Gadgetory

Apple prides itself on its courage the courage to do what no one else does the courage of our convictions to solder everything down courage to remove features pushing your willingness to pay more for less but sometimes sometimes they falter sometimes innovation rears its ugly head and today we have the iMac Pro the upgradable iMac the workstation iMac the Mac for legitimate creative professionals who saw that one coming today's video is brought to you by us check out the ltte merch store at the link in the video description we've got shirts mugs hat stickers and more so the base 8 core configuration of the iMac Pro is four thousand nine hundred and ninety nine US dollars let's take you for a tour then and break down what you get for that money and how that would compare to buying components off the shelf the most obvious feature of any AIO is the LCD spec wise there's really not much out there like it with LG's ultra fine 5k being the closest analogue with P three wide gamut color support 500 nits maximum brightness Thunderbolt 3 input and a $1,700 price tag moving under the hood the next most expensive component is an 8 core Intel Xeon w21 40 be a slightly down clocked version of the Xeon w21 45 that can be swapped out for up to a Xeon w21 95 18 core for very heavy workloads now with the Xeon comes ECC or error correcting memory and even our base model has a healthy 32 gigs of it interestingly unlike previous 5k IMAX the pro is using full-sized dims rather than sodium's theoretically great news for upgraders but alas Apple giveth and Apple taketh away to take full advantage of the Zeon's quad channel memory controller all four of the iMac pro slots are populated and there is no access hatch on the back a little bit more on that later one of the most underwhelming aspects of the base iMac Pro is probably the GPU of Vega 56 I mean it's not terrible but considering that previous Mac Pros used fire pros rather than consumer cards and the price point you might reasonably expect better and the same could be said for the upgrade options your GPU is soldered directly to the motherboard so the only way to max it out with the marginally faster Vega 64 is to pay up front AMD's full MSRP for a standalone card on top of what you already paid theoretically for a Vega 56 thanks cryptocurrency miners so bottom line with a comparable motherboard equivalent 10 gigabit networking a terabyte of very fast PCI Express storage a power supply a case cooling and some decent peripherals the Apple tax on this particular model even ignoring that computers do not assemble themselves and that ongoing software support and warranty coverage both have a value is a whopping negative $200 so why is it that Apple has this reputation for having overpriced computers we're gonna get to that first let's talk about the experience of using the iMac Pro it is essentially identical to that of our regular iMac the display is gorgeously retina and very bright but with fat bezels and no HDR support for reasons that likely have everything to do with supply chain and nothing to do with courage it D clutters your life with only a single cable needed for power as long as you don't need to plug anything into one of the conveniently located USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3 ports at the back and the included wireless peripherals are more than usable ranging from pretty darn good for a low-profile chiclet style at least it has a numpad 2 the built-in touch pad is really cool for gestures but how have they not fixed this charging port yet really similar except for one big difference the iMac pro uses workstation class and modern hardware something you can't take for granted so you'd probably think then that tools like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro that have been tuned for years for outdated mainstream or mobile CPUs would run like billy-o on this thing and you'd be right this is the fastest Mac ever built in every respect you kind of have to feel it to believe how quick and responsive it is across the board Safari launches instantly even at 5k desktop animations never drop a frame and even Adobe Premiere as much of a dog as it can be launches every bit as quickly as the fastest test benches we've ever built oh and also 10 Gigabit Ethernet means that the iMac Pro is a real Mac that is finally able to work with large files and networked resources right out of the box something that is essential to our production workflow where we keep all of our footage on a redundant protected high-speed storage device on the network as for how well it performs elsewhere well it should come as no surprise that it tears through most of our professional tests with relative ease Cinebench scores landed about where they should lux mark spat out some very respectable numbers and blender ran very well except when it didn't we're kind of hoping that the performance issues with blenders cycles render are just growing pains that will be dealt with in short order with all those rosy results in mind though it should be noted that the Zeon W didn't quite match the performance of our similar C on W or our similarly priced desktop grade core I 9 and that even our base model CPU throttled under sustained loads with the imac pro's cooling system staying in audibly quiet rather than holding the cpu temperatures at a more comfortable 70 to 80 degrees we'd like to see Apple ramped up the fan more aggressively though with that said given the placement of the exhaust with air basically being blown back into the intake anyway it's kind of hard to tell how much it would help and what we also don't know at this time is how a higher spec CPU would affect any of this let's get back to that discussion about upgradability now Apple may officially void your warranty and getting inside the iMac Pro is a real chore but it appears as though the CPU RAM and proprietary SSDs there are two of them running in raid zero could all be swapped out for compatible replacements so this is something that we plan to explore in a follow up video bottom line then it feels like Apple is finally listening to its professional users there are a few things missing maybe kind of like the Soviets after the 1969 moon landing they've decided to just let Microsoft have it as the only one with a sexy AIO with a digitizer by leaving out support for the Apple pencil but they gave us 10 gig Ethernet and truly professional-grade performance and they did it in a form factor with a level of polish that nobody does quite like Apple so thermals aside I guess it's pretty magical and our major gripes that are really just the usual stuff about the restrictive Niseko system in general one without any obvious reason the iMac Pro doesn't support target display mode which would allow you to get more mileage out of it as a monitor once the internals become outdated - other than Thunderbolt 3 there is no way to add an expansion card in spite of the CPUs massive 48 PCIe lanes and three while on paper the specs and pricing actually look really attractive compared to an apples to apples DIY solution a big part of the reason for that is Apple's manner of choosing expensive options that not everyone would necessarily spring for if given the choice better performance per dollar can be achieved with some compromises in a DIY box now it's possible that when the true standalone workstations arrive perhaps later in 2018 that will see some more flexibility here nvidia gpus anyone they've got drivers but i wouldn't hold my breath speaking of breath do you find yourself as a small business owner or freelancer having a hard time catching your breath at the end of the day especially when you go oh and i have to sit down and do accounting well FreshBooks is the solution for you it's the simple way to be more productive more organized and get paid faster you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get 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