Configure your iMac Pro

For near-as-dammit $7.5K, you’d want a Mac that’s ready to use, and that’s what you get with the base iMac Pro. The single terabyte of PCIe SSD is acceptable considering you’ll always need external storage, and there are four Thunderbolt 3 ports for that.

32GB of RAM is reasonable, but creative pros have been using this amount for a while, so it may not feel very future-proof. Doubling it is a $600 option, a 100% markup on the market price. Because they had to rejig the internals to achieve the increase in cooling required for the Pro’s CPUs and GPUs ( achieved in near-silence, a remarkable feat) the iMac 27-inch’s access hatch doesn’t exist in this almost entirely upgrade-proof machine. If you can’t stretch to 64GB right now, console yourself that hiring an engineer to prize off the screen, extract the motherboard, and plug in some third-party RAM later can’t cost much more. The maximum is an implausible 256GB.

True, the 8GB Radeon Pro Vega 56 is a sub-$500 GPU in a nearly $8,000 system. Whether that bothers you depends on your apps. A 16GB Vega 64 adds $825; there’s also an Apple– exclusive 64X at $1,050, though its spec is elusive. CPU specs go much higher. The Xeon W-2140B preempted Intel’s 2018 line-up but is unique to Apple, presumably binned for efficiency. A step up to ten cores adds $1,200; there are two options beyond that, but we got a nosebleed.

Inescapably, though, it’s the $10k-plus configurations that really justify the iMac Pro. Compared to the base model, an iMac 27–inch with the i9–9900K is neck and neck CPU-wise. Buy that with a de minimis 512GB SSD, the 8GB Vega 48 and 8GB of RAM, add 32GB yourself, and you’ve saved a few thousand dollars. You can only add two 4K monitors or one 5K, versus four and two for the Pro. It’s not Space Gray, and the fans could get audible. Your call.

iMAC PRO 3.2GHz eight–core Intel Xeon W–2140B processor, 32GB RAM (max 256GB), 1TB SSD, 8GB AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics, 27– inch 5120x2880 P3 display, four 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 ports, four 10Gbps USB–A ports, 10Gb Ethernet, SDXC card slot Launched in 2017, the iMac Pro had only minor updates in 2019. Since it’s not upgradable, you might want to hold out for an overhaul. The iMac Pro has the same screen as the iMac 27– inch and a similar-shaped case, but is finished in Space Gray and supplied with matching Magic Mouse 2 (or Magic Trackpad) and Magic Keyboard, the latter with Numeric Keypad as standard. Saving sacrifices