6 ms·

I'm not a bit surprised they're doing it. I literally have an iMac Pro, 18 core Xeon with 64 gigs RAM, and a newer M1 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs RAM that was a qu

I'm not a bit surprised they're doing it. I literally have an iMac Pro, 18 core Xeon with 64 gigs RAM, and a newer M1 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs RAM that was a quarter the price. The M1 laptop at a quarter the price is faster than the maxed-out Intel-based iMac Pro. Not for everything… I do streaming using software x264 encoding and can set the quality levels way higher on the iMac Pro as it's native and 18 cores (the laptop's running OBS in Rosetta and has 8 cores, four of which are efficiency cores). But for some things the laptop's already a bit faster, consistently, right now. At a quarter of the price. I'm guessing their experiments with scaling up what's in the initial M1-based Macs to more power vs. just maximum efficiency (for instance, a desktop that doesn't need to get 20 hour battery life and can actively cool itself) are turning out so shocking that they know they've got to kill the current product line, immediately. I bought my iMac Pro in June 2020. That's a little over half a year ago, and I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development. It's a good thing it has such a nice screen and still has plenty of use, but it's going to be absolutely decimated by what comes out next. It's pretty well decimated now by my little laptop if you count how much energy is wasted, and how for certain tasks the giant 'Pro' monster absolutely cannot keep up with the introductory M1 models running native code, at a quarter or an eighth of the cost. There is no WAY they can keep selling their current line. Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon.

