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Desktops (Apple) iMac Hardware Apple

Apple Will Ship A Pro iMac Later This Year, It Won't Feature Touchscreen (buzzfeed.com) 163

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Apple's expected update to its iMac line will arrive later this year with some previously unexpected additions: pro models. From a report: "We have big plans for the iMac," Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing, said during a recent reporter roundtable at the company's Machine Shop hardware prototyping lab. "We're going to begin making configurations of iMac specifically with the pro customer in mind." Just what those configurations will entail, Apple won't yet say. Nor will it comment on the possibility of an iMac Pro moniker for the more powerful machines in the lineup. Company executives are, however, quite happy to confirm a feature the pro iMac will not have: touchscreen. "No," Schiller said when asked if Apple would consider building such a thing. "Touch doesn't even register on the list of things pro users are interested in talking about. They're interested in things like performance and storage and expandability."
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Apple Will Ship A Pro iMac Later This Year, It Won't Feature Touchscreen More

Apple Will Ship A Pro iMac Later This Year, It Won't Feature Touchscreen

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  • Apple will never give you what you want. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Apple will make you use dongles and raise the price for their toy Macs. Real (PowerPC) Macs have been out of production for a decade.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, lets go back to the days of endless shipping delays due to IBM fabbing chips for their P-series servers, and then Apple as an afterthought. Let's go back to not having any performance whatsoever in notebooks, because there was no such thing as a low-wattage G5 and never would be. And, even better, let's get all the software incompatibility of not running a common instruction set with the rest of the world, causing you to have to run needed applications in virtualization + emulation rather than just

      • Yeah, lets go back to the days of endless shipping delays due to IBM fabbing chips for their P-series servers, and then Apple as an afterthought. Let's go back to not having any performance whatsoever in notebooks, because there was no such thing as a low-wattage G5 and never would be. And, even better, let's get all the software incompatibility of not running a common instruction set with the rest of the world, causing you to have to run needed applications in virtualization + emulation rather than just virtualization.

        You may have missed it, but the transition to Intel was the smartest thing that Apple has done in 15 years, other than release the iPhone.

        Even though the G5 whipped all over the Intel chips of the day, raw-performance wise, you're right that the move to Intel was the smartest business decision Apple ever made.

    • Apple will make you use dongles and raise the price for their toy Macs. Real (PowerPC) Macs have been out of production for a decade.

      So the cheese-grater Mac Pros weren't Real?

      I'll always love my G5 tower (which continues to serve as an iTunes server); but I'd trade it in a minute for a 2010 Mac Pro.

  • Apple has a serious problem with storage on MBP. For their price points they should start at 512, with 1T being the norm and all lines having a slight increase to access 2T. If iMac is going to be like MBP why would anyone care?

    • Ideally, Apple should ship a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD, using that for a baseline Fusion configuration. For expanded stuff, the machine should have at least two NVMe slots (for SSD RAID), and a good amount of SATA slots with a hardware RAID controller that supports autotiering, and RAID 6.

      • Ideally, Apple should ship a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD, using that for a baseline Fusion configuration. For expanded stuff, the machine should have at least two NVMe slots (for SSD RAID), and a good amount of SATA slots with a hardware RAID controller that supports autotiering, and RAID 6.

        In the desktop world, I believe that TB 3 has nicely addressed that need. No reason whatsoever to have massive amounts of internal drive bays.

    • Apple has a serious problem with storage on MBP. For their price points they should start at 512, with 1T being the norm and all lines having a slight increase to access 2T. If iMac is going to be like MBP why would anyone care?

      With TB, who cares? Especially with a desktop. Get yourself an external and STFU.

  • Vision (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by amiga3D ( 567632 )

    Jobs died and so did the Vision at Apple. Jobs had the Vision of what Apple was. Now they wander around with no clue as to what kind of company they are, coasting on momentum. I wonder sometimes if the people running Apple use Windows 10 on their Macs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I wished Apple would get Woz in it since he still alive. He had good technical vision. Maybe Apple should hire me since I am unemployed and unhappy with what Apple is doing right these days.

  • "[...] the list of things pro users are interested in talking about. They're interested in things like performance and storage and expandability."

