iMac Pro 2017 latest news,rumours,release date & specs

iMac Pro 2017 latest news,rumours,release date & specs



Having promised that a professional grade iMac was on the way back at a briefing in April, Apple has given us a first look at the new iMac Pro, a Space Grey beast of a machine, and promised that it will arrive in December this year.

The new iMac Pro

WWDC gave us all the first peek at this new professional-grade iMac, but it wasn't the first time we had heard talk of it.

Back in April, talking to journalists in what appears to be a bid to convince pro users that Apple hasn't forgotten about them, Apple VPs Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi and John Ternus revealed that because the Mac Pro in its current form hasn't been meeting the needs of many pro users, some pros have turned to the iMac instead, and as a result Apple intends to provide those users with an update to the iMac designed to suit them.

"So many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address many, many more of those that were finding themselves limited by Mac Pro through a next generation iMac," Federighi said at the time.

Apple has put "a lot of our energy behind" this new iMac, according to Federighi.

2017 iMac Pro: Design

The new iMac Pro, when it arrives, will have a new, darker, look shrouded in a Space Grey case.

But it's not just its outward appearance, on the inside of the iMac Pro Apple has had to completely rethink the thermal architecture in order to house the new components. The result is a new fan system that offers an 80 percent increase in cooling capacity, according to the company. Apple says that the new system “allows for upgraded internals without making more noise.”

Apple explained: “We reengineered the whole system and designed an entirely new thermal architecture to pack extraordinary performance into the elegant, quiet iMac enclosure our customers love — iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it.”

2017 iMac Pro: Display

The 27in iMac Pro will still offer 5,120x2,880 resolution 5K Retina display, like it's non-Pro cousin.

As for whether the iMac display will double up as a touchscreen, the answer is no.

Back at the April briefing, Phil Schiller was asked about whether Apple would consider adding a touch screen to the iMac. His response: "No". His colleague Craig Federighi suggested that the iPad Pro offers a far better drawing experience.

2017 iMac Pro: ProcessorThe new iMac Pro will ship with 8-, 10- or 18-core Xeon processors making it the “Most powerful Mac ever made.” Apple describes this as: “Workstation class performance”, noting the 22 Teraflops of GPU Performance, Fast Storage and Advanced I/O.

Xeon chips are better suited to applications involving complex data - such as large, multi-layered Photoshop files, 4K video or 3D scenes with huge textures - as they are generally more robust and reliable than Core chips. They can also use ECC (error-correcting code) RAM, which can prevent errors that could - for example - crash your computer during a long render, explains our colleagues at DigitalArts.

During the keynote Apple talked often of machine learning and other high performance uses, in a bid to emphasis the pro nature of this machine.

2017  iMac Pro: RAM

The iMac Pro will offer 32GB ECC Memory as standard, but will be configurable to 64GB or 128GB ECC Memory when it launches in December.