Amid speculation that Apple no longer cares about its pro user base and that the company is no longer interested in investing in the Mac, Apple executives earlier this week revealed that the company has no plans to abandon developers or creative professionals. Speaking to a handful of tech journalists a few days ago, Apple said that it’s already working on a brand new Mac Pro design and that a pro version of the iMac is in the works as well.
“With regards to the Mac Pro,” Phil Schiller said in remarks transcribed by Daring Fireball, “we are in the process of what we call ‘completely rethinking the Mac Pro’. We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.”
With respect to the iMac Pro, Apple was predictably short on details, though Schiller emphasized that the machine will be designed “with the pro customer in mind.” Helping us to fill in some of the blanks, a new blog post from Pike’s Universum (via MacRumors) relays a number of interesting details about Apple’s upcoming iMac Pro, including hardware specs and a launch window.
Citing a source purportedly familiar with Apple’s plans, the blog claims that the iMac Pro will be released in late October and will feature a new keyboard design. Incidentally, recently published Apple patents suggest that Apple has plans to bring the Touch Bar it introduced on last year’s MacBook Pro to the iMac.
As far as specs are concerned, the iMac Pro will seemingly pack a big punch.
Good news folks. I am told, by a little bird, that the next iMac (to be released in late October) will be available with (up to) Intel E3-1285 v6 processor with 16 GB (upgradable to 32 or 64 GB) ECC memory. Faster NVMe SSD’s possibly up to 2 TB and AMD graphics to support VR and Pro apps. Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C gen 2 with… tada… a brand new keyboard.
By way of comparison, Apple’s current entry level iMac has 8GB of RAM and can only be configured up to 32GB. Further, Apple opting for ECC memory should help dramatically reduce the incidence of data corruption errors. The tidbit about AMD graphics is also notable given that it’s a rumor we’ve seen floated before.
As for other points of interest, Pike’s Universum claims that the “next Mac Mini won’t be so mini” and that Apple, in conjunction with its work on a new Mac Pro, is also working on a brand new 8K display.
Apple may have neglected its Mac lineup in recent years, but the good news is that the company seems to fully appreciate, perhaps more now than ever, just how important the Mac is to its users. The iPhone may still be the company’s primary source of revenue, but the Mac has been pulling its own weight in recent years. In fact, Apple saw more money from the Mac last quarter than it did from the iPad.