    Uhmm... If they knew all along, I'd like to hear him explain the latest MacBook Pro model.

  • It's about time! (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:54AM (#54170079)

    I'm really looking forward to running Aperture on one of these new Pro iMacs!

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Allsup ( 987 ) <<ten.euqsilahc> <ta> <todhsals>> on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:57AM (#54170091) Homepage Journal

    "Tasks that previously would have required the Mac Pros of old are now being well addressed by today’s iMac."

    And creative tasks that require a high-end machine, where once creative pros would turn to Mac Pros, are now being well addressed by high-end Windows workstations, that, you know, allow newer CPUs than Sandy Bridge.

    • Whoops, my bad, _Ivy_ Bridge. FTFM. But still, a pre-Haswell CPU, and a GPU that benchmarks roughly similar to a GTX 660 Ti or a Radeon HD 7870. Fine for photoshop and DTP people, I imagine, for for those with serious 3d and/or video workloads...

  • The iMac is really cool, sleek, pretty, minimal, yeah... but many pros I know already have monitors they like. How about a little love for their other desktops (mini and Pro)! I'd also wager that most "pros" aren't, in general, people with white offices and squeaky clean desks on which art-like computers sit.

    And keep your confounded sticky fingers off my screen!

    Otherwise, yeah, a long-time Mac user drifting away from the fold. Then again, there aren't many systems left that aren't larded with propri

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      To be fair, touchscreens are lame on anything but a tablet; it has been known since the days of the light pen (remember how successful they were?) that, surprisingly, people's arms get tired trying to lift then up to a vertical screen.

      That being said, why the fuck don't we have a MacPad Pro already? (aka the Mac equivalent of Surface, running OS X, not iOS)

  • A "small" internal SSD is fine (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:59AM (#54170107) Journal

    A "small" internal SSD is fine. Like 1TB. I would be running an external RAID encloure anyways. I can't see having less than 8TB for editing 4K videos anyway.
    But what I REALLY would like was a workstation like the old Mac Pro. My late 2013 iMac runs OK(the big 4gb graphics card and fastest cpu) still but it bothers me that I have to replace everything, including the screen. I can extend the life of it now that I make more and more in 4K by getting a faster external RAID.

    So what I think what I will do is that I will build a 8 core hackintosh workstation so that I can get a proper workstation to run FCP X on now that Apple don't make one and haven't done for some time.

    • That late 2013 iMac should still do Target Display Mode though. Yet another amazing feature that Apple decided to do away with when they moved to the 5K version. At least you can still use it as a background processor and secondary display.

    • If you need external hard drives, then the iMac isn't made for you. You should get a tower with 4-5 hard drives slots. Unfortunately if you like Apple, Apple doesn't offer any.

      • If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless. The problem is that the recent Macs have performed the paradoxical task of both pigeon-holing and fragmenting the market for such things.

        For users where disk I/O isn't critical (photographers, etc.), NAS units like Synology or QNAP are great, plentiful, and relatively inexpensive. They'd be more useful if there were 10gbit NICs on their computers or even if the Thunderbolt adapters that were either 10g or dual-hea

        • If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless.

          Unless you often need to connect the drives to different computers (and no, network file sharing doesn't count), internal storage is much better than external.
          Less expensive, less cables, less bulky, no need for a second power supply, you get the full speed of the native hard drive bus.

          Instead of having a dedicated NAS device it's often a better idea to get a tower with built-in hard drives, and share them over the network.

          • If high storage capacity is a requirement, external devices tend to be a better be regardless.

            Unless you often need to connect the drives to different computers (and no, network file sharing doesn't count), internal storage is much better than external.

            I think it's a horses-for-courses thing. Don't get me wrong, my laptop has more onboard storage than most and I don't walk around with external drives, but I also have a NAS for a reason.

            Less expensive

            Well, yes...but a half decent RAID controller evens the score pretty quickly.

            less cables

            Technically, yes...but it's not like one power cable and one bus cable is in itself going to be a dealbreaker.

            less bulky

            Depends on how many drives are needed and a few other factors. If a desktop can only handle two internal drives, a 4-bay NAS isn't bad at

            • Well, yes...but a half decent RAID controller evens the score pretty quickly.

