New iMac Pro Launched: Here Are The Specs, Price, And Features

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Launching today is the new iMac Pro, a product line intended for professional users who desire an all-in-one computer experience with top-notch performance.

The New iMac Pro

The iMac Pro is a performance powerhouse, offering impressive specifications intended for those who need a combination of extreme processing power and a smooth and intuitive MacOS operating system. Starting at $4999 for the base model, the sky’s the limit when it comes to customizing and upgrading the new iMac Pro. Xeon processors are available up to 18 cores, with 22 Teraflops of graphics performance and a beautiful 27-inch Retina 5K display. The iMac Pro is truly the most powerful Mac ever made.

As a premium device with a premium price tag, the new iMac Pro is intended for professionals who need to push a machine to its limits. The computing power is intended for real-time 3D rendering, creating and editing VR content, demanding developer workflows, high megapixel photography, intense simulations, large audio projects, and 4k (and even 8k) video editing. From researchers to videographers, the iMac is capable of even the most demanding tasks.

iMac Pro Philosophy and Design

John Ternus, vice president of hardware at Apple, explained Apple’s philosophy with new iMac Pro. “iMac Pro combines the incredible design of the iMac with the most powerful workstation architecture we’ve ever built…iMac is the most popular desktop for our pro users due to its amazing display and elegant design, so we completely re-engineered it to deliver performance far beyond what anyone thought possible in an all-in-one.”

The new iMac Pro is just 5mm wide and features a new space gray finish. The computer also comes with matching accessories, ensuring you have everything you need to get your work up and running with Apple’s new machine.

For such an expensive price, it’s reasonable to expect that the iMac Pro will deliver the best of the best when it comes to design and hardware. The Retina 5K display is pretty impressive, and all of your projects will look great on the screen. With 500 nits of brightness, a P3 wide color gamut and support for 1 billion colors, users will experience true-to-life image quality for all of their projects.

The graphics of the new iMac Pro aren’t necessarily the best on the market overall, but they’re more than sufficient for nearly any professional task you need to get done. This model does feature, however, the most impressive graphics ever present on a Mac device. It’s clear that Apple intends to reaffirm their reputation as the go-to device for creative workstations.

Recently, Microsoft has been giving Apple a run for their money with the technically impressive Surface devices. Intended to capture a slice of a market previously dominated by Apple, Microsoft did manage to convert a non-trivial portion of creative professionals to their ecosystem, which obviously didn’t sit well with Apple. Apple’s redesign with the new iMac Pro offers excessive power and will certainly appeal to those who need their computers to keep up with increasingly demanding tasks.

iMac Pro Hardware

In order to keep up with these taxing tasks, the iMac Pro has an updated thermal architecture designed to deliver up to 80 percent more cooling capacity without an increase in noise. Even when you’re pushing your Mac to its limits, you likely won’t have to worry about the machine overheating.

The machine also ships with four microphones with beamforming technology, new speakers that are up to 50 percent louder, and a new 1080p FaceTime HD camera with enhanced low-light performance.

Through the four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the computer supports up to two high-performance RAID arrays and two 5K displays at the same time, ensuring you have what you need to work efficiently and keep up with your latest project. The new iMac Pro also works with up to 4TB of SSD and 128GB of ECC memory.

As far as the actual performance of the machine goes, the iMac Pro supports up to 16GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), and the Vega GPU delivers up to 11 Teraflops of power for all of your real-time 3D rendering. For half-precision computation, the computer is capable of up to 22 Teraflops of performance.

With this new power, 3D designers can render scenes up to 3.4 times faster, developers have the capability to run multiple virtual machines and compile code up to 2.4 times faster, and researchers can run complex simulations up to 5 times faster. Photographers, who have been a major market for iMac adoption, will be able to perform image processing up to 4.1 times faster.

It remains to be seen whether this massive power will be enough to grab back the customers that Microsoft has impressed with the new Surface line of PCs. The new iMac Pro is certainly more powerful than the Surface models and may appeal to a different subset of the creative market. While the Surface line appealed to artists who needed a combination of portability and power, Apple’s new machine is intended to function as a workstation with incredible power for the most intense video rendering and research simulation tasks.

With how expensive this new computer is, it’s certainly a niche product intended for the workplace. There’s no doubt that there’s some sort of demand for a product of this caliber, but whether it’s enough to warrant this redesign of the iMac Pro remains to be seen.

The new iMac Pro is available today, starting at $4999.

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