izacus 6y ago
> The M1 laptop at a quarter the price is faster than the maxed-out Intel-based iMac Pro. Even with the "not for everything" guard, this is still some seriously heavy BS. iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, multiple display outputs (which M1 significantly restricted) and support for large amount of memory Seriously, let's avoid this type of hyperbole and silly comparisons.
- graeme 6y ago
  I have an imac pro. I bought it so I could make live video recordings without fan noise, and export video quickly. I bought my assistant an M1 macbook air for editing. It is by definition quieter, and yet reliably beat my imac pro in renders! I would love a machine with ecc ram though. Way fewer random crashes since I got my imac pro. As for outputs, I’m certainly waiting for more, though the M1 mac mini isn’t terribly if you get one of those new hubs. It has ethernet, two usb c, two usb a and a dedicated power port. Yeah there’s are people using the imac pro for super crazy advanced things but many people just wanted a fast quiet computer with ports. (The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless)
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    I literally have the 18 core Xeon iMac Pro, with 64 gigs of RAM. I bought the Macbook Pro (not the Air) with 16 gigs of RAM and 1T SSD. Not as concerned with video editing and renders. The iMac Pro can wreck the Macbook on specifically OBS software x264 encoding, while OBS is not Apple Silicon-native. Repeat, software encoding, not attempting to use the hardware chip (there can be issues streaming to YouTube using it). This is the one case I've found, of anything, where the iMac Pro wins. I tried Minecraft, as there's an M1-native version out there. My old intel Mini: 70 fps. The iMac Pro: 240 fps. The M1 Macbook: 270 fps. I'm gonna say it's rare that my M1 Macbook Pro does NOT beat my Xeon iMac Pro at four times the price, four times the RAM. Again, I literally own both. I've even found a purpose (software x264) where the M1 machine can't keep up. It's the only thing I've found so far, where the M1 isn't faster. Everything else about operating this machine is faster than the iMac Pro, which remains my primary desktop I use every day.
    - spacedcowboy 6y ago
      I have both too. The M1 is fast, no doubt, but throw a big compilation project at it and it’s smoked by the iMac Pro. Parallelism trumps the M1’s smaller number of cores.
      - Applejinx 6y ago
        That's fair. I see that in software encoding to x264, in OBS (though admittedly the M1 is running under Rosetta still). The iMac Pro can reliably stream at 'slow' quality level, but the M1 can barely go above 'ultrafast' without choking. You've nailed it as far as the reason: if you can come up with a task that legitimately needs parallelism that heavy, that's where the Xeon comes into its own. Anything lighter, and the M1 starts to zip ahead.
      - 1123581321 6y ago
        What type and size of compile, and what numbers do you see?
        6y ago
- perardi 6y ago
  So these benchmarks are a bit out of date, as at least some of the Adobe apps have gone M1-native, but the iMac Pro does wallop the MacBook Pro in several cases. https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html - “…bespoke accelerator card…” Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute.
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    Thing is, I don't play Warhammer :) My iMac Pro has the Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB. I'm given to understand the absolute top of the line had some kind of problems… still, that's as much in graphics card RAM as exists in the whole RAM of some of the M1s. I'm betting Warhammer makes heavy use of the graphics card and it's that which is walloping the M1-running-Rosetta-emulation. This probably means there will still be games where a previous version with a fancy enough graphics card will get higher framerates than what the M1 Macs can get. I don't anticipate Apple ever making those kinds of concessions to the gamer market, so that's where you're going to see the only holdouts (in terms of, M1 doing super poorly). And that, mostly with stuff that expects real gamer cards. I don't think the Radeon Pro Vega 56 is nearly top of the line for a gamer card but I can easily believe it's better than the on-board graphics for the initial M1 machines. Remember part of the selling point for the iMac Pros is that they could summon up graphics-card grunt for the purposes of 3d modeling. I should try some Blender experiments and see what's snappier, there's a possibility the iMac Pro will make a decent showing for itself for that reason :)
  - izacus 6y ago
    > Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute. Yup, my mistake. No idea why I was thinking of the Mac Pro.
- titzer 6y ago
