Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

I got a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Kaby Lake) and so far, so good. Am very happy. Like you say, I wish it had the Apple touchpad (but not the new one - that's getting _too_ big).

Everything else is great. The Infinity Edge screen, beautiful keyboard...

But, yes, I transition from a Mac (home) to Windows (work) daily and while I can choose not to, I find that working on different OS and learning its nuances has taught me a lot about how my Python programs execute, for instance.

I think you sum it up well - there are some rough edges in the Windows world, but there also are in the Mac world. I find I hardly use my iPad now.

And agree, at home, Windows 10's unix capabilities are amazing. Apple needs to dedicate some real resources to the Mac line and turn them back from being overpriced toys and back to useful tools.

Takes a bit of time to get acquainted, but I really enjoy it.

Does that mean I get a UNIX env/shell on windows?

I use WSL a lot during the day; and the stock terminal is way not good and third party options such as conemu are OK, but still comes with annoying issues. My emacs quality time gets messed up because of some of these issues... there may be no way around some of that and it may simply be the reality of a system that maps certain keys one way and a subsystem that would like them another.

Otherwise, I own a Surface Book for travel and tablet like usage and I use a Lenovo workstation for my day-to-day stuff. All Win 10. Very happy overall.

So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.

Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.

Dell quality has been very bad though, I'm not amused.

Linux bash on Windows also helped me a lot to transition development work to Windows.

It's rubbish. And the lack of consistency throughout the OS (icons different everywhere, duplication of settings app despite same underlying COM snap-ins, settings app titlebar isn't really a titlebar, 3 different right-click menus - one for the Start menu, one for Edge, one for everywhere else) it is driving me insane. You have to learn all of these edge cases on how to interact with core OS windows.

That shouldn't be the case!!

Windows 3.11 came with a manual (I have it) that informed you how to interact with the desktop and windows. Just imagine the mess they'd have to write for Windows 10 - "drag the blue bar at the top, unless it is the settings app, where there is no blue bar and you can't tell where the titlebar ends and the toolbar begins"; "single click on buttons, unless you are presented with the 'open with which app?' dialog where you will be able to double-click on the button that has the name of the application you wish to use" etc etc etc

EDIT: And I say all this where I use my PC all day at work as a C++ Windows dev and Windows at home when I need to cross-compile. Don't get me started on the lack of future for the MFC codebase we have at work.

What's reassuring is that we need a Mac to work/compile iOS apps. Until they port the toolchain to iOS, not taking care of the Mac could be dangerous to their ecosystem.

Windows is a no go for me. I want a unix underneath, and Windows has its own share of ugly (though I do keep hearing nice things about Surface). I haven't looked at Linux distros lately, but I'm hoping there's one that's as nice and pretty as OS X in its better days.

Which is why Surface Pro owners often turn to these: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/productI...

> I'm sure I'll be back on a Macbook someday (cause hey, change is fun) but no regrets right now.

After a few years with Surface touch and pen, going back to a Mac is like having a limb removed....

They say they do this to train Cortana, but it has the side effect of giving the NSA a front row seat to everything I do.

I use PCs for most of my development work, and Macs when I can (when I'm doing the more ops-like bits of devops, and for personal use). The MacOS environment is really nice, and the Windows tools for writing native code are really good, but the writing is on the wall: Own your computing environment or you will working at someone's sufferance.

I'm not going to go full bull-goose Stallman, but it seems like a worthwhile thing to do.

[1] It's rocky. Device support is spotty, and user interfaces are often staggeringly bad. Maybe with more people piling on things will get better.

You stick 1TB of your files in your Documents directory (or app-specific data folders..), and you can access them in any device that supports iCloud, including iPhones & iPads.

Try it, you'll like it, and you don't have to deal with physical storage devices.

I mean, have people never even tried iCloud sync?

