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The Most Powerful iMac Pro Now Costs $15,927 (vice.com)
Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights runs a whopping $15,927. An anonymous reader writes: The most expensive possible upgrade is a $5,200 charge for upgrading the RAM from 32GB to a startling 256GB. Other addons include an additional $700 for a 16GB Radeon video card and $2,400 for a 2.3 Ghz Intel processor with 18 cores. Almost $16,000 is a lot of money for a computer, especially one so overpowered that there are very few reasonable applications of its hardware. Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.
Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games Sounds familiar to me. No comments, other than the famous "640K ought to be enough for anybody." is often attributed erroneously to Bill Gates.
With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.. Of course, because both tasks are memory-bound, and not compute-bound /sarcasm.
If your time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour, then this purchase becomes justifiable if it can save you a sufficient number of hours. I don't think that there are that many people who will see significant improvements from maxing this thing out. About half of the cost is maxing out the RAM and using the largest internal SSD possible. You can save considerably by avoiding the Apple tax and installing your own RAM upgrade and you've probably already got an external RAID setup for storage if you're in the market for this kind of machine. The $2,400 for the extra 10 cores is probably the only thing that most people would want/need to touch and I expect that over a few years of use, it's likely to justify its cost.
Sixteen grand for a machine like this is still dirt cheap for a high end animation studio like Pixar or Ghibli.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I wouldn't say 32-64GB is too much for some of those tasks, CAD and the like could easily spike 128GB with modern systems. The RAM is just an option because the Intel processor is designed for servers/workstations and simply allows you to. It's also useful if you have a rig of GPU's, which this iMac is capable of powering a number of eGPU systems so for very remote circumstances I can see it being useful.
In comparison, a Dell workstation can run you a lot higher, the CPU and RAM being the primary cost drivers, one of those Xeons by itself can cost upwards of $10k on the street.
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You don't have to pay Apple's prices to upgrade RAM, you can buy the chips yourself. The process to get to the ram slots is somewhat involved, but you can also just have Apple install the ram you bring them.
The thing is the RAM the iMac Pro uses is not cheap (2666MHz DDR4 ECC / PC4-21300), so you'll be paying a lot regardless of the path you take. For instance an iFixit RAM upgrade kit to 128GB is $2,000.00. To reach 265GB you'll need four 64GB memory chips... and probably best not to use the cheapest ones. Crucial does not even list chips that will work with the iMac Pro...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As in the statistics system. I deal with data scientist that do spend $16k+ per week on data modeling and forecasting at AWS. With that expense, it's should be easy to justify that desktop. But they'd complain about only 18 cores.
I already use 32gigs on my laptop, for my servers I am happy with 128gigs.
Now why so much where we could had nearly the same type of work 20 years ago with 1/1000 of the resource?
While there is some bloat, there is the annoying factor of security being a big concern, Back 20 years ago, shared memory was common, no sandboxes, if you keep on moving your pointer values you will finally run into some other line of ram for an other system. Today we have sandboxes and virtualization, for added levels of protection, to make sure App 1 will not overwrite App 2.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!"
Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!"
Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!"
The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!"
Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!"
Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.
I mean, in all the years I've used Apple products, that's always a complaint about them from detractors; They don't give you enough flexibility or choice!
Well, here's a system from Apple that you can configure in all sorts of insane, over the top ways, IF you actually want to -- and people are complaining because it's too much?
I actually own one of these iMac Pros, but I purchased it in the standard "base" configuration. I was also able to buy it for $1,000 off the regular price on a sale that Micro Center stores ran on it, shortly after it was released. They ran various sales on it for months after that, varying between about $500 off and that $1000 discount -- but there were definitely some opportunities to get one for less than Apple's advertised pricing.
It's been a great computer and I have no regrets purchasing it.... The 5K display in it is excellent and partially justifies the base cost of the computer when you see how much equivalent monitors sell for separately. I certainly don't see the need to buy the upgraded configurations for many thousands more? But I'm glad those were available, in case people needed them. I can see someone running a lot of virtual machines in test environments, as a developer, possibly needing a lot more RAM. Maybe not 256GB but 128GB? Yeah .... could happen.
What will make my shiny new imac pro obsolete? (bearing in mind that nothing on the imac pro can be upgraded without surgery)
Will it be new graphics hardware?
Will it be the widespread availability of cpus with more than 18 cores?
Will it be higher resolution displays?
No. It will be the emergence of bloatware the likes of which even god has never seen.
Still waiting for the Mac Pro Tower. Having gone through half a dozen iMac all in ones they each had their lives shortened drastically by the screen going bad. A Xeon will make those fans run loud not G5 risc chip fast but still over 150 degrees F.