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Apple iMac Pro Goes on Sale December 14th (engadget.com)
Apple vowed to ship the iMac Pro in December, and it's making good on that promise. From a report: The company has confirmed that its workstation-grade all-in-one will be available on December 14th. It has yet to reveal the exact configuration options, but the $4,999 'starter' model ships with an 8-core Xeon processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of solid-state storage and a Radeon Vega graphics chipset with 8GB of RAM. You can option it with up to an 18-core Xeon, 128GB of RAM, a 4TB SSD and a 16GB Vega chipset, although video creator Marques Brownlee notes that you'll have to wait until the new year for that 18-core beast.
Xeon CPUs and powerful GPUs inside a pointlessly thin computer with a built-in display? What for? Who the fuck asked for this?
Either the internal heat will kill components prematurely or the thing will make even more jet noise than an old PowerPC G4 tower.
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Very few people have any use for a system like this though, particularly if it's not running Windows.
I fail to see what "running Windows" has to do with the argument. It's obviously aimed at a market point that you have no knowledge of. Multiple 5K displays are most likely of use to people in moving image processing, this relatively big data needs this spec as an absolute minimum nowadays.
I doubt very many will be bought for gaming.
Legally run OS X. For some folks, that's justification.
You may be joking but that is actually 100% correct. Steve Jobs himself pointed out that Apple is a software company. Their hardware is nice but nobody would pay a premium for it if it ran Windows or if the iPhone ran Android. The hardware for a Mac or an iPhone is not meaningfully different from any number of their competitors. So that means that the reason people seek out Apple products is based in what they do differently and that is software.
People get confused about what sort of business Apple is because they won't sell you most of their software without bundling it with a piece of hardware. But a company is what they actually make and what they actually make is software.
Needs beefy machine.
Runs 2011 MBP.
Do I fail the fanboy test here or does that not make any sense? A (very) small segment of the user population needs a workstation class machine. For those who do and want to run OSX...welp break out the corporate cards. For everyone else, you can get more for less AND not have such a high level of lock-in. Maybe Apple will even let you upgrade this system...!
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Xeon CPUs and powerful GPUs inside a pointlessly thin computer with a built-in display? What for? Who the fuck asked for this?
Henry Ford said it best when he said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". Perhaps you are right and nobody wants this but Apple does have a pretty good track record of making products people didn't know they wanted. We'll know soon enough.
Either the internal heat will kill components prematurely or the thing will make even more jet noise than an old PowerPC G4 tower.
I'm glad you could clear that up for us without ever having seen the product.
A Dell Precision 5720 All-in-one workstation costs $3900, has a Xeon E3-1245, a 4K 27" display, and Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics. The video upgrade alone on the iMac is $500. Factor in the better processor and display, and they're very comparable price wise. The iMac Pro also has an A10 coprocessor. I don't think the iMac is overpriced at all, considering what you're getting. Obviously your "mission-critical" servers aren't shipping with a 5K display or a $1000 video card, and probably don't have a 1TB SSD drive either. BTW, I call BS on your 1/20th cost, unless you're buying old off-lease servers.
I believe it's actually ECC RAM, which is much more expensive than the conventional desktop variety.
The thing between Microsoft and Apple is, with Apple, you know right from the beginning that they're going to gouge you, but after that they're pretty good. Quality is good. Reliability is good. You don't have to deal with bullshit. (Well, historically this has been true... this past year Apple has done a fantastic job of shoving their reputation through a woodchipper).
Microsoft, on the other hand, will screw you each day, every day, and you will either learn to accept it or throw your hands up and switch to something else. Their quality is shit. Their QA is shit. They demand that they have control of your machine, but they don't want to take responsibility for your machine, with the end result that your computer can go tits up one day through no fault of your own.
As obnoxious as Apple is, there has never been a report, for example, where all Macs across an entire continent were suddenly yanked off the net due to a bad dhcp update. Microsoft has had so many bad updates that have hosed entire fleets of machines, that it's shameful. But because Microsoft has a monopoly, they can get away with it.
Of course, I shouldn't speak too soon because so far I am very unimpressed with High Sierra, iOS 11. They have been buggy messes. And don't get me started on what they've done to their macbooks in recent years. The only reason I haven't gone back to Windows is because Apple and Microsoft seem to be in a "Hold My Beer" competition, and I can't predict how things are going to shake down, so I'll stick with the costs I have already sunk.