Apple has finally taken a page out of its Windows-based competitors and is now offering a fully capable professional-grade workstation for hardcore Apple users. At the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) event today, Apple officially unveiled their "most powerful Mac ever," called the iMac Pro.
Sleeper look
The brand new iMac Pro is designed to look like the regular 27-inch 5K iMac that was first launched in 2015. However, the main difference with the Pro model is that it will be coming with a sleek and exclusive Space Grey finish. The keyboard and mouse for the iMac Pro are also finished in Space Grey colors and will only be available for Pro buyers.
Despite its relatively harmless looks, the new Pro version comes with some ultra high-end components. Due to this fact, Apple has redesigned the cooling system within the device, which now sports what Apple calls its brand new dual centrifugal fan system.
Powerful internal hardware
At the heart of the new all-in-one workstation is an ultra high-end Intel Xeon Processor that can be optioned to have 8-cores or up to an insane 18-cores. The more than capable processor can also be paired with up to 128 GB of ECC system RAM. The RAM on the device is unfortunately not user replaceable or upgradeable, which is not really unexpected. The processor and RAM combination makes for a total insane computer that should be future proof for years to come despite its lack of upgradability.
If that is not enough, the iMac Pro is also equipped with a Radeon Vega GPU that sports up to 16 GB of VRAM. This all translates to 22 Teraflops of power. For storage, the workstation can be equipped with up to 4 TB of SSD memory space with transfer speeds of 3GB per second. With the limited storage, users will likely have to purchase external hard drives or utilize NAS servers, as 4TB will likely be not enough for HD video editing and game development usage.
Other specs and price
Being a fully professional workstation, the Apple iMac Pro is equipped with all the ports necessary to get the work done. The device comes with 4 USB 3.0 ports, 4 Thunderbolt ports, an Ethernet port, an SDXC Port, and strangely a headphone jack.
As for the pricing, the entire system will obviously not be coming cheap.
The base model, which will have an 8-core Xeon processor, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, will start at a bank-breaking $4,999. Higher end components will, of course, drive the price up significantly. The brand new "Bad Ass" iMacs will be made available in December.
