Apple Confirms iMac Pro Will Be Discontinued, Recommends 27-Inch iMac
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
"As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do."
The Mac Pro and XDR display were machines that took a long time to build thus the iMac Pro (announced 6 months after that article) was created to fill the gap for two years. I don't think the iMac Pro was ever supposed to replace the Mac Pro, but only a biography of Schiller might clarify what really happened.
It must have been in development for much longer than that.
I remember at the time people were saying how un-Apple-like it was to admit that there was an issue at all. I think it was because at that point they figured the iMac Pro was still six months out and they felt they had to at least do *something* to show them that they still cared about pro users, though in truth I think in hindsight it's become evident that it isn't really a market segment that they're particularly interested in.
Really? The volume may not be there, but I think Apple has always cherished the prestige associated with being the platform of choice for studio mixing rooms, cinema production, etc. People argued that that's why those ridiculous $20k+ configurations of the Mac Pro even exist— as something for auteurs to demand as a status signal.
With that being said, I've noticed a startling increase in Linux use among pro workflows. The other day I visited a mixing studio that was entirely driven by Arch and Reaper if you could believe it, a really neat setup to say the least.
If they think they've got a castle in the sky, they'll find out why it's there if they start burning the pillars as firewood.
Edit: Clarity
Serving the professional creative market is the core of their marketing.
Are they selling a majority of MacBook Pro’s to film studios? Of course not, but they need that prestige to compel Greg the aspiring film student to buy one so he can feel like he has “arrived”.
Makes no sense to have a 20*50*50 box if the only part inside it is a tiny 8*8 PCB.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Not sure if I’m comfortable disclosing numbers, but the iMac Pro is a lot faster for me in that sort of situation.
You used it above, and here, in a way I can’t tell if the sentence is different without the word or if I should take some meaning from it.
A better use would be: “I literally have the best intel mac and the m1 air beat it”
In that case it is literal. OP probably just switched it over to a case where highlighting literal ownership is superfluous.
> The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless
I have no issue with the imac pro! Just to say the M1 does win on both counts.
https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html
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“…bespoke accelerator card…”
Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute.
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 :)
Yup, my mistake. No idea why I was thinking of the Mac Pro.
I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.
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.
The iMac Pro never supported the afterburner card - that’s a Mac Pro exclusive. I think you’re getting your products mixed up here…
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.
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.
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.
They can't because TSMC is overbooked already.
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.
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.
...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.
A "cluster of MacBooks" style board might still be an interesting approach to offer something to the market segment that hungers for an Apple workstation without relegating the MacBook to a second class device. "For up to four threads it's just as fast as the mighty stationary monstrosity" would be a much better sales pitch than "if the mobile isn't fast enough for you you might be interested in or stationary offering".
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.
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.
We can and should. This is the sort of cart-driving-the-horse culture that acts like a ball and chain on the enterprise.
What a crappy article. Of course it has stopped with new Intel iMac Pros.
Any new iMac Pro will have to wait for the ARM version.
That doesn't mean it has pulled any plug...
That's because they have plenty of supplies to their other Intel products, and continue to build them even because they are crucial to tens of millions of customers, whereas the iMac Pro is a limited units higher-end product -- whose stock has dwindled and whose any replacement will come after 2021 and more pressing ARM releases (the standard iMac, the 16" Macbook Pro, the Mac Pro, and so on).
They have stopped selling items that became available again in new versions/designs many times in the past, with similar "while supplies last" fashion.
Remember how the Mac Pro wasn't renewed for 5+ years and there were similar cries, and then a new model came out, with an updated "recycle bin" design, that Apple has been working on for the best part of those years?
> What a crappy article.
There is a difference between stock draining to zero and actually announcing a product to be discontinued.
I dont even remember a single Mac product that has gone under a similar treatment. Although one could argue this was forced confirmation when media pushed for it.
MacRumors got a follow up from Apple confirming that it has been discontinued. I suspect with the upcoming performance of the Apple silicon, lines between an iMac and iMac Pro were about to get blurry... but that's just a hunch.
From MacRumors: "We've since confirmed with Apple that when supplies run out, the iMac Pro will no longer be available whatsoever. Apple says the latest 27-inch iMac introduced in August is the preferred choice for the vast majority of pro iMac users, and said customers who need even more performance and expandability can choose the Mac Pro."
They have done the same thing time and again during similar transitions or new designs. The eat through the stock, and then the item is not available at all, until at some point a new design/version hits.
In fact, reports of "stock dwindling" and "while stocks last" etc and Apple stopping selling an item on the web Applestore are things Apple-focused news websites explicitly use to tell that a new version of some product is in the works or soon to land...
In this case, the iMac Pro is niche enough, that the new version is not soon to land, as other more staple products have a priority for the Apple Silicon treatment. That doesn't mean it's not in the works.
Yeah, they usually do this without saying anything. What's crazy is that they confirmed. With MacRumors of all sites.
