Malcolm Owen
Despite the delay in new Mac Pro models arriving on the market, Apple is still aiming to target professional users looking for new Macs, and has revealed plans to release new iMacs this year with new configuration options that could be attractive to prosumer and creative users.
Disclosed to a group of journalists at Apple's headquarters, at the same time as plans for Apple's future Mac Pro releases, Apple marketing head Phil Schiller confirmed that new iMacs are in the works, slated for this year. John Gruber of Daring Fireball noted Schiller advised this will include configurations of iMac specifically with the pro consumer in mind, revealing that the company's popular desktop with professional users is the all-in-one iMac.
Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi spoke about the evolution the iMac has seen over the last decade, from the original candy-colored tube iMac, to modern svelte models that can still satisfy many pro user needs.
"And now you look at today's 5K iMac," Federighi said, "top configs, it's incredibly powerful, and a huge fraction of what would've traditionally - whether it's audio editing, video editing, graphics, arts, and so forth - that would've previously absolutely required the Mac Pros of old, are being well addressed by iMac."
Federighi suggested there's still even further that Apple can take iMac as a high-performance pro system, and said the current form factor can address even more of the professional market.
According to Apple's research, approximately 30 percent of the entire Mac user base use pro apps at least once per week, for media creation and software development tasks. Within this group, there is an 80/20 split between notebooks and desktops in terms of sales, and of these desktop sales, iMac outpaces the Mac Pro.
While it remains to be seen what kind of configurations Apple has planned for the pro iMac, there have already been some changes on the Mac Pro side. Early on Tuesday, Apple issued a minor speed bump to the 2013 Mac Pro, with a six-core Xeon CPU and dual AMD G500 GPUs in the base $2,999 model, while the $3,999 variant gains 8 cores and dual D800 GPUs.
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Marko Zivkovic
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61 Comments
Sweet. Next 12-18 months is going to be awesome for the Mac
It doesn't help when Intel continues to delay the release of anything more than a modest update. Let's go and make a prediction (based on recent news) and say that the next iMac will not be Intel based, but will have its own Apple re-designed AMD Ryzen along with its own GPU, whether it's a daughterboard BPU or a SoC design. It will obviously have USB-C ports and flash storage and doesn't really have to have any of this sealed inside the monitor. The new iMac could be a blend of the old Mac mini and the new Apple display mentioned in other articles. Make sure the architecture is such that it could handle at least one or two CPU/SoC upgrades via easy replacement along with internal flash storage and RAM upgrades (or just bite the bullet and start with at least 32GB RAM) and I bet lots of people would be happy with this new iMac. We've seen what Apple can do with compact yet powerful designs in the iPhone and iPad so I'm sure they can scale to the requirements all the prosumers have when the device doesn't need to be portable.
Time to start saving!
Exactly how is a glued shut, skinny iMac with soldered in memory and on board Vampire Video GPUs going to serve a Pro Market or have any shelf life?
The very all in one concept of the iMac or a laptop serves the constant churn that may be profitable for Apple, but not what more than a few want or need. The workstation form factor is still the most flexible design and that is precisely what Apple abandoned with the Trashcan and pushing people to the iMac.
I do not want cables running all over the place for external storage or external GPUs and I sure do not want all my stuff in the Cloud. The cloud is fine for many things, but not everything.