  I don't think we've even remotely scratched the surface of what the Neural Engine can do. Also, the battery life is incredible and stays up to the hyperbole I've seen online. 10 hours of heavy work and takes it like a champ. I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.
- benreesman 6y ago
  FWIW my daily driver has been a maxed out iMac Pro, albeit from 2018. I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well.
  - matwood 6y ago
    > I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well. This is why the iMac Pro is going away, it's simply not needed. The upcoming Apple Silicon iMac should be able to span entry level up to iMac Pro level with just BTO options.
- djrogers 6y ago
  > iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, The iMac Pro never supported the afterburner card - that’s a Mac Pro exclusive. I think you’re getting your products mixed up here…
  - izacus 6y ago
    Ugh, I was thinking of the Mac Pro, not iMac Pro. Mistake -_-
- smoldesu 6y ago
  What I've found over the years is that Apple's marketing can often lead people to buy tools they don't necessarily need. For every consummate Macbook professional I've found, there's always another savant who prefers to spend their money on a 15 year old Thinkpad and a 2-year supply of Four Loko. It's a somewhat ironic equilibrium in my eyes, but I think that's part of the ultimate joy of programming. However, I mostly agree with you. I think Apple's marketing does a pretty poor job of communicating the difference in their products, and it's certainly intentional. One of my friends ended up buying the iMac Pro for development, and I can't understand for the life of me why. Similarly, he also derides me for not buying a Mac Mini already and ditching my Linux ecosystem for good. C'est va, I suppose.
  - jamroom 6y ago
    The iMac Pro with it's 5K screen would make an excellent development system I would think.
  - philistine 6y ago
    Might I recommend you work on your French?
    - smoldesu 6y ago
      Please do, it's quite bad.
- alexfringes 6y ago
  Replaced a 10 core, 64 GB RAM iMac Pro with a maxed-out M1 MacBook Air and very happy with that choice. Kept the iMac for Windows and "just in case" the Air doesn't work out. But it's just sitting in a closet now. It isn't just whether or not the speed tests look certain ways, you're right. It's also the fact that the Air is just a really great laptop. It's so good at being a laptop that, after years of compromising via a dual machine setup, the Air has allowed me to return to all the great things laptops used to represent, while providing comparable-to-desktop speed in the same machine. It can easily balance in all sorts of couch potato positions, functions as my main input to a larger screen, and can sit on my lap without burning me or giving me "build anxiety" like other laptops, where I'd dread the fan noise and heat of building. I'm not looking forward to having to decide to even have a desktop again because of however much faster the Apple Silicon desktops will be. Because having this much power in the same setup that I can take everywhere is really enticing and differs from past laptop offerings in the aforementioned improvements (and others like battery life or even the maybe somewhat silly option to run the Dyson iPhone app to control my office fan). PS: I think you might be thinking of the Mac Pro re the accelerator card, no?
mgkimsal 6y ago
you can expand the ram, though, right? for some workloads, that's still going to be key. but yeah, I hear the frustration. I've been on the fence about getting a refurb 27" iMac. have been mostly laptop based for years, but the pandemic made me reconsider a desktop system again. Then... M1 news came out and... it's all up in the air.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  Get the laptop and hook it up to an external monitor or get the mac mini
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    I'm not a great early adopter :). I will probably get something later this year assuming there's a second round of hardware (m1x? m2?) updates.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I'm interested in seeing what the next iteration of laptops is like. I have an iMac and MacBook Pro which are both over 5 years old and it would be nice to upgrade both to a new ARM laptop even if it's a bit less travel friendly than my current system. (I usually travel with my Chromebook anyway.)
- deergomoo 6y ago
  > you can expand the ram, though, right? Ehh kind of. The 27" iMac (non Pro) has a RAM door, and RAM is fully user serviceable. The iMac Pro has slotted RAM, but it has no door and is not considered a user-serviceable part by Apple. So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty. I believe you can also pay Apple an obscene amount of money to do it and keep your warranty, although you'd have to use their RAM.
  - quesera 6y ago
