After a year or two of Windows 10, I’m ready to go back to a computer that doesn’t hate me. I’d been hoping the iMac Pro, announced today, would come in a relatively affordable form—competitive with the $2700 Microsoft Surface Studio, for example. But no! It doesn’t! At $5000 to start, this total monster of an all-in-one is most certainly for professionals: you can have 18 cores, 128GB of DDR4 RAM, 4TB SSD, a 16GB Radeon Vega video card, a 30-bit 5k display and even a headphone jack.
To make sure you know it means business, it comes in black and ships December. I’ll be sticking with the standard iMac Amateur, I think, which received significant spec bumps: 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake processors, “50% faster” SSD drives, Thunderbolt 3, and Radeon Pro 500 graphics (can’t find benchmarks, but isn’t this the same as Polaris?)