There were lots of announcements during yesterday’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. And I mean lots! So what can we expect from Apple in the coming months? They announced a new iMac, which will blow your mind. Designed for power users, the iMac Pro will come with the following:
- a 27″ Retina 5K display
- up to 18 core Xeon processors
- up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation
- Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse
- a new Radeon Pro Vega GPU
- features up to 16 GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory
The iMac Pro includes an all flash architecture and new thermal design, which provides up to 80% greater cooling capacity than current iMac’s. Why is all of this important? It allows high end users to process from a 3D and VR capacity. Which is the way that the world is going these days, so this iMac will only help with that. In addition, the iMac Pro supports up to 4TB of memory, and has four Thunderbolt 3 ports. Which means, you can connect up to two high performance RAID arrays and two 5K displays at the same time. At the same time! But that’s not all. The iMac Pro also includes 10 Gb Ethernet which will allow for up to 10 times faster networking speeds.
During the keynote speech yesterday, Apple provided a demonstration on how someone could utilize the VR capabilities. Which was incredible. The premise was that you could be in the design yourself and create the scene around you. Of course, in order to create something as incredible as they were demonstrating, you would need a computer with intense processing power. Which is what Apple is giving you. Fast forward to about the 1 minute mark to see exactly how the scene was created.
That’s pretty cool, right? I am usually a bit critical of products as I always feel that they can do just a bit better. But today is different. I’m not sure how they can improve this product. Or at least not based on what I’ve seen. I myself would not qualify as a power user by any means, so I have to rely on Apple to give me information. But as someone who can see the potential in some emerging technologies, I think this is beyond pretty cool. Why? It seems surreal that we can have the ability to create something like VR through our own devices. Meaning, we don’t have to go to a fancy studio somewhere to be able to create something amazing. We simply just need the technology at our finger tips. And now we have it.
This also means that more professionals will be using these products. Which will in turn raise the bar for next years’ (or the year after) announcement to see what else can be created. Which, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts is what it’s all about. Taking something great and making it even better. With so many developers attending the conference, and participating worldwide, I can only imagine what will come next. The iMac Pro will be available starting in December and at a price of $4,999. During the keynote, it was mentioned that it was originally priced much higher.