    > So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty. If you are in the US, this is not correct. It's a common misunderstanding, which probably makes manufacturers happy, but it is not true. Disassembling your product does not violate your warranty -- even if you have to puncture a (very un-Apple-like) sticker that says "VOID IF REMOVED OR DAMAGED", etc. However: damaging your product via disassembly, or anything else, allows the warrantor (Apple) to choose not to honor their warranty if the damage is directly related to the issue being repaired under warranty. But if you cause no damage, or if the damage is cosmetic or unrelated to the warranteed part, you are free to do as you like. And so is a third-party repair shop.
thitcanh 6y ago
Yeah, a quarter of the price, a quarter of the screen, a quarter of the RAM, a quarter of the SSD. Of course the price is also a quarter. The CPU isn’t the only part of that ludicrous $5000 price point
amelius 6y ago
> Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon. They can't because TSMC is overbooked already.
steelframe 6y ago
> I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development I don't think a Mac Mini M1 replaces an iMac Pro right now. The Mac Mini M1 maxes out at 16GiB of RAM, which means it will aggressively use swap for certain workloads that require a lot of memory. The speed of swap tends to mask the fact that you're swapping a lot more, but I think it puts a lot of wear on the flash. You don't want to do that because that can decrease the lifespan of your storage, and you can't swap the storage out once it's past its useful lifespan. Because of longevity concerns, if you're running memory-intensive workloads, I'd suggest getting a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory. There's no published timeline on when Apple will release an Apple Silicon-based iMac Pro that can be configured with higher amounts of RAM (i.e., 64GiB). It might happen this year, or you might be waiting more like 2 or 3 years for that to happen. I don't think anybody who has purchased a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory has gotten any kind of a "raw deal" from Apple.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  When Apple formally announced the M1 Macs last June, they committed to replacing their entire lineup within 2 years. I suspect that they plan to do it well within that period. I would expect that the Mac Pro and a possible iMac Pro equivalent might be the last models replaced. Still, based on their timelines you might see an iMac that could fully replace the iMac Pro as soon as end of this year or early 2022.
- usrusr 6y ago
  > The Mac Mini M1 maxes out at 16GiB of RAM ...and that tight coupling between RAM and CPU must be a big part of its performance. I wouldn't really be surprised if they went for a somewhat lazy architecture for the stationary/pro segment that simply (well, "simply", it won't be easy, just maybe less hard than a properly scaled up M1, perhaps much less hard) put n of those units on a shared carrier board with lots of memory slots that would either serve as slower RAM, relegating those 16 GB to an awesome "L4 cache" or maybe even just as one big volatile SSD swapspace. A "lazy architecture" might appear a bit out of character for Apple, but that pro segment must be so far from their core focus that this approach could work out really well. A conventional strategy whati new tech gets introduced in the pro segment and then trickles down until it eventually appears on the iPhone wouldn't really cut it because the phone is their unquestioned flagship and a "pro board" could make trickling up so easy that they might theoretically even make those things end-user upgradeable.
zepto 6y ago
> I bought my iMac Pro in June 2020. That's a little over half a year ago, and I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development. I would be too. On the other hand there are people who really needed that machine then for whom it was worth the money not to have to wait a year.
ghaff 6y ago
>Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon. A lot of companies are still providing employees with Intel MacBooks. I know mine doesn't have M1 variants in the line yet. The reality is that IT cares a lot more about support effort than they are about providing employees with the latest and greatest. You can't really blame them.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > You can't really blame them. We can and should. This is the sort of cart-driving-the-horse culture that acts like a ball and chain on the enterprise.
  - Jcowell 6y ago
    A good IT team wouldn’t jump on the latest Tech until they’ve ensured it’s comparable and safe with the enterprises current tech. If enterprise that had people working from home have everyone a new M1, they would’ve been ass out to see that Cisco AnyConnect did not work (though it was due to Big Sur)

