[chucker]

Originally Posted by Robo I'm not married to the idea of the iMac Pro maintaining its current position with the Xeon-W. I think Apple was definitely in a different position when they made it, where they felt they needed to fill the void of the Mac Pro. I could see Apple adjusting its positioning, now that the Mac Pro's void is filled.

Yeah, but… what? As has been pointed out (but isn't directly Apple's fault), the iMac Pro is already lagging behind much cheaper non-Pro iMacs in single-thread performance.* And those now go up to 8 cores.

So the iMac Pro isn't actually "better" in all respects, just for rather specialized scenarios.

And surely, the regular iMac will eventually get the same cooling system and other upgrades the Pro has (or something more advanced than that). So that plus will go away, too.

Where does that leave it? A workstation GPU, maybe? (Radeon Pro / née FirePro? Quadro?)

*) which continues to be very important. Don't let "my machine needs 18 cores" folks fool you.

Originally Posted by Robo It's a little weird how the "Pro" suffix means such different things across Apple's line-up. On the MacBook, it's like, okay, the MacBook Pro is $200 more than the MacBook Air. Even if you want the "real" MacBook Pro with four Thunderbolt ports and a 28W processor, it's 50% more. Same with the iPad...the iPad Pro is about 50% more than the iPad Air. But then on the iMac, it's like, 3x the price of the 27-inch iMac. The 27-inch iMac is already a sort of "pro" product, and so the iMac Pro goes into high-end workstation territory, with a huge jump in price.

I feel like of those, the MBP has the worst positioning.

The iPad Pro at least has stuff like a much better speaker system (though "pro" is questionable on that — it's kind of mostly useful for consumption?), ProMotion, a better Pencil, etc.

The iMac Pro has a workstation-class CPU.

What does the MBP have, really? The Touch Bar, love it or hate it, is not really a "pro" feature. Apple should either be all-in on it and believe that it's a useful input method, or they shouldn't. To make it pro-only is bad. A P3 display, sure, that qualifies. But why, for instance, is there no ProMotion on the MacBook Pro?

Originally Posted by Robo I'm not saying I think the iMac Pro as it currently is should be half its price or whatever. But could I see Apple "downgrading" the future iMac Pros, now that they have the Mac Pro tower to be their ultra-high-end workstation? Maybe. Ideally, the iMac Pro would be positioned in a way where it would tempt some 27-inch iMac buyers to move up, and right now it just doesn't. There's a massive chasm between their prices.

Yup.

(The 27-inch iMac starts at $1799, buuuuuuut.

The iMac Pro starts at 32 GB memory and a 1 TB SSD. At that point, the iMac is already $2899.

Add a configuration that has a Vega GPU so it's somewhat more comparable, and you're at $3649. Add an 8-core CPU, and you're at $4049.

And yet — that's still $950 more! Which buys you a CPU that's actually worse much of the time, a better GPU, and 10 Gig Ethernet, and… that's about it.)

In short, the base model iMac Pro is a bad deal now that the iMacs are on Coffee Lake Refresh. But, if you really want to go higher end than that, the regular iMacs are a dead end, whereas the Pro lets you add more CPU cores (you probably don't need to do this) and much more RAM (this may be useful), and more storage (honestly, just hook up something external — Apple's pricing here isn't justified).

Originally Posted by Robo How popular is the iMac Pro? People like MKBHD and Marco Arment adore it, and it is a fantastic machine, but I'm not sure it's been an out-and-out sales success for Apple (even by high-end desktop standards).

Probably not, but I don't really like the narrative that everything Apple does needs to be a smashing mass-market success. (Like, how is "HomePod doesn't have much market share" a shocking or otherwise interesting story? Why does it need to?)

I don't mind at all if they have some niche products. Steve's 1999 2x2 product matrix made sense for the time and was a good idea, yes, but Apple isn't in that time any more.

Originally Posted by Robo And of course, Apple has scarcely touched it in nearly two years.

Yeah, but there isn't really that much they can do.

Originally Posted by Robo I'm really interested to see where Apple takes the iMac and iMac Pro next, because right now it seems like their desktop line might be in flux a bit.

Yup!

I think that's mostly a good thing. There seemed to be a few years where the Mac roadmap felt rudderless and, they didn't really seem to care much. (That may or may not be fair — but they're supposed to be good at PR, and their Mac PR just wasn't good.)

Originally Posted by Robo The iMac is overdue for a redesign, to be built around flash like every other Mac. And the fat bezels and chin are looking a little dated. We've had this same design since 2012, after all, and from the front it looks identical to iMacs since 2009.

It's arguably just an iteration of the 2004 iMac G5, which after fifteen years is a bit of a shame.

(Then again, Gruber recently made the point that the entire 2019 MacBook line-up is arguably an iteration of the 2001 PowerBook G4 Titanium.)

This overlaps with That Other Thread, but I wonder if three decades of Ive has led to a sense of complacency where everyone thinks you can't really go for a different design direction, and now that he's gone, maybe they'll try?

Like, remember how cool the iMac G4 was?

Originally Posted by Robo I'd be okay if the iMac Pro "just" becomes a really high-spec'd iMac, even if it means dropping Xeon-branded processors and ECC memory.

Yeah, I think now that the Mac Pro exists, that may be the right path.

Originally Posted by Robo I think a lot of people would welcome that, and I think more people would make the jump up if there wasn't such a price chasm. But I'm sure Apple really likes trying to sell them at $4999, so who knows.

But they might like selling 100,000 a quarter at $2999 more than selling 20,000 a quarter at $4999.