You could close a session with a number of apps open, go to some other location, and login with a different Sun Ray located there, and your session just as you left it would be there, no rebooting or loss of state (assuming that the Sun Ray was somehow connected or federated to the same server that had your login details and apps).

It would be interesting to have something like process migration across VMs, but with mobile devices.

https://medium.com/@tzhenghao/why-your-smartphone-is-soon-be...

I've tried having two different computers. Dropbox makes it easier, but still you have the problem that you need to maintain two separate systems.

I think technically this is not so far fetched. With the portable USB3 memory you could almost achieve it. This would just require that the operating system supports waking up in a bit different hardware (at least different CPU, possibly also different amount of RAM).

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/slick...

What I want is to have docking stations with extra computing power/GPU/RAM/HDD etc built in, so that I can keep the small Surface with its limited battery for the road but have an absurdly powerful desktop PC when I dock it.

A 13" tablet is still a bit big to be carrying around - I'm hoping they'll eventually manage to make an x86 phone with enough oomph to operate as a development workstation - but it's getting there.

It's a good question if a CPU should be included or not. On the one hand, I want a desktop class CPU in some situations and a laptop class CPU in other situations. And it would be nice to upgrade your entire computer without even having to shutdown the OS.

On the other hand, an Skylake or Kabby lake laptop class processor is actually the same silicon as the desktop class processor, just but with some cores disabled, clocked at a lower speed and binned for low power usage instead of performance.

So theoretically, you could have CPU which can be a quad core desktop processor when plugged into a beefy power source and cooling solution, but disables cores and downclocks when power and cooling is more limited.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

It's an open hardware standard for switching the computer between different interface devices.

"We have so many amazing things in store that I am so excited about" <-- recycled and beaten to death CEO lingo. I mean, he might be telling the truth (I am not gonna argue what I don't know!) but the wording is just awful and comes off as corny and forced by your PR department.

Actions speak louder than words. The new MBPs are the most meh Apple laptops ever. The iPhone 7/Plus are the laziest iPhones ever made, too. Rehashes losing legacy ports and trying to impose new ones (although USB Type-C is the best decision they've made in the last several years; I think they should've went with the same port for the iPhone as well). And losing battery life. Damn.

I was never an active Apple user. I bought my first iPhone and Macbook at March 2016 (the 12" Macbook and the 6S Plus; I sold the iPhone only 4 months later but that's a separate topic). But I did consider Apple because part of the Windows ecosystem -- and the entire Android ecosystem -- are disappointing me a lot lately. I was really curious what will Apple bring with the iPhone 7/Plus and the new MBPs.

Severe disappointment followed. I'll give them until the next iPhone release. If they can't excite me, oh well, guess it's time to sift again through the trash yard that Android has become lately.

Also, in this situation, denial is the lesser of two evils. Because if there are rumors that "X is going to be killed", and you don't squash them, that's even more suspicious.

Oh and this was quite accurate at the time (I'm not implying that in case of Apple): http://wiki.c2.com/?WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom

The first 25 minutes were spent rambling about other Apple business, and then they only updated 1 of their many Mac product lines.

Is it any surprise that longtime Mac users are pissed?

What Apple is committed to is its iPhone-powered firehose of cash. (Maybe volcano of cash? Atomic bomb? No hyperbole is too strong, here.)

I pine for great computer hardware from Apple as much as anyone else, I'm sad about the current state of their computers. But can you really blame them? The numbers generated from their iPhone business is bonkers. It's off the map/beyond the pale and it has made them arguably the biggest most successful enterprise in the history of the world. What are they to do?

In my daily home life outside of work, having an i7 over an i5 doesn't add value for me because I'm just messing around. I think it all comes down to need. I didn't get a MBP as a status symbol, I got one because I wanted a machine that ran macOS alongside Windows without building a Hackintosh. I do think plenty of college students get MBP's because everyone else has them when in reality, they won't need something like a MBP for their coursework likely ever.

