[chucker]

Originally Posted by chucker One thing that's unusual is that they're already preannouncing a spec bump. Not just the "coming soon" $500 more rack mount variant, but also: It makes sense because the Mac Pro as introduced today ships with the previous-generation Vega AMD graphics and up to 4 TB SSD, whereas 16-inch MacBook Pro already offers Navi graphics and up to 8 TB SSD. I wouldn't be surprised if "soon" means February-ish, and: that day, they just upgrade all graphics options as mentioned above, at the same pricing as before; likewise, they just double each SSD option. That means it'll go from 512 to 8 rather than 256 to 4, and it also means it will no longer start at 256 (which is dumb); aaaaaand maybe they'll also upgrade the iMac Pro that day. The iMac Pro could now get Xeon W-2200 chips, could also use nicer graphics, and of course the various additions to RAM and SSD.

So, I was wrong both in optimistic and pessimistic ways.

• The SSD option became available on Dec 19th, just nine days later. Weird. I guess they wanted to open up regular sales ASAP and weren't quite sure yet if they could offer the SSD before Christmas? Some last-minute firmware bug, maybe? Otherwise, why bother with the delay at all? So odd.
• Then came the rackmount option, but the GPU option isn't there yet.
• It's looking increasingly unclear if there will be a new iMac Pro at all, ever. They might just merge it with the regular iMac. Add the Pro's better cooling, and use Comet Lake-S to go up to ten cores, and the iMac Pro becomes a much thinner niche.*

*) The answer if you benefit from eighteen cores during regular use is almost certainly no. Almost all software today still isn't even remotely parallelizable like that.