Brief thoughts on the iMac Pro
Yesterday, Apple announced the iMac Pro, an all-in-one machine purchasable with up to an 18-core Xeon processor. I can’t tell if this is a machine for me or not (I love Xeon Macs but not iMacs so much), but I also have no real reason to think about that beyond fantasy – I’m only on my 2nd Xeon Mac, and I expect to get a few more years out of it. They age well. The current, oft-maligned Mac Pro smashed an impressive amount of tech into a rather small, highly optimized space. It may lack the expansion necessary for typical Pro users, but it is a technological masterpiece. The new iMac, however, seems like an impossible feat1.
What truly excites me is the reinforcement that Apple is committed to its Xeon machines. The iMac Pro is not the mysterious upcoming Mac Pro. So while tech pundits have lamented the inevitable death of the Mac Pro in recent years, Apple has instead doubled down and will be offering two Xeon Macs rather than zero.
One final thought that is more dream than anything – Apple prides itself on its displays, and on its Pencil/digitizer in the iPad Pro. A lot of artists use pro software on iMacs with Cintiq digitizers. Cintiqs are top-of-the-line, but that doesn’t make them great. The digitizers are decent, the displays themselves are alright, but they aren’t spectacular devices – they’re just the best thing out there. I don’t expect Apple to move to a touch-friendly macOS, their deliberate UI choices show that this is a clear delineation between macOS and iOS. But I think working the iPad Pro’s Pencil/digitizer into an iMac2 could very well prove to be a Cintiq killer for illustrators, photographers, and other visual artists.
- Credit due to Intel, which seems to be doing a pretty good job lately of cutting down power/thermal requirements for their heavier-duty processors. ↩︎
- The thing would need to articulate better than current iMacs do. The Cintiq handles this pretty well, but I have no doubt Apple could do it better. ↩︎