Apple has announced a brand new computer in the form of a $4,999 iMac Pro at its developer conference in San Jose, making the company’s all-in-one computer the most powerful Mac available.

The new beefed-up iMac is intended to address the concerns of professional creatives, who until now have been limited to either the consumer 27in 5K iMac or the older Mac Pro, which hasn’t been updated since 2013.

The new iMac Pro starts with an 8-core Intel Xeon processor, but can be configured with an 18-core processor variant, as well as up to 128GB of EEC RAM, 4TB of SSD storage and Radeon Vega discrete graphics cards with up to 16GB of memory.

The 27in machine has the 5K display from the existing 5K iMac, but has four Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports and is capable of pushing up to 44m pixels across three screens. Apple will hope that the iMac Pro will address the concerns of video editors looking to work with 4K or 8K video that need workstation-level power – a market that the company has failed to serve for the last couple of years forcing once Apple-only outfits to switch to alternative operating systems and machines.

The iMac Pro will start at $4,999 in the US and will be available in December.

Apple also updated the standard iMac line with new 7th generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, up to 64GB of RAM and Apple’s Fusion drives as standard. The 21.5in iMac will come in a standard and 4K screen variant, with Iris Plus 620 graphics and a choice of Radeon Pro 555 and 560 discrete GPUs.

The 27in 5K variant will come with Radeon Pro 570, 575 or 580 graphics cards, and were demoed producing live VR content - a new area of exploration for Apple, which has joined with Valve to bring its Steam VR platform for the Mac as well as Unity and Unreal engines.

The 21.5in and the 5k iMac hadn’t been updated since late 2015 with the Skylake, 6th generation Intel processors – the same as those used in the MacBook Pro when it launched in 2016.

Finally, Apple also updated its MacBook and MacBook Pro line with 7th generation Intel processors, and gave the MacBook Air a specification bump in response to its sustained popularity.

When the redesigned MacBook Pro with Touch Bar was launched in October 2016, one of the criticisms of the design was that it used older 6th generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors rather than the latest 7th generation versions, which were more powerful and more thermally efficient.

By updating to the 7th generation “Kaby Lake” Core i5 and i7 processors, Apple has brought the MacBook Pro line up to pair with rivals from Dell, Razer and HP. But Apple will also hope that the more efficient, newer processors will help it live up to its promises of a 10-hour battery life, of which the 13in MacBook Pro fell well short.

Source: The Guardian