What you need to know
- Apple has tweaked the iMac Pro lineup to give the $4,999 model more grunt.
- The previous 8-core Xeon chip is no more, with the 10-core part taking its place.
- The move differentiates the iMac and iMac Pro somewhat.
While everyone was checking out the newly refreshed iMac, Apple was also tweaking its iMac Pro lineup slightly in an attempt to further differentiate it from the standard model. Now, the $4,999 iMac Pro ships with a 10-core Xeon processor for the first time.
That replaces the previous base model that had just the eight cores, something that posed a problem for Apple, as Jason Snell of Six Colors points out. Namely, the high-end iMac was a little too fast and the low-end iMac Pro was a little too slow.
Last year's iMacs already pushed up against the performance of the iMac Pro, and these will undoubtedly beat it—especially that 10-core model. In an acknowledgement of this, Apple has rejiggered the iMac Pro line, dropping the old base eight-core model and moving the 10-core model to the base price. So now the iMac line ends at 10 cores and the iMac Pro line begins there.
However, that's where the changes begin and end. Anyone hoping for a redesigned iMac Pro is going to have to wait, potentially until Apple has its own silicon ready to power it.
The iMac itself is expected to get a big redesign at the same time it ditches Intel's chips, by the way.
