Apple Teases Behemoth iMac Pro and New MacBooks The $4,999 iMac Pro is aimed at video editors and virtual reality game developers, while the iMac, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineups get new Intel processors.
By Tom Brant
This story originally appeared on PCMag
At its developers conference on Monday, Apple unveiled a new iMac Pro that it says is the fastest Mac ever built.
The $4,999 iMac Pro will go on sale in December, and it's aimed at video editors combing through 4K footage and game developers working on their latest virtual reality title, among other creative professionals. While it's got the same form factor and 27-inch display as the current high-end iMac, the similarities pretty much end there.
It's in slate gray, a color that hasn't been used before in the iMac lineup. Under the hood is an all-new centrifugal cooling system with two fans to draw heat away from the system's Xeon processor, which you can configure with eight, 10 or 18 cores. The dedicated graphics card is from AMD's new workstation-class Vega series, which will allow up to 22 teraflops of half-precision floating point performance.
The iMac Pro also comes with up to 128GB of memory and 4GB of flash storage. I/O options include four Thunderbolt ports, which means you could power two external 5K displays and two RAID storage arrays at the same time, assuming you need that much storage and screen real estate.
If you don't, Apple also refreshed the prices and specs of the regular 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac models. They include new seventh-generation Intel "Kaby Lake" processors, and the 27-inch version also gets a raised memory ceiling of 64GB. Every new iMac will also have refreshed graphics, from a new version of the integrated Intel Iris graphics in the base model that is 80 percent faster than the previous version, to the Radeon Pro 500-series with up to 8GB of eDRAM for the high-end 27-inch iMac.
The iMac Retina 4K 21.5-inch model also has a new lower price of $1,299, while the non-4K 21.5-inch starts at $1,099 and the 27-inch begins at $1,799. All of the new models are available now.
Finally, Apple is offering a similar spec upgrade for its MacBook and MacBook Air notebooks. They get Kaby Lake processors, as well as a curious new pricing scheme that lowers the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro 13-inch version to $1,299, the same price as the 12-inch MacBook. Touch Bar-equipped 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models start at $1,799 and $2,399, respectively. All of the new notebooks can be ordered today.
