Apple’s HomePod may not see the light of day this year, but it’s not as if Apple will have no new products lining store shelves this holiday season. Assuming that there are no unforeseen bumps in the road, Apple will begin shipping its brand new iMac Pro sometime next month. Indeed, Apple just a few weeks ago reportedly told component suppliers to start boosting production, a clear sign Apple will be able to meet its initial ship date of December 2017.
With the iMac Pro launch looming overhead, developers Stephen Troughton-Smith, Jonathan Levin, and Guilherme Rambo have been busy poking around macOS and, funny enough, they stumbled upon some data strings which provide us with some interesting information about Apple’s next-gen desktop.
First and foremost, the iMac Pro will reportedly include an A10 coprocessor running its own variant of iOS — dubbed BridgeOS — as to enable functionality like the ‘Hey Siri’ feature Apple originally introduced with iOS 8.
This looks like the iMac Pro's coprocessor (Bridge2,1) will be an A10 Fusion chip with 512MB RAM 🤔 So first Mac with an A-series chip
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 18, 2017
Rambo, meanwhile, unearthed the following.
Confirmed: "Hey, Siri" is coming to the Mac pic.twitter.com/Dw9bRAzbxD
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 18, 2017
Interestingly enough, there’s also some speculation that the iMac Pro’s A10 chip will enable “Hey Siri” functionality at all times, even when the machine is powered off.
Unlike the Touch Bar, the A10 in the iMac might always be running, even when macOS is shut down?
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 18, 2017
The "Hey Siri" setup on macOS is identical to the one on iOS, but it's implemented with regular AppKit, there's no magical UIKit port or UXKit being used pic.twitter.com/lhuga3dA7y
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 19, 2017
And as if that weren’t enough to satiate your thirst for Siri information, Rambo even managed to unearth some Siri sounds from BridgeOS for your listening pleasure.
Siri "thinking" sounds found in BridgeOS pic.twitter.com/Gbg7b7utsO
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 18, 2017
Lastly, there’s a tidbit about multiple user support as well, though it remains unclear if this means a single user setup will be able to support multiple voices.
"Hey Siri" enrollment model from my testing yesterday was stored in ~/Library/VoiceTrigger/SAT. Means it's going to support multiple users.
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 19, 2017
The inclusion of “Hey Siri” aside, the forthcoming launch of the iMac Pro is long overdue and is clearly an answer to the long-running narrative that Apple has been neglecting the Mac for years. In fact, this narrative became so prevalent this year that Apple, in an effort to set the record straight, sat down with select journalists last April and emphatically reiterated the company’s allegiance to Mac development.
So when WWDC came around this year, Apple finally showed the world what they had been working on, an absolute powerhouse of a machine that can be outfitted with 18 core Xeon processors. Naturally, the iMac Pro won’t come cheap as the entry-level model starts at $4,999.
https://bgr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/imac-pro-specs.png?w=768
If you really want to get into the technical nitty gritty of BridgeOS, make sure to check out Jonathan Levin’s work over here.
As for other iMac Pro rumors, there have been rumblings that the machine will be the first desktop Mac to support Touch ID, following in the footsteps of Apple’s October 2016 MacBook Pro.