That said, this is my last MBP. The changes Apple are making aren't exactly things I align with. I can only buy the pioneer argument so much. I think my next purchase is going to be a Thinkpad or a Surface Book Pro.

Got it refurbished from Apple saved a couple hundred bucks. It did have a fan problem right before the warranty expired -- when I sent it in for repair, they ended up replacing (with no charge) huge amounts of it, in addition to the fan problem I specified (replaced the entire graphics board and logic board, as well as entirely new display, because their diagnostics found problems I have no idea what but I'm not complaining -- I think the moral is always take a macbook into the apple store for a checkup right before the warranty expires, come up with something small to say there's a problem with, have them run all their diagnostics, be friendly and polite to the apple desk person).

I'm pretty darn happy with it. It's still plenty fast enough 3-4 years later. (Looking it up, it's dual core i5, but I've never really wanted for more cpu; I'm not a gamer though it must be said). I think when I bought it a newer model had _just_ been released, and price reductions on the model I got.

So I dunno, it seems pretty comparable (some things better, some things worse, but a pretty similar machine) to the thinkpad you purchased for a comparable price, really, doesn't it? Not neccesarily better, not neccesarily worse, depends on what you're looking for, similar price.

I am not sure I like the direction macbooks have gone since then, in price-to-features, it's true. I'm not alone, which is why Apple is trying to assuage mac owners.

It also doesn't run OS X, and lots of other stuff. If you try to understand it as "value for money", then there are far better computers for number crunching that are way cheaper than a Mac. Instead with Mac you get lots of marginal returns, that, if you have the money can appreciate, and they are all focused on things other than raw performance per dollar.

Weight, size, construction, design, no crap ware, magsafe (rip), great trackpad, first to get hi-dpi screens, first to get modern more powerful ports, first to ditch legacy stuff, and good battery life (despite some recent problems it has been traditionally better than the PC competition, even for units 2x the size). Plus a whole ecosystem that has the same values, of smartphone, tablet, watch, desktop, Cloud services, etc. And a great resale value.

Also Apple traditionally uses it bargaining/money to order the best parts of what it orders (quality assurance wise). They don't get the most powerful Nvidia, for example, but for the model of Nvidia they do get, they get the most careful produced units. Same for less/no stuck pixels on the monitors, etc. Don't have an exact reference now, but I've read that from 2 different people working for other OEMs/suppliers. Of course its also inevitable for every product run that runs in the millions that they also get some duds as they had in the past. The screens on MBPr's or iMacs have for example, have consistently been top of the crop, with respect to color, brightness, etc compared to other (cheaper or not) laptops. Compared to dedicated pro screens that cost the same as the whole MBPr just for the screen, no, but that's not the point. The point is in the balance.

Even not having to bother with 200 customization options is a feature for some.

About the "it's not thin and weights 1.5 pounds more". This might seem like OK tradeoff to you, but is enough to drive some people crazy, like this guy:

I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky* things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. It’s not just laptops, btw – Intel sometimes gives me pre-release hardware, and the people inside Intel I work with have learnt that being whisper-quiet is one of my primary requirements for desktops too. I am sometimes surprised at what leaf-blowers some people seem to put up with under their desks. I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit).* (Linus Torvalds)

    > I don't get the attraction of luxury laptop lines at this point.

Apple doesn't make those anymore. It makes machines with parts glued together, and drives soldered to the board, whose GPUs overheat and die after a few months.

Then I actually had to use one for work.

I'll never go back.

It's the little things that are not so little: 1) The wake speed 2) The battery life 3) The overall comfort and feel of the keys and the trackpad compared to ANYTHING I've ever used before from Lenovo or Dell.

I can live in Mac mode and build almost anything targeted to a *nix platform natively.

And if I need to do anything for Windows, I just use Boot Camp.

You mention 1080p. I believe the high-res displays (think 4k-ish/Retina) are still super expensive, even for non-Apple machines and they make a huge difference for me. For professionals working with print, it's an absolute bliss to "not see pixels" anymore and I generally love it for just reading super crisp text. Then there's the "little things" that even fewer high end laptops get right and Apple tends to nail (like the glass-surface trackpad).