izacus 6y ago

> The M1 laptop at a quarter the price is faster than the maxed-out Intel-based iMac Pro. Even with the "not for everything" guard, this is still some seriously heavy BS. iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, multiple display outputs (which M1 significantly restricted) and support for large amount of memory Seriously, let's avoid this type of hyperbole and silly comparisons.

graeme 6y ago
I have an imac pro. I bought it so I could make live video recordings without fan noise, and export video quickly. I bought my assistant an M1 macbook air for editing. It is by definition quieter, and yet reliably beat my imac pro in renders! I would love a machine with ecc ram though. Way fewer random crashes since I got my imac pro. As for outputs, I’m certainly waiting for more, though the M1 mac mini isn’t terribly if you get one of those new hubs. It has ethernet, two usb c, two usb a and a dedicated power port. Yeah there’s are people using the imac pro for super crazy advanced things but many people just wanted a fast quiet computer with ports. (The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless)
- Applejinx 6y ago
  I literally have the 18 core Xeon iMac Pro, with 64 gigs of RAM. I bought the Macbook Pro (not the Air) with 16 gigs of RAM and 1T SSD. Not as concerned with video editing and renders. The iMac Pro can wreck the Macbook on specifically OBS software x264 encoding, while OBS is not Apple Silicon-native. Repeat, software encoding, not attempting to use the hardware chip (there can be issues streaming to YouTube using it). This is the one case I've found, of anything, where the iMac Pro wins. I tried Minecraft, as there's an M1-native version out there. My old intel Mini: 70 fps. The iMac Pro: 240 fps. The M1 Macbook: 270 fps. I'm gonna say it's rare that my M1 Macbook Pro does NOT beat my Xeon iMac Pro at four times the price, four times the RAM. Again, I literally own both. I've even found a purpose (software x264) where the M1 machine can't keep up. It's the only thing I've found so far, where the M1 isn't faster. Everything else about operating this machine is faster than the iMac Pro, which remains my primary desktop I use every day.
  - spacedcowboy 6y ago
    I have both too. The M1 is fast, no doubt, but throw a big compilation project at it and it’s smoked by the iMac Pro. Parallelism trumps the M1’s smaller number of cores.
    - Applejinx 6y ago
      That's fair. I see that in software encoding to x264, in OBS (though admittedly the M1 is running under Rosetta still). The iMac Pro can reliably stream at 'slow' quality level, but the M1 can barely go above 'ultrafast' without choking. You've nailed it as far as the reason: if you can come up with a task that legitimately needs parallelism that heavy, that's where the Xeon comes into its own. Anything lighter, and the M1 starts to zip ahead.
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      What type and size of compile, and what numbers do you see?
      - 6y ago
perardi 6y ago
So these benchmarks are a bit out of date, as at least some of the Adobe apps have gone M1-native, but the iMac Pro does wallop the MacBook Pro in several cases. https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html - “…bespoke accelerator card…” Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute.
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Thing is, I don't play Warhammer :) My iMac Pro has the Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB. I'm given to understand the absolute top of the line had some kind of problems… still, that's as much in graphics card RAM as exists in the whole RAM of some of the M1s. I'm betting Warhammer makes heavy use of the graphics card and it's that which is walloping the M1-running-Rosetta-emulation. This probably means there will still be games where a previous version with a fancy enough graphics card will get higher framerates than what the M1 Macs can get. I don't anticipate Apple ever making those kinds of concessions to the gamer market, so that's where you're going to see the only holdouts (in terms of, M1 doing super poorly). And that, mostly with stuff that expects real gamer cards. I don't think the Radeon Pro Vega 56 is nearly top of the line for a gamer card but I can easily believe it's better than the on-board graphics for the initial M1 machines. Remember part of the selling point for the iMac Pros is that they could summon up graphics-card grunt for the purposes of 3d modeling. I should try some Blender experiments and see what's snappier, there's a possibility the iMac Pro will make a decent showing for itself for that reason :)
- izacus 6y ago
  > Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute. Yup, my mistake. No idea why I was thinking of the Mac Pro.
titzer 6y ago
I don't think we've even remotely scratched the surface of what the Neural Engine can do. Also, the battery life is incredible and stays up to the hyperbole I've seen online. 10 hours of heavy work and takes it like a champ. I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.
benreesman 6y ago
FWIW my daily driver has been a maxed out iMac Pro, albeit from 2018. I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well.
- matwood 6y ago
  > I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well. This is why the iMac Pro is going away, it's simply not needed. The upcoming Apple Silicon iMac should be able to span entry level up to iMac Pro level with just BTO options.
djrogers 6y ago
> iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, The iMac Pro never supported the afterburner card - that’s a Mac Pro exclusive. I think you’re getting your products mixed up here…
- izacus 6y ago
  Ugh, I was thinking of the Mac Pro, not iMac Pro. Mistake -_-
smoldesu 6y ago
What I've found over the years is that Apple's marketing can often lead people to buy tools they don't necessarily need. For every consummate Macbook professional I've found, there's always another savant who prefers to spend their money on a 15 year old Thinkpad and a 2-year supply of Four Loko. It's a somewhat ironic equilibrium in my eyes, but I think that's part of the ultimate joy of programming. However, I mostly agree with you. I think Apple's marketing does a pretty poor job of communicating the difference in their products, and it's certainly intentional. One of my friends ended up buying the iMac Pro for development, and I can't understand for the life of me why. Similarly, he also derides me for not buying a Mac Mini already and ditching my Linux ecosystem for good. C'est va, I suppose.
- jamroom 6y ago
  The iMac Pro with it's 5K screen would make an excellent development system I would think.
- philistine 6y ago
  Might I recommend you work on your French?
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    Please do, it's quite bad.
alexfringes 6y ago
Replaced a 10 core, 64 GB RAM iMac Pro with a maxed-out M1 MacBook Air and very happy with that choice. Kept the iMac for Windows and "just in case" the Air doesn't work out. But it's just sitting in a closet now. It isn't just whether or not the speed tests look certain ways, you're right. It's also the fact that the Air is just a really great laptop. It's so good at being a laptop that, after years of compromising via a dual machine setup, the Air has allowed me to return to all the great things laptops used to represent, while providing comparable-to-desktop speed in the same machine. It can easily balance in all sorts of couch potato positions, functions as my main input to a larger screen, and can sit on my lap without burning me or giving me "build anxiety" like other laptops, where I'd dread the fan noise and heat of building. I'm not looking forward to having to decide to even have a desktop again because of however much faster the Apple Silicon desktops will be. Because having this much power in the same setup that I can take everywhere is really enticing and differs from past laptop offerings in the aforementioned improvements (and others like battery life or even the maybe somewhat silly option to run the Dyson iPhone app to control my office fan). PS: I think you might be thinking of the Mac Pro re the accelerator card, no?

