and 2TB hard drive for an M1. What a world of difference. Losing Windows kid of sucks but I really only used it for Windows support.
I highly doubt we’ll have to wait until WWDC2022 for an all Apple Silicon Mac lineup.
Yeah, I think it stands to reason that Apple provided a buffer in that two year commitment. It’s kind of the prudent thing to do when making the announcement four months into a global pandemic that disrupted pretty much all business globally.
Not a surprise. I always thought the iMac Pro was a filler. It was just something they could slap together and get out fast while the "real" Mac Pro was being finished. Now that the Mac Pro is out I'm a bit surprised they let it go this long. I've been catching rumours of a Mac Pro Mini on the way. This might be how they might explain this, that the iMac Pro is being replaced. In reality it was never intended to be around for long.
The iMac Pro was a joke, ram couldn’t be upgraded without taking the entire machine apart, that included slicing thru the glue on glass panel for the display, and the graphics card access was also basically the same,
There are plenty of upgraded iMac Pros in the refurb store.
The entire 27” iMac line is going to stop. That giant aluminum housing will stop being produced and every variant of it, I’m sure. The iMac Pro is the first due to it likely being the lowest volume, but the 27” tapered iMac is done for certain, shortly.
This is the first time in many years I have ever seen Apple tell us a model was discontinued and to place orders while supplies last. In fact, I cannot recall having seen this in over 20 years. Usually inventory dries up at resellers and models move off Apple’s store pages and any leftover new stock is quietly sold under a clearance page with a tiny discount if any.
It means the transition to the M series will be wrapped up in about 13 months like the last transition to Intel, all the designs for the new machines are done and probably have have been for at least a year.
Larger screens tend to be associated with the word pro. Also, more processing power, more ports, more RAM, and ECC RAM.
So, in the future maybe the “pro” for iMac just means a bigger screen and more powerful GPU with more ports. Maybe ECC is reserved for the headless Mac Pro.
Don’t care what Apple calls it, as long as they make a usable machine that isn’t enfeebled.
Unsurprised. The machine always seemed like a stopgap at best, and, at worst (and the option I'd bet on), a "we thought this was good enough to replace the Mac Pro" mistake that they course-corrected on at the last minute and then never admitted to.
Unsurprised. The machine always seemed like a stopgap at best, and, at worst (and the option I'd bet on), a "we thought this was good enough to replace the Mac Pro" mistake that they course-corrected on at the last minute and then never admitted to.
I may not remember this correctly but I thought when the iMac Pro was announced it was pitched as the system to buy if you need a pro machine but couldn’t wait for the transition for the cylinder Mac Pro to whatever was coming next, the current Mac Pro.
That makes sense. The iMac Pro was clearly a stopgap measure because of the Mac Pro 2019's lengthy development time.
Apple likely never intended it to be an ongoing product line. It was a one-shot wonder to provide pro customers an alternative to the ill-conceived and dead-end trashcan Mac Pro.
They won’t need the same kind of thermal envelope for the ASi processor/gpus and appear to be moving to a “chinless” design so, yeah the iMac Pro is going away. No doubt the M1X iMacs will be close in cpu performance if not gpu output—just not the hyper performance of the ASi MacPro and MacProMini.
Instead of this ridiculously overpriced and underperforming model they could have just slapped some components in a midi-tower and called it a day. It would have sold better and it would have been a better hold-over.
Instead of this ridiculously overpriced and underperforming model they could have just slapped some components in a midi-tower and called it a day. It would have sold better and it would have been a better hold-over.
Yeah, that sounds exactly like something Apple would do.
Funny how actual iMac Pro owners seem to love their machines.
The iMac Pro was the only iMac with two Thunderbolt3 buses, rather important if you have two backups of an external data drive, plus a Time-Machine backup drive plus regular drive backup of internal SSD plus a few other external Thunderbolt items ( card reader, multi port hub, XDR Display).
I sure hope Apple has an iMac with two Thunderbolt4 buses. My 16” MBP has two TB3 buses ( acros 4 ports) so it seems an insult if they don’t have an iMac model with two TB buses ( 7 devices per bus including iMac as a device =6 external devices per bus).
Frustratingly, the iMac Pro did not support the XDR display, since its Thunderbolt buses were Dispayport version 1.3, not DisplayPort 1.4 that came out in 2013 !!! Arghh!
Not a surprise. I always thought the iMac Pro was a filler. It was just something they could slap together and get out fast while the "real" Mac Pro was being finished.
They just don't need it any more due to the gains in efficiency. The changes to the thermal profile were only ever needed to accommodate Intel's and AMD's inefficient components.
