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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I’m disappointed they chose “pretty” over a “functional” metal box like the old Mac Pros. They ran into thermal issues with the fancy design of the trash can, despite their promises of cutting edge thermal design. These iMac Pros are probably going to be soldered-CPU, soldered-RAM beasts with low repairability.

It's a bit of a small victory that they support external GPUs, but I think they are missing the boat here.

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This is the stopgap. They said there'll be a real Pro in 2018.

Then why should anyone buy this one?

It is available earlier, and perhaps, with those "power" upgrades, it does the job for a large part of the audience. The iMac is a really great computer for all, who don't need to exchange components. Now with real workstation class power.

It's a different product for a different audience. And it has a screen.

This is not a Mac Pro, it's an iMac pro...

Historically, Apple has been verrrrrry anal about making their x-ray marketing images reflect the real design that is hiding inside their units...and I definitely saw RAM sticks in slots when they were showing off the fans. So maybe they have changed course just a little?

The 27 inch imac has always had slotted ram.

Agreed. Pretty is not everything. Many of us just need a practical and flexible machine to work with.

There are plenty of nice looking PC cases out there these days. I'm hoping to build a Hackintosh into an NZXT Manta case [0] (the windowless, matte black one) so that I can have practical, flexible, pretty, and quiet

[0] https://www.nzxt.com/products/manta-matte-black-windowless

Nothing wrong with pretty. The problem with Apple these days seems to be that they compromise extensibility for prettiness.

I think their real target market is no longer pros. The pros are vastly outnumbered by people with a lot a money that will buy the latest shiny thing Apple puts out. As a company strategy to make the most money, its smart. If you are a pro looking for a serious work computer, Macs are just not very compelling.

You are probably right but I think that's pretty shortsighted. I think one of the main reasons for the rise of the Macbooks was the fact that suddenly a lot of developers started using them. Once developers start moving away from Mac their ecosystem will hurt a lot.

Absolutely - and OSX is still the king of HiDPI compatibility, along with some other niceties. That's why I think a Hackintosh is the way to go - though it's a lot of work to build your own machine. If I had the skill and time I'd start selling compact PCs with hardware that just happened to be compatible with OSX. Might be a small market, but I think it's there.

A "Certified for Hackintosh" product line could sell pretty well for developers. Or being able to run a Hackintosh as VM in Linux. You probably would need a good lawyer though.

DIMMs were visible in the cooling system animation they showed on stage. Also I doubt that Intel will even make non-socketed Xeons.

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