apple imac pro
Apple unleashes its most powerful desktop ever, but disguises it in an iMac’s shell. Is this really the pro-level beast Mac users have been waiting for?
Packed with performance, the iMac Pro is destined for the pros, so is it too much for us mere mortals?
£9,039 (from £4,899) apple.com/uk
The iMac Pro is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Actually, that’s underselling it. It’s a small nuclear warhead in sheep’s clothing. Somehow, Apple has packed a workstation with up to an 18-core Intel processor in a frame the exact size of the regular 5K iMac. The only thing more incredible than the engineering feat of producing it is the price you might pay for one. But this a truly pro machine, and that kind of power comes at a cost.
Specs appeal
Apple provided us a pretty trickedout model (see the specs box above) for our review, with a price tag nudging the £10k mark. The ‘basic’ £4,899 model packs an eight-core, 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processor, a less potent 8GB AMD Vega 56 graphics card, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It’s all hugely configurable, though – even beyond our beefy unit, you can
choose a 14-core processor (a £1,440 upgrade from the basic option) or the 18-core top-end option (£2,160).
Going from 32GB of RAM to 128GB alone costs £2,160. It adds up quickly if you’re planning to max it out.
If you’re wondering what the benefits are of spending that kind of money on a supercomputer that fits behind a monitor, you can probably already rule out the iMac Pro as being for you, even if you could afford it.
Video editors will see big benefits from having multiple cores to render demanding footage and play back in real time. Programmers compiling code will benefit from big parallel computing output. Extreme Photoshop users will find the giant RAM option useful.
To make it worthwhile, you probably have to be someone who looks at the price of the iMac Pro, calculates how much time it could save them, and then works out whether the two balance out.
Or a millionaire who just really wants the (admittedly irresistible) Space Gray finish for their desktop computer. And no one on T3 would blame you for that. Just look at it!
But the gist is, the reason this costs so much is that it’s using workstation parts like ECC (error correction code) RAM, which means your huge, vitally important work is less likely to become corrupted and crash apps out, losing you time and money. If you don’t need that, you can go cheaper.
The joy of overkill
Okay, we’re finished being boring and sensible now. You want to know what it’s like anyway. We feel you.
Obviously, it’s fast. Really fast. Everything you do is effectively instant, though that’s mostly down to the storage. Apple’s SSDs use some kind of mysterious technology to be just comically fast, even compared to what else is out there. We clocked the storage on the iMac Pro with write speeds of 3GB/s per second, and read speeds of 2.5GB/s. Just to be clear, that’s three gigabytes per second.
This is part of what makes it so good for video work (see the box on the next page for our tame video pro’s opinion of what it’s like to actually use for 4K editing).
But other Macs also have really fast storage (not quite this fast, but we’ve seen the MacBook Pros hitting 1.7GB/s), which makes them pretty much as fast for loading apps and stuff. The speed of the iMac Pro only really stands out from other Macs once you start doing something processor or graphics intensive.
So naturally, the next thing we tried was a bit of video exporting. We like to tax things with a video export of a native Blu-ray file into a streaming-friendly MP4. The most recent regular 5K iMac managed to convert our 31-minute video in 27 minutes. It’s a tough challenge, and this is a respectable score. The iMac Pro managed it in under 10 minutes.
9 minutes 40 seconds, to be precise. That’s what we mean about the price being worthwhile if it saves you time – it’s a huge speed boost.
It’s a similar story when it comes to graphics. The Vega 64 chip we have is AMD’s big powerhouse, meant to battle the top-end cards from rival Nvidia, and there’s big performance here. In Unigene Heaven benchmarks, it doubles the score of the 5K iMac, which is a good start. But that’s just theory. The more important fact is that, if you want to play games in 4K
or even 5K, you can. Not always super smoothly, but games a few years old, like the Tomb Raider reboot, can hit 30fps in 5K and and 60fps in 4K at higher quality settings. With more modern stuff, stick to 2560x1440. It’s also powerful enough for VR, which Apple’s keen to push, though it’s still only just getting started on Macs, really. Of course, Macs still have generally worse gaming performance than Windows, and you can buy this level of GPU power for a fraction of the price in a PC, so think of gaming as a bonus here only.
Gimme 5K
One thing softens the price of the iMac Pro, at least, is that it’s basically a workstation with a free 5K screen. A standalone 5120x2880 27-inch display that connects over a single Thunderbolt 3 cable will set you back £1,400, so getting it as part of the package here definitely adds appeal.
That said, it is the same panel you get in the regular 27-inch non-Pro iMac, so if that’s the bit that interests you, you don’t need to stump up £5k+ for your 5K screen.
Still, the important thing is that the screen is totally gorgeous. It’s bright, colours are fantastically vibrant, and naturally everything looks super-sharp. For photography and 4K video playback, it’s pretty much best in class, though we know some people don’t like the glossy glass-coated finish.
It does have one downside, though, which is that it’s not rated for HDR at all – having a built-in way to check your HDR grading would’ve been a boon for video editing. The 500-nit brightness (comparable to some monitors that say they are HDRcapable) is a start, but is way below the 1,000 nits expected for true HDR LCD TVs. It’s also not a native 10-bit display, which is what HDR requires, instead using techniques to mimic 10-bit colour on an 8-bit display. The difference is small and the complaint niche, but ‘small’ and ‘niche’ are the main words we’d use to describe this machine’s intended audience, so it’s worth noting.
Round the back of the screen, it’s nice to note that Apple has avoided cutting back on the connections the way it did on the MacBook Pros. Four regular USB 3 ports make it easy to hook up anything you want, and some good old-fashioned slots for SDXC cards, 3.5mm headphones and the humble Ethernet cable (though at a not-so-humble high-speed 10Gbps connection speed) mean you plug in pretty much anything you need to. The new hotness comes in the form of the four Thunderbolt 3 ports (which double as USB-C ports, since they’re the same connector). Again, the need for Thunderbolt 3 is niche, but if you’ve got a ton of 4K videos to import, the 40Gbps transfer speeed will be heaven.
They do inherit the problem the ports on the regular iMacs have, though, which is that they’re a pain in the arse to get to. You think it’s hard to get a USB plug in the right way up first time normally – try doing it by feel reaching around the back of this beast. Maybe you’ll want to add to the Pro’s price a few hundred quid for a Thunderbolt 3 multi-port dock you can keep closer to hand.
Key decisions
The iMac Pro comes with an Apple keyboard and mouse (or trackpad, which is our choice – the Magic Mouse is not great) finished in super-cool Space Gray to match its overall aesthetic, naturally. Apple’s keyboards are still a point of contention – the low-travel, clicky feel is hated by some, but we don’t
mind it, after a small adjustment period. They keyboard is nicely flat for good ergonomics, though, and is full-size, so includes a number pad.
Would we recommend the iMac Pro, then? Absolutely, though if you’re asking us and not some kind of specialist community on the internet, you may not be the intended buyer. If you want to know whether it’s a stunningly powerful miracle of design, though, it’s a firm yes.