I don't get the "open ended" pricing (>$2500), either. I don't get why versions of the same base model with $200 worth of better hardware cost $500 more, that's the Apple idiot-tax. But the existence of high-end laptops alone? Dude, I spend like half my day in front of that thing, for years. People don't raise an eye brow on you spending +/- 25% on a car yet I'd argue for many people, you get way more use out of a laptop. It's worth paying a little extra, IMO.

[my friend also does a demonstration where he shuts down the lid of his running Thinkpad and walks on it, then opens up the lid and keeps working... yay exoskeleton :]

It's not about being ultra-thin as much as the quality and experience of macOS over anything else.

I've been wanting a mac laptop the size and weight of a MacBook Air 13" ... how about the size and weight and price??

They removed a bunch of ports, reduced battery life and upped the price.

USD $1799 to $2799 (with touch bar). Pricing is out of reach. Especially if you live outside of the USA where exchange rate kills it completely.

I love the 13" Macbook Air, just wish they would add retina, retain the ports, AND the price point.

If they'd sold these new models as New Air, everyone would be fine; Air customers would be ecstatic and Pro customers would be interested. But they called them Pro and slapped (raised) Pro prices on them, which is basically trying to sell me shit for chocolate.

It's an utter failure of branding and marketing, which is what Apple is supposed to be the best at.

They are a worse product in every way for me over my current rMBP. Literally the only advantage is they are thinner and lighter and the display has a wider color gamut. Not worth all the trade offs. The old ones already had plenty of USB ports which today are more useful than USB-C.

Apple actually stopped making pro hardware. They're unpredictable when it comes to upgrades(15 Retina ethernal Haswell, 2013 Mac Pro, even iMacs), they do not seem to have an idea how the platform should evolve and they're obsessed with thinness, while in the pro market performance and battery life are vastly more important.

Last but not least, their recent idea of progress is gimmicky touch bar and emoticons everywhere. Sorry, it just does not fit. Add to it degrading software quality (iOS10 sucks, MacOS just got rid of battery prediction, because they couldn't work with new processors - come on!), frozen progress on software front in general and there is not much left.

Currently Apple is a company sitting on an extremely large pile of cash and they have not idea what to do with it. Not sexy at all.

Since the Touchbar may convince noobs like my 15-year-old, provided they're spoiled with laptops no-one can afford, you may end up with a situation where old farts are only 5-10% still cursing at the lack of hardware Esc/Function keys. But that's because of the attrition of professionals, not because you've made a good product.

Face it, the market actively rejects this innovation. A lot of people who wanted to renew held off, and are replacing their Macbook with... nothing. It's a bit like if your boyfriend leaves you, and if he doesn't have anyone else to date. He just leaves you because you're bad, because your prices increased too much, and because your features are missing. I don't even thing Microsoft's innovation plays much of a role in Apple's attrition.

Now let's talk about the missing battery life incidator, the missing battery life, the missing magsafe, the missing USB ports, the missing compatibility with iPhone 7's USB key.

One more thing. The new Macbook isn't on display in stores (in France at least), 6 weeks after the keynote and one week before Christmas. Apple really has a problem with procurement.

1) Very slightly faster. (2.9 vs 2.8) 2) 2 TB SSD instead of 1 TB. 3) Ability to charge and drive monitor over single cable.

But what is the price?

1) $4,199 -- nearly $1000 more expensive than the last one. 2) Complete inability to plug in any peripheral I already own without a dongle. 3) No physical ESC key.

It's only $150 more if I stick with a 1TB SSD. But if I do that, literally the only significant benefit I get from the new machine is the ability to drive monitor and charge over a single cable -- and of course, I've got to replace my existing (expensive, beautiful) monitor to do that.