With Apple Silicon, there's no need to have a separate model in the iMac lineup, they can use the same design for every model, which will likely use the best of both or a new design just for Apple Silicon.
3x the M1 mini performance brings it to iMac Pro level (5x for the GPU). This would be under 100W of power. The iMac Pro can handle 500W. Apple Silicon is 5x more efficient performance-per-watt than the old Intel chips and probably 3x or more the 14nm AMD GPUs used in it, given that AMD's 7nm is over 2x and Apple is on 5nm.
They can bring this power to the mainstream iMac, hopefully along with the space grey style, and people will get iMac Pro performance for under half the price (actually under 1/3 the price as it will compete with the $7400 higher-end model).
They could probably go up to 20TFLOPs+ performance in the iMac but it wouldn't be necessary to do that. For most users, even professional workflows, performance around 10-15TFLOPs would suffice for pretty much everything. And if they did go up to 20TFLOPs+, it would reduce interest in another Mac Pro even more than current performance advances already have.
It's no wonder they switched to custom chips, this level of efficiency offers a lot of possibilities for clean hardware designs without compromising on performance. I suspect they might leave the Mac Pro until 3nm next year to get an extra 50% boost in efficiency.
To replace it requires adding ECC RAM and somehow I don't think the ASi iMac is going to include ECC. I'm hesitant to rely on much more 16 GB without ECC.
So the new iMacs with ASi are going to be powerful enough to make an 18-core Xeon obsolete and probably at a far lower price. They could release 24” or 32” Pro Display HDRs with the Mac or Mac Pro designated by the processor card you’re plugging into it. Same for redesigned desktop & notebook chassis.
That's how I read it.
Maybe in a couple of year's time we'll see a new iMac Pro with a special fast Apple Silicon device but at the moment there's no space for it.
I have a 10 core iMac Pro, and have since the very beginning. Geekbench results today: 1105/9437. I also got an M1 Mac Mini to do some testing with. Geekbench results today: 1748/7619. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure the next M1 chip, whatever they end up calling it, will be faster than this machine. Where it still lacks in performance is with graphics. I'm absolutely positive the next iMac (Pro or otherwise) will have graphics performance equal to or better than the 61192 Metal Score or the 59511 OpenCL score of my current iMac Pro. (The M1 Mac Mini is 22177 and 19564, respectively.)
Comments
I'm happy I ditched my 13" INTEL MBP 32GB RAM and 2TB hard drive for an M1. What a world of difference. Losing Windows kid of sucks but I really only used it for Windows support.
The iMac Pro was a joke, ram couldn’t be upgraded without taking the entire machine apart, that included slicing thru the glue on glass panel for the display, and the graphics card access was also basically the same,
It means the transition to the M series will be wrapped up in about 13 months like the last transition to Intel, all the designs for the new machines are done and probably have have been for at least a year.
Don’t care what Apple calls it, as long as they make a usable machine that isn’t enfeebled.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/07/tech/apple-imac-pro-discontinued/index.html
Apple likely never intended it to be an ongoing product line. It was a one-shot wonder to provide pro customers an alternative to the ill-conceived and dead-end trashcan Mac Pro.
Funny how actual iMac Pro owners seem to love their machines.
With Apple Silicon, there's no need to have a separate model in the iMac lineup, they can use the same design for every model, which will likely use the best of both or a new design just for Apple Silicon.
3x the M1 mini performance brings it to iMac Pro level (5x for the GPU). This would be under 100W of power. The iMac Pro can handle 500W. Apple Silicon is 5x more efficient performance-per-watt than the old Intel chips and probably 3x or more the 14nm AMD GPUs used in it, given that AMD's 7nm is over 2x and Apple is on 5nm.
They can bring this power to the mainstream iMac, hopefully along with the space grey style, and people will get iMac Pro performance for under half the price (actually under 1/3 the price as it will compete with the $7400 higher-end model).
They could probably go up to 20TFLOPs+ performance in the iMac but it wouldn't be necessary to do that. For most users, even professional workflows, performance around 10-15TFLOPs would suffice for pretty much everything. And if they did go up to 20TFLOPs+, it would reduce interest in another Mac Pro even more than current performance advances already have.
It's no wonder they switched to custom chips, this level of efficiency offers a lot of possibilities for clean hardware designs without compromising on performance. I suspect they might leave the Mac Pro until 3nm next year to get an extra 50% boost in efficiency.
Maybe in a couple of year's time we'll see a new iMac Pro with a special fast Apple Silicon device but at the moment there's no space for it.