Source: I literally have an 18-core, 64 gig RAM Xeon iMac Pro and one of the new laptops (Macbook pro, 16 gig RAM). If they don't have to get 20 hours of battery life and they do literally anything to expand the processing from what they have, they're going to obliterate the discontinued ones so hard that it'd be insane or criminally misleading to continue selling the iMac Pros.
They've already quit selling the machine I have, and I kinda wish they had half a year ago… because I spent more than $8000 in the belief that I was going to put a stake in the ground and rely on that computer for a goodly number of years and that it was relevant to where Apple was headed.
Now (if Linus Tech Tips is to be believed) I can get a baseline Macbook Air, pop the back off, put a thermal conductive pad to vent heat away from the heatsink to the aluminum surface of the laptop, and get observably better performance on at least some realworld tasks for literally one EIGHTH the price.
I won't say I feel ripped off, but I feel extremely blindsided and that's only going to get worse as Apple continues to put out more products. Not sure people quite understand how inferior Apple's 'top line' products from the last generation, are to what they're currently producing.
Right now if you need heavy processing of VERY specific types involving many cores and many gigs of physical RAM but that doesn't fit into a category Apple's covering already with the M1s, such as 4k and 8k video editing that's better done on any M1 machine, that's the last known good use of the iMac Pros and Mac Pros. Only the heaviest of heavy lifting that's not covered by the strong suits of the M1…
I give it four months before Apple has something maybe at the $2000-3000 price point that absolutely destroys all the previous machines, no matter how 'Pro', at any price. And this is why they've got to kill off the previous lines. People will be really angry when this becomes apparent. Better to not even try and sell the machines, much less try to market them as 'more performance'. Expandability, yeah, there's that.
https://www.engadget.com/apple-imac-pro-discontinued-1551254...
> If you were hoping to buy an iMac Pro for some serious work, you'd better act quickly. 9to5Mac reports (and Apple has confirmed to Engadget) that Apple is winding down sales of its all-in-one workstation. You can still buy one, but it's limited to the base 10-core Xeon configuration and only available "while supplies last." You'll have to be patient, too, as orders are taking three to four weeks as we write this.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/06/apple-confirms-imac-pro...
https://barefeats.com/2020-iMac-5K-8core-versus-2017-iMac-Pr...
And at quite the discount. You give up ECC RAM, and I think the fans on the non-Pro iMac ramp up like turboprop, but that iMac Pro was getting long in the tooth.
I am a bit out of the Xeon loop; was there even an appropriate Xeon to update the Pro?
I'm not sure if the updated 2020 non-pro iMac ever got the T2 line rate encryption feature the iMac Pro has either.
Apple really needs something in between the $700 Mac Mini and $6000 Mac Pro. A somewhat larger case that opens easily and some expansion slots should not carry a $5000 premium, and no I don't want a built in display.
Apple announced a two year transition time from x86_64 to Apple Silicon. The MacBook Air, Mac Mini and 13” MacBook Pro have made the jump. That leaves the Mac Pro, 16” MacBook Pro, the 21.5” iMac and 27” iMac left to make the jump or otherwise be discontinued.
I totally agree. I believe this is the only reason, why Apple "upgraded" the MacBook pro 13". The new MacBook Air smashed it, so Apple had to do something in the 13" range.
MacBook 16" has the distinctive advantage of a better screen.
I am totally excited about Apple's new MacBook lineup coming later this year. This is going to be really huge.
Even the MacBook Pro 16" base models have too many ports and too much graphic performance for the original M1 to replace them. The base 13" already had enough limitations that they could replace it without making any of its specs worse (and leave the existing Intel 13" in the range with no changes for the 4-port model)
There's probably a gap in demand for them up to say a +50% price increase, but there may be a market for fewer of them at double or more the price.
That said I may get the rumored 14in MacBook Pro with an M1X as well.
While we have always known iMac Pro was a stopgap solution. Seeing an All in One design capable of dissipating ~600W TDP Max is quite amazing. And I have always wished Apple moved that design to its consumer iMac range with powerful CPU and GPU hardware.
Hopefully there will still be a place for 32 Core Apple Silicon within the upcoming iMac lineup.
One of the issues with it as a product was that there was little they could actually do in terms of releasing newer, higher-performance models (given a relative lack of processor options). Eventually the high-end, non-Pro iMac basically caught up, so I expect sales have basically been nonexistent for some time now.
We could easily see an ARM version later on - for the people who want a high-end desktop without requiring the excessive Mac Pro. But it could equally be the case that there’s not much space in the product lineup any more and it’s quietly replaced by a high-end ARM iMac.
One of the biggest critics during the Mac Pro trash can era was Apple not sharing or updating professionals about their future lineup. Or if they will abandoned Mac Pro completely. So they are giving a rare notice for any professionals to stock them up if they need.
With memory and storage soldered ofcourse...as is tradition.
Nobody said the discrete GPU would be 3rd party. I suspect Apple will release their own discrete GPU before long. SoC works well for the long end, but I can't see it being worth it at the Mac Pro level.
iMac - m2 chip + max out at 64 gig ram
iMac Pro - m2x chip + max out at 256 gig ram
Not that I don’t see the benefit of a modular system, and it makes sense for some pros, but not all.