Plus as an added bonus, they're discontinuing the Time Capsule, which has been my main local backup solution for years.

It's more about regression for cosmetic reasons then not being revolutionary. There's potential with development of newer hardware and yet they use it to make slimmer devices and with less ports. Smaller motherboard ? Instead of slimming the shell, make it thicker and use the rest for batteries. 50 hour battery laptop, now that's revolutionary.

Regardless of strategic Cook leaks: Apple is deprecating macs-as-computers-for-professionals. It should be obvious why; so many HNers love to cheer market forces. Apple makes way more money on phones and shiny things, so that's all they're going to make from now on. Because the market cannot afford inefficiencies, and anywhere someone is making $0.99 when they could be making $1.00 is an inefficiency that must be corrected.

For me, the highest end mini is almost enough, as I really don't want a built in display at all... The mac pro is too overpriced (more than it was when last refreshed) and there's no new mac pro in sight... and to be honest, I really want a mid-range "Mac" (not pro, not mini), effectively i5-i7 iMac hardware without a built in display, hell build it off an itx platform board in a fancy case, then allow the pricing to rule itself out... I mean, keep the developers happy and making apps for their iOS devices... yeah, we'll build other stuff too, but really they need to figure out that a lot of actual software developers (the people that make the stuff that makes their platforms worthwhile) aren't happy with the options available.

The Mac Pro is a video editing appliance ATM.

What they don't have is a developer/hobbyist oriented desktop. And this will bite them in the ass long term, because they will lose mind share. I'm very close to switching back to Linux if they don't offer me a developer oriented Mac Pro in the next 1-2 years.

"Stuck in the present" might be a bit more fair :)

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-bal...

The team simply has different priorities in particular security and battery life which means some eg service workers take longer to implement (if at all).

That's why on my Mac unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari isn't a memory hog that chews through battery life like it's nobody's business.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135

As an actual developer, who's been around since the eternal IE-version days, I really don't understand this criticism.

Honestly, Safari as a lot of new really nice browsers features that my clients are actually asking for, like blurred backgrounds[1] and native CSS carousels[2]. Realistically, things like WebRTC is only holding back a very specific subset of development.

[1]: http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-backdrop-filter

[2]: http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-snappoints

He was just as vague as Tim Cook is being and there is certainly an air of nostalgia when reading this.

I don't believe this bodes well for the product line at all.

Will you really let go of Sketch and all the other great tools from 3rd party devs just because you don't like dongles & touchbar?

I'm pretty sure Apple would never give up Control.

The time is right now especially given the age and non-expandability of the Mac Pro.

I do kind of want the huge cinema displays. But they're expensive.

I do kind of want the cylindrical mac pro. But it's expensive.

Apple's laptops are the sweet spot. I want them. The price is right. And they have performed. Tablets and touchscreens suck compared to a solid laptop.

Mac minis are borderline indistinguishable from any other mac during use. But they've always been coasters. Lazy susans. Arm rests. Furniture.

The only time you think about it being a mac mini is when you cycle power, or when you imagine opening it up, and adding more power because multi-tasking.

Providing the mac pro at closer to mini prices would be cool. The polished metal cyclinder is kind of cool. But it's hard to find fetish items that endure six months these days. The death march of cell phone upgrades has seen to that.

Once they started soldering and epoxying internals, well... I start to feel guilty about polluting the environment with electronics waste, and I start googling recycling programs.

