Pro Mac setup

A maxed-out Mac Pro costs £53,349! Fortunately, you can get an amazing system for a little less

Configure your iMac Pro

For near-as-dammit five grand, 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 memory is reasonable, but not very future-proof. Doubling it is a £400 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 – 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 prise off the screen, extract the motherboard and plug in some third-party memory 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 £5,000 system. Whether that bothers you depends on your apps. A 16GB Vega 64 adds £550; there’s also an Apple-exclusive 64X at £700, though its spec is elusive. CPU specs go much higher. The Xeon W-2140B pre-empted Intel’s 2018 line-up but is unique to Apple. A modest step up to 10 cores adds £800; there are two costly options beyond that.

Saving sacrifices

Inescapably, though, it’s the £7,500-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 for £3,199, add 32GB yourself for £140, and you’ve saved a grand and a half. You can only add two 4K monitors or one 5K, versus four and two for the Pro. It’s not Space Grey, and the fans could get audible. Your call.