              Most people who need storage don't need that. Software raid and/or fake raid works just fine. I use the Intel RAID I don't see what I am lacking. I doubt those low end NAS box have great RAID controllers anyways.

              A typical "Pro" desktop computer should have the room for at least 4 hard drives. Apple doesn't offer any product in this category. They only offer a desktop with laptops components (iMac) or a non-expendable desktop (Mac Pro / Mac Mini).

        • I'm hoping that more USB 3.1 arrays wind up on the market, because they can not just be used at a high speed, but work everywhere, be it a Mac, a newer PC, or heck, even an older PC running at a lower speed. Thunderbolt drives do run faster, but the bottleneck winds up being the drives or the array, and not the bus, so the added headroom that Thunderbolt gives isn't worth the cost in most cases.

          For "slow" storage, NAS units from QNAP, Synology, etc. are ideal, just because they bring so much functionality

  • They want to sell less for more...
  • "Apple Will Ship a Pro iMac"
    vs.
    "Nor will it comment on the possibility of an iMac Pro moniker"

    Not gonna click the link to RTFA because BuzzFeed.

  • Don't do Mac's or Microsofts anymore (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Actually, my Linux Mint's are just running well, yesterday I needed to scan some documents, so a picked up from basement my old Canon LED USB scanner that is not working on OSX anymore, no drivers. Connected to the Mint and in like 5 seconds I was burning documents using it, no pain, no drivers to install, nothing. EAT that Apple & Microsoft!

    Wake me when they release a standard Pro tower not this garbage can!

  • I sometimes spend 2-3 hours playing games with hands constantly moving in the air. Don't understand what's up with Apple's claims that an occasional swipe on the screen will immediatelly make people collapse with exhaustion. Trackpad will still be there, even make it a second screen if you want to be fancy.

    I understand the objection when technology was poor quality or for budget devices. But now Apple is just being obnoxious.

    • Don't understand what's up with Apple's claims that an occasional swipe on the screen will immediatelly make people collapse with exhaustion.

      That's because you're a snotty little hipster brat who's too young to remember gorilla arm syndrome.

  • Unless it comes with 80 PCI-E lanes, it doesn't deserve the name.

  • In my opinion, the real gap in Apple's lineup isn't "an iMac with more professional features," but instead "a consumer-grade headless Mac that can be used for gaming." I really don't understand why they won't make one.

    They could release a small upgradable tower, which I'm sure a lot of people would like. They're not going to, though. That's not Apple's style. However, they could make a more consumer-grade Mac Pro, running a single Core i5/i7 processors instead of Xeon processors and a single Nvidia 106

    • In my opinion, the real gap in Apple's lineup isn't "an iMac with more professional features," but instead "a consumer-grade headless Mac that can be used for gaming." I really don't understand why they won't make one.

      I don't know if gaming has been a priority of Apple. Sure you can play some games on one but don't expect the latest AAA one that requires the newest video cards to be on those lists. PC Gaming desktops are starting to become niche PCs themselves.

      They could release a small upgradable tower, which I'm sure a lot of people would like. They're not going to, though. That's not Apple's style. However, they could make a more consumer-grade Mac Pro, running a single Core i5/i7 processors instead of Xeon processors and a single Nvidia 1060/1070/1080 instead of dual AMD Fire Pro cards. Drop all the hardware down a peg from workstation-grade to consumer-grade, and drop the price to reflect that. I think you'd have a system a lot of people would buy.

      The only people that might be interested in a consumer Mac Pro would be gamers. Then the problem is they want so many customizations.

      Or if you don't want to do that, just make bigger version of a Mac mini that can hold a laptop-grade Nvidia CPU instead of using Intel's chips. Maybe something vaguely in the class of an Alienware Alpha. Hell, just cram a discrete GPU into one of the existing Mac mini lineups. They used to do that, and I suspect they could overcome any technical challenges if they wanted to. They put discrete GPUs into the 15" Macbook Pros.

      The whole point of a Mac Mini is that it isn't upgradeable. Making it more upgradeable goes against the entire design.

      • No, the whole point of the Mac mini was a low-cost entry Mac. Removing RAM slots increases the cost of entry because you have to pay for the Mac mini and extra RAM right at the beginning. At Apple's RAM prices on top of that. It couldn't be further from the idea of the Mac mini.

