Apple has historically attracted professional users in the photography, video and programming industries as some of its most devoted customers. Over the past couple of years, this has changed though, owing to Apple’s apparent abandonment of its most high-end products.
The devices that have appeared, such as the MacBook Pro, have failed to resonate with professional audiences. Branding aside, many former fans have suggested Apple has lost sight of what its most demanding users require. In most cases, this isn’t a “Touch Bar” secondary display but an SD card slot and several USB ports.
iMac Pro 2017
Apple
At its WWDC developers conference this week, Apple followed through on previous statements that it’s still committed to supporting its professional customers. It unveiled the new iMac Pro, a device which it hopes will convince sceptical consumers that it still knows how to build performance hardware.
The 27-inch all-in-one features a 5K display and processors from Intel’s Xeon range of server and workstation chips. There’ll be options available with up to 18 cores and 22 teraflops of raw graphics power.
iMac Pro 2017
Apple
This graphical prowess will come from a Radeon Pro Vega GPU, one of AMD’s next-generation graphics cards yet to be formally announced. After floundering in the high-end market for years, Apple is returning in a big way, creating a true workstation system for the most hardcore of users.
The new iMac Pro has the same basic chassis as the current iMac range. Apple has had to dramatically improve its thermal efficiency and cooling abilities to fit the powerful internals. It has an 80 percent greater cooling capacity and an entirely new architecture for heat distribution. According to Apple, the changes are a “huge step forward” for pro users.
iMac Pro 2017
Apple
“We’re thrilled to give developers and customers a sneak peek at iMac Pro. This will be our fastest and most powerful Mac ever, which brings workstation-class computing to iMac for the first time,” said John Ternus, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Engineering. “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”
Unusually for Apple, the new iMac Pro won’t be available until December. Since the company typically puts products on sale mere weeks after they’re announced, the Pro’s early unveiling implies Apple is trying to appease its disheartened professional customers. If nothing else, Apple is clearly showing that it’s now listening to its users, finally building the hardware they’ve been requesting for years.
The company also confirmed a new Mac Pro desktop PC is on the way. It’s still early in development and won’t appear until next year. In April, the company made the highly irregular move of inviting members of the press to its campus to effectively concede defeat. Apple acknowledged it made missteps with the design of the current Mac Pro which resulted in costly restrictions on the processing power available. It’s now returning to the drawing board to build an all-new product, one that should be worthy of its “Pro” name.
