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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Apple hasn’t made an official announcement the iMac Pro’s future, but the Mac’s product page speaks volumes. As first reported by MacRumors, the configurable models of the iMac Pro are no longer available for purchase. The only remaining iMac Pro on Apple’s online store is the $4,999 base configuration, which Apple notes prominently at the top of the page will only remain available ‘While supplies last.’

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...

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Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.

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."

>Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.

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.

> They have done the same thing time and again during similar transitions or new designs.

Yeah, they usually do this without saying anything. What's crazy is that they confirmed. With MacRumors of all sites.

ANY Apple Silicon iMac is going to kill, just kill, the top of the line Intel Xeon iMac Pros. Blurry is not the word. It's gonna leapfrog the Xeons for almost any purpose rendering the whole thing ridiculous.

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.

Yeah, I had a hunch something like this was going to happen which is why I opted for a refurbished base model iMac Pro over something new. Still expensive (~$3500), but not nearly as bad for the period of time I was able to get use out of it. Will probably trade it in along with a 2017 MBP 15" to pay for the majority of a Mac Pro Mini or ARM MBP 16" and hopefully one of the lower-cost displays they're rumored to be releasing this year.

Huh? They’re not dropping configuration and listing “while supplies last” on any of their other Intel products. This is exactly how Apple kills a product line.

>They’re not dropping configuration and listing “while supplies last” on any of their other Intel products.

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?

Okay, guess we’ll just see then.

No intent to “told you so”, I hardly care about my reputation reading Apple tea leaves. But maybe this was unwarranted:

> What a crappy article.

There is a difference between telling its customers "While Supplies last" and Stock draining to literally zero without notice.

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.

Engadget confirmed it via Apple.

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.

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