mgkimsal 6y ago

you can expand the ram, though, right? for some workloads, that's still going to be key. but yeah, I hear the frustration. I've been on the fence about getting a refurb 27" iMac. have been mostly laptop based for years, but the pandemic made me reconsider a desktop system again. Then... M1 news came out and... it's all up in the air.

danlugo92 6y ago
Get the laptop and hook it up to an external monitor or get the mac mini
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  I'm not a great early adopter :). I will probably get something later this year assuming there's a second round of hardware (m1x? m2?) updates.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm interested in seeing what the next iteration of laptops is like. I have an iMac and MacBook Pro which are both over 5 years old and it would be nice to upgrade both to a new ARM laptop even if it's a bit less travel friendly than my current system. (I usually travel with my Chromebook anyway.)
deergomoo 6y ago
> you can expand the ram, though, right? Ehh kind of. The 27" iMac (non Pro) has a RAM door, and RAM is fully user serviceable. The iMac Pro has slotted RAM, but it has no door and is not considered a user-serviceable part by Apple. So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty. I believe you can also pay Apple an obscene amount of money to do it and keep your warranty, although you'd have to use their RAM.
- quesera 6y ago
  > So you have to disassemble the machine at the expense of your warranty. If you are in the US, this is not correct. It's a common misunderstanding, which probably makes manufacturers happy, but it is not true. Disassembling your product does not violate your warranty -- even if you have to puncture a (very un-Apple-like) sticker that says "VOID IF REMOVED OR DAMAGED", etc. However: damaging your product via disassembly, or anything else, allows the warrantor (Apple) to choose not to honor their warranty if the damage is directly related to the issue being repaired under warranty. But if you cause no damage, or if the damage is cosmetic or unrelated to the warranteed part, you are free to do as you like. And so is a third-party repair shop.

thitcanh 6y ago

Yeah, a quarter of the price, a quarter of the screen, a quarter of the RAM, a quarter of the SSD. Of course the price is also a quarter. The CPU isn’t the only part of that ludicrous $5000 price point

amelius 6y ago

> Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon. They can't because TSMC is overbooked already.

steelframe 6y ago

> I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development I don't think a Mac Mini M1 replaces an iMac Pro right now. The Mac Mini M1 maxes out at 16GiB of RAM, which means it will aggressively use swap for certain workloads that require a lot of memory. The speed of swap tends to mask the fact that you're swapping a lot more, but I think it puts a lot of wear on the flash. You don't want to do that because that can decrease the lifespan of your storage, and you can't swap the storage out once it's past its useful lifespan. Because of longevity concerns, if you're running memory-intensive workloads, I'd suggest getting a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory. There's no published timeline on when Apple will release an Apple Silicon-based iMac Pro that can be configured with higher amounts of RAM (i.e., 64GiB). It might happen this year, or you might be waiting more like 2 or 3 years for that to happen. I don't think anybody who has purchased a previous-generation iMac Pro with more memory has gotten any kind of a "raw deal" from Apple.

Tagbert 6y ago
When Apple formally announced the M1 Macs last June, they committed to replacing their entire lineup within 2 years. I suspect that they plan to do it well within that period. I would expect that the Mac Pro and a possible iMac Pro equivalent might be the last models replaced. Still, based on their timelines you might see an iMac that could fully replace the iMac Pro as soon as end of this year or early 2022.
usrusr 6y ago
> The Mac Mini M1 maxes out at 16GiB of RAM ...and that tight coupling between RAM and CPU must be a big part of its performance. I wouldn't really be surprised if they went for a somewhat lazy architecture for the stationary/pro segment that simply (well, "simply", it won't be easy, just maybe less hard than a properly scaled up M1, perhaps much less hard) put n of those units on a shared carrier board with lots of memory slots that would either serve as slower RAM, relegating those 16 GB to an awesome "L4 cache" or maybe even just as one big volatile SSD swapspace. A "lazy architecture" might appear a bit out of character for Apple, but that pro segment must be so far from their core focus that this approach could work out really well. A conventional strategy whati new tech gets introduced in the pro segment and then trickles down until it eventually appears on the iPhone wouldn't really cut it because the phone is their unquestioned flagship and a "pro board" could make trickling up so easy that they might theoretically even make those things end-user upgradeable.

zepto 6y ago

> I bought my iMac Pro in June 2020. That's a little over half a year ago, and I'm still frustrated that they took my money knowing they've got this in development. I would be too. On the other hand there are people who really needed that machine then for whom it was worth the money not to have to wait a year.

ghaff 6y ago

>Right now they shouldn't be selling anything that isn't an M1 or some other Apple Silicon. A lot of companies are still providing employees with Intel MacBooks. I know mine doesn't have M1 variants in the line yet. The reality is that IT cares a lot more about support effort than they are about providing employees with the latest and greatest. You can't really blame them.

mr_toad 6y ago
> You can't really blame them. We can and should. This is the sort of cart-driving-the-horse culture that acts like a ball and chain on the enterprise.
- Jcowell 6y ago
  A good IT team wouldn’t jump on the latest Tech until they’ve ensured it’s comparable and safe with the enterprises current tech. If enterprise that had people working from home have everyone a new M1, they would’ve been ass out to see that Cisco AnyConnect did not work (though it was due to Big Sur)