apple prides itself on its courage the
courage to do what no one else does the courage of our convictions to solder
everything down courage to remove features pushing your willingness to pay more
for less but sometimes sometimes they
falter sometimes innovation rears its ugly head
and today we have the imac pro
the upgradable imac the workstation imac
the mac for legitimate creative
professionals
who saw that one coming
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so the base eight core configuration of the imac pro is 4999
us dollars let's take you for a tour then and break
down what you get for that money and how that would compare to buying components
off the shelf the most obvious feature of any aio is the lcd spec wise there's
really not much out there like it with lg's ultrafine 5k being the closest
analog with p3 wide gamut color support
500 nit maximum brightness Thunderbolt 3 input and a 1700 price tag
moving under the hood the next most expensive component is an 8 core Intel
xeon w2140b a slightly down clocked version of the
xeon w2140 that can be swapped out for up to a xeon
w219518 core for very heavy workloads
now with a xeon comes ecc or error correcting memory and even our base
model has a healthy 32 gigs of it
interestingly unlike previous 5k imacs
the pro is using full-sized dimms rather
than so dims theoretically great news for upgraders
but alas apple giveth and apple taketh
away to take full advantage of the xeon's quad channel memory controller all four
of the imac pro slots are populated and
there is no access hatch on the back a little bit more on that later
one of the most underwhelming aspects of the base imac pro is probably the GPU a
vega 56 i mean it's not terrible but considering that previous mac pros used
fire pros rather than consumer cards
and the price point you might reasonably expect better and the same could be said
for the upgrade options your GPU is soldered directly to the motherboard so
the only way to max it out with the marginally faster vega 64 is to pay
upfront AMD's full msrp for a standalone
card on top of what you already paid theoretically for a vega 56.
thanks cryptocurrency miners so bottom line with a comparable
motherboard equivalent 10 gigabit networking a terabyte of very fast pci
express storage a power supply a case cooling and some decent peripherals the
apple tax on this particular model even ignoring that computers do not assemble
themselves and that ongoing software support and warranty coverage both have
a value is a whopping negative two hundred
dollars so why is it that apple has this
reputation for having overpriced computers
we're going to get to that first let's talk about the experience of using the
imac pro it is essentially identical to that of a
regular imac the display is gorgeously retina and very bright
but with fat bezels and no HDR support for reasons that likely have everything
to do with supply chain and nothing to do with courage it declutters your life
with only a single cable needed for power as long as you don't need to plug
anything into one of the conveniently located usb 3 or Thunderbolt 3 ports at
the back and the included wireless peripherals
are more than usable ranging from pretty darn good for a low profile chiclet
style at least it has a numpad too the built-in touchpad is really cool for
gestures but how have they not fixed this charging port yet really similar
except for one big difference the imac
pro uses workstation class and modern
hardware something you can't take for granted so you'd probably think then that tools
like logic pro and final cut pro that have been tuned for years for outdated
mainstream or mobile cpus would run like
billio on this thing and you'd be right this is the fastest
mac ever built in every respect you kind of have to feel it to believe how quick
and responsive it is across the board safari launches instantly even at 5k
desktop animations never drop a frame and even adobe premiere as much of a dog
as it can be launches every bit as quickly as the fastest test benches
we've ever built oh and also 10 gigabit
Ethernet means that the imac pro is a real mac that is finally able to
work with large files and networked resources right out of the box something
that is essential to our production workflow where we keep all of our
footage on a redundant protected high-speed storage device on the network
as for how well it performs elsewhere well it should come as no surprise that
it tears through most of our professional tests with relative ease
cinebench scores landed about where they should luxmark spat out some very
respectable numbers and blender ran very
well
except when it didn't we're kind of hoping that the performance issues with
blender's cycles renderer are just growing pains that will be dealt with in
short order with all those rosy results in mind
though it should be noted that the xeon w didn't quite match the performance of
our similar cnw or our similarly priced desktop grade
core i9 and that even our base model CPU throttled
under sustained loads with the imac pro's cooling system staying inaudibly
quiet rather than holding the CPU temperatures
at a more comfortable 70 to 80 degrees
we'd like to see apple ramp up the fan more aggressively
though with that said given the placement of the exhaust with air
basically being blown back into the intake anyway it's kind of hard to tell
how much it would help and what we also don't know at this time
is how a higher spec CPU would affect any of this let's get back to that
discussion about upgradability now apple may officially void your
warranty and getting inside the imac pro
is a real chore but it appears as though the CPU RAM and
proprietary ssds there are two of them running in raid 0 could all be swapped
out for compatible replacements so this is something that we plan to explore in
a follow-up video bottom line then it feels like apple is finally listening to
its professional users there are a few things missing maybe
kind of like the soviets after the 1969 moon landing they've decided to just
let microsoft have it as the only one with a sexy aio with a digitizer by
leaving out support for the apple pencil but they gave us 10 gig Ethernet and
truly professional grade performance and they did it in a form factor with a
level of polish that nobody does quite like apple
so thermals aside i guess it's pretty
magical and our major gripes with it are really just the usual stuff about the
restrictiveness of the apple ecosystem in general
one without any obvious reason the imac
pro doesn't support target display mode which would allow you to get more
mileage out of it as a monitor once the internals become outdated
2. other than Thunderbolt 3 there is no way
to add an expansion card in spite of the CPU's massive 48 PCIe lanes and 3 while
on paper the specs and pricing actually
look really attractive compared to an apples to apples diy solution a big part
of the reason for that is apple's manner of choosing expensive options that not
everyone would necessarily spring for if given the choice
better performance per dollar can be achieved with some compromises in a diy
box now it's possible that when the true
standalone workstations arrive perhaps later in 2018
that we'll see some more flexibility here NVIDIA gpus anyone they've got
drivers but i wouldn't hold my breath
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