        • No I would argue the purpose of a Mac mini was a very small form factor headless Mac. At this point, the shrinking form factor allows for almost no upgrades.

          • There's nothing to argue about, go watch the Keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the Mac mini. The point was to be a low-cost, bring-your-own display/mouse/keyboard Mac for switchers.

      • I don't know if gaming has been a priority of Apple. Sure you can play some games on one but don't expect the latest AAA one that requires the newest video cards to be on those lists.

        Yeah... that was kind of my point. Apple has practically been going out of their way to make sure their computers aren't good for gamers. I'm suggesting that if they just made one model that had hardware appropriate for gaming, they might see an uptick in people using it for that, and then developers would have more incentive to port games to it.

        PC Gaming desktops are starting to become niche PCs themselves.

        Do you have some market research to support that? I feel like I've been hearing for decades that consoles would kill PC gaming, but it hasn't happened. If anyth

        • Do you have some market research to support that? I feel like I've been hearing for decades that consoles would kill PC gaming, but it hasn't happened. If anything, I feel like consoles are showing some weakness recently.

          I'm not saying that console games are making PC gaming obsolete. I'm saying people who are building fewer and fewer gaming PCs and generally people are buying fewer desktops.

          That's debatable, but also beside the point. I didn't say that they should make the Mac mini upgradable, just that they could sell a higher-end model with a decent GPU.

          Yes but how soon does that GPU become obsolete? I mean you can still use decade old CPU just fine for general computing but decades old GPUs are basically unusable by gaming.

          • I'm not saying that console games are making PC gaming obsolete. I'm saying people who are building fewer and fewer gaming PCs and generally people are buying fewer desktops.

            I'm not sure what I'm supposed to infer from this. You're not saying that consoles are killing the gaming PC, but you're saying people don't buy gaming PCs. Are you saying that nobody is gaming anymore? Or are you trying to imply that consoles are killing the gaming PC while refusing to say that, for some reason? Because I notice you're also not saying that consoles *aren't* killing the gaming PC.

            Yes but how soon does that GPU become obsolete? I mean you can still use decade old CPU just fine for general computing but decades old GPUs are basically unusable by gaming.

            So you're simultaneously implying that consoles are killing the gaming PC because people aren't building PCs

  • Once, long ago... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by puddingebola ( 2036796 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @10:47AM (#54170391) Journal
    Once, long ago..., Slashdot was a place of serious programmers. They were interested in the philosophy of open source programming. They were committed to the development of good open source software, of promoting its use and development. They were interested in the technical challenges that it's development created, and they discussed the various facets of the issues involving open source software. Now...now there are only people like us discussing the latest Mac! Ha ha ha ha! We've destroyed them ALL! We've RUINED THEIR WEBSITE! HA HA HA HA HA! BWAHAHAHA!

  • People settled for the iMac. Old Pro was better. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by enjar ( 249223 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @11:58AM (#54170881) Homepage

    The old Mac Pro (4U aluminum chassis) had:
    - Four drive bays, and you could get an aftermarket tray to add SSDs/
    - Easy RAM upgrade
    - Interchangeable GPU(s) -- it would take nVidia or ATI boards.
    - Two network drops

    The "replacement" Pro garbage can had stuff soldered in place, no upgrade option for GPU and a form factor that didn't allow upgrades, in addition to being abhorrently expensive and never updated. Not to mention having to do simple things like expand hard drive space with daisy chained expensive Thunderbolt stuff strung together like Christmas lights. I remember the mocking Jeff Goldblum Apple ad asking if PC stood for "Perpetually Cabled". In the old system you could keep all that stuff internal and using PCI, which was still faster.

    When we retired the old Pros, we replaced them with MacBookPros -- the garbage can just priced itself out of contention, and into the realm of "can we do the same thing Linux or Windows instead, since that garbage can is now more expensive than some really decent servers we bought recently"

  • e-net $30 more 10-gig-e $100 from apple and it uses the TB3 bus.

  • They're interested in things like performance and storage and expandability.

    Not doing too well on that front after they switched to the trashcan.

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