But once the iPhone came out and became a major success, it started to appear that Apple was neglecting the Mac. Hardware refreshes, which used to occur roughly twice a year for most models back in the mid-2000s, started to reduce in frequency. Thinness and lightness started to become the design goals at the expense of upgradeability and performance, first with the soldered-on memory of the original MacBook Air in 2008 and with the non-user serviceable battery in the 2008 uni-body MacBook Pro. Then once Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, these trends started to intensify. The soldered-on nature of the MacBook Air spread to the MacBook Pro. The easily serviceable white MacBook was discontinued. The Mac Mini, which at one point had user-upgradeable RAM and had an option for a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, was nerfed, with no quad-core option and with soldered RAM. Even the iMac got the soldered RAM treatment, except for the high-end 27" model. The only truly upgradeable and expandable Mac, the Mac Pro, was transformed from a mini-tower to a modern day version of the G4 Cube, but with no expansion slots (the G4 Cube had one slot, if I recall correctly). And while Apple's hardware offerings increasingly became non-upgradeable and compromised, Apple's refresh frequencies started dragging out dramatically; the worst being the Mac Pro, which hasn't been refreshed in three years, an eternity in the computing world. And I haven't even gotten into the port situation, especially with the new MacBook Pro.

The sad thing is that for me and other fans of Mac OS X, there are no longer any "no compromise" personal computer solutions these days like what Apple used to provide back when the company was fully devoted to the Mac. I assessed the situation in 2013 and ended up holding my nose and buying a MacBook Air despite my dislike for non-upgradeable hardware since I didn't want to have to deal with Windows 8 and the controversy surrounding GNOME 3/KDE 4 at the time. Now it's 2016 and the situation regarding the Mac has worsened. Today's Macs are not much of an upgrade from my 2013 MacBook Air, although I hope my out-of-warranty MacBook Air will last me a few more years. The PC world has a wonderful selection of hardware at every price and performance point imaginable, which appeals to me. Unfortunately, buying a PC means having to deal with Windows or desktop Linux. While they've come a long way since the days of Windows XP and 2005-era distributions, they are still, in my opinion, far behind Mac OS X when it comes to consistency, polish, and productivity. Two weeks or so after Apple announced its 2016 MacBook Pro, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T430 to familiarize myself with Windows 10. Windows 10 isn't that bad, but I ran into an annoying problem regarding drivers. When I tried to insert a USB 3.0 thumb drive into the USB 3.0 port, Windows complained that it couldn't recognize it. My MacBook Air had no problems recognizing it. I tried updating the drivers on my ThinkPad; still no good. Finally I installed FreeBSD on my ThinkPad. It recognized the thumb drive perfectly fine. If drivers for a common laptop are more of a hassle on Windows 10 than on FreeBSD, something must be wrong.

It saddens me that after decades of Apple providing an alternative commercial platform for those who won't do Windows, Apple has given up, not because Microsoft has crushed it, but because Apple now has a reliable revenue stream coming from its consumer electronics devices and from casual Mac users and no longer needs to cater to more-demanding users. Unfortunately what this means for us power users is that we have been handed over to the world of Windows and desktop Linux, and there is no modern-day polished third party OS like BeOS, OS/2, or OPENSTEP out there for us in 2016. It's really sad, and I don't think there's a viable solution. We power users are a niche market, and nobody is going to invest the millions of dollars and the major engineering effort needed to build an OS (or even a Linux desktop environment + an app ecosystem) that is as polished as OS X just to placate a bunch of disaffected Mac power users.

Sadly it looks like I'm either going to need to hold on to Mac hardware like how many people in Cuba hold on to their 1950's American cars, or I'm going to need to suck it up and learn to love Windows and/or the Linux desktop. I apologize if I sound too melodramatic, but I feel like I've been abandoned with nowhere pleasant to go to.

I wish this was true, but at the price points they're selling the mac pro; I have a hard time thinking that they are losing money on each unit.

A high-end PC is going to top out at $1400 or so for the foreseeable future. You can go higher if you want to pay for it--but you aren't going to need to. If anything, those prices will come down, not go up.

And I am assuming you mean a Single i7 on consumer mother boards.

I am not sure if even the most expensive MAC pro could get near something built on say the X99-E-10G WS workstation class MB (4x SLI and 128GB Main Memory)

$x Graphics cards 128GB

i'm seeing Thunderbolt 2 on the back of the iMac

http://www.apple.com/imac/specs/