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Apple has finally announced, after a good few years of selling the infamous ‘black bin’ Mac Pro, that a new one is on the way.

iMacPro-Blog-1Coming our way December 2017, it will be called the Apple iMac Pro.

Apple are touting this with the strapline ‘The Most Powerful Mac Ever” – and the specs seems to back that up.  This 27-inch space grey workstation class computer will feature (for around $4999 / £3845)

  • A retina 5K display
  • A Xeon-Pro CPU with up to 18 cores(!)
  • AMD’s Radeon Vega GPU
  • Up to 128GB RAM
  • Up to 4TB of SSD HD
  • 4 x Thunderbolt 3 Ports which can support up to two 5K displays
  • 1080p FaceTime Camera
  • 10GB Ethernet

iMacPro-Blog-2Having the Xeon V4 class CPU, this is definitely aimed at the Pro user – those interested in graphic modelling or video production work.

The $4999 price tag is for the ‘base’ model with an 8 core Xeon CPU (E5-2620 V4 @ 2.1GHz possibly, but Apple is yet to confirm), an 8GB Radeon Vega GPU, 32GB of 2666Mhz DDR4 ECC RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

The maxed-out version can have an 18 core Xeon Pro CPU, 16GB Radeon Vega GPU, 128GB 2666Mhz DDR4 ECC RAM and a 4TB SSD HD.  Looking at this maxed-out spec, you can expect to spend…wait for it!  Around $17k!!

This will put this version of the new iMac Pro out of the reach of the average user, but it’s enough to turn even the most modest geek into a quivering wreck.

To sum up, Fully-equipped, the machine Apple will be selling will unquestionably be very expensive — at least for a traditional desktop. But if you consider this to be a professional production workstation, it’s not overly expensive. But if you’re a film company, and it’s time to make another big movie, a $17k workstation (or 4!) is not overly expensive.

EDIT: Apple has a page up on their website for the new iMac Pro, but don’t expect any extra information until the big reveal!

https://www.apple.com/uk/imac-pro/