New iMac Pro!

filmguy123 said:
Apple's design is great. I worked for them for a couple years. I owned a Mac Pro. I own a Macbook Pro. I have built Hackintoshes. I have built PCs.

The reality is, a big honking tower can be just as quiet as Apple's top end. Mine is. It's setup with liquid cooling in a sound dampened case from Lian Li in a beautiful dark aluminum. I have a few ultra quiet Noctua fans as well. I can drop in the latest and greatest hardware piece meal when I need it. And, I could build my tower to be far smaller - I just like the ample room to work with. I have 10 internal HDDs and a honking GTX 1080 TI and I have ample room to move around inside.

Nothing against Apple, I'm wearing my Watch Series 3 and have the iPhone X here. I border on fanboy. But it's a false dichotomy to say Apple is BMW and PC is Corolla. Apple is BMW. PC has offerings and options from Geo Metro to BMW to Maserati.

Regarding the ecosystem (OS X), Apple does some great things with software but frankly Windows 10 is edging out OS X these days, except for in the mobile and consumer space. Apple does amazing things with OS X for laptops, it's why I own a Macbook Pro. OS X also has a lot of very slick consumer friendly features that just out-class Windows 10. But in the professional workspace, after years of working on a Mac, I prefer Windows 10. There is nothing OS X offers these days to pros that Windows 10 doesn't do just as well or better. And the virus thing is simply no longer true. Apple even had to change their marketing: OS X doesn't get "PC" viruses. Key addition. Fine. Windows 10 doesn't get "Mac" viruses. The unix base of OS X is no doubt excellent but with its massive rise in popularity, it's no longer as immune to attention as it once was, and I haven't had a virus problem on my PC for about a decade now.

To clarify, I am not coming down on OS X or Apple. OS X vs Vista was a no brainer. OS X vs Windows 10 is, these days, Leica VS Zeiss. But the clincher for me is that Apple's focus is undoubtedly on the mobile mass market consumer end of things. I am glad to see them paying more attention to pro users lately and believe they make great products and will continue to make even more compelling pro products. They are a great choice, they just aren't an inherently better choice.

Fact is, if I had to choose between an equivalent top end Mac or top end PC system (spec'ed out like I have mine), I would pay $1000 more for the PC side due to a preference these days for Windows 10 and hardware flexibility. But that's just me.

All respect to those who love the Mac - I actually do too. I just think it's patently false to state that the Mac is the BMW and the PC is the Honda. PC by definition is open platform and can be whatever you make it to be. Mac sources all the exact same components used on a quality high end PC and adds a TPM chip which is the only thing that blocks OS X from running on PCs. It's why it's so easy to build a Hackintosh. Apple's design is undeniably superb. I think the iMac Pro is beautiful piece of design and hardware and, like I said, an impressive feat in engineering.
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Doesn't change the fact that your giant tower can't run Mac OS. Well not legally at least. I'm also not saying you can't get more performance out of a PC. I built editing work stations for people for years. My point is that sort of thing doesn't matter to a lot of people. There are pros out there that frankly don't give a darn if a system costs a couple extra thousand. They finance it/pay cash for it out of business funds and write it off at the end of the year. They don't lose sleep over it. They just buy it and do their work. When the machine no longer functions they rinse and repeat.

In my experience it is the "non pros" that care more about bang for buck. The Pros just buy what they need and don't think twice about an extra $2,400 for RAM. It may sting for some people but at the end of the day it is just money and one project that requires that level of horse power really pays for it so whats the big deal.
 
Thomas Smet said:
Doesn't change the fact that your giant tower can't run Mac OS.
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Doesn't change the fact that I don't want it to ;)

Thomas Smet said:
Well not legally at least.
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Yup. It can run it... but it's not installed :)

Thomas Smet said:
There are pros out there that frankly don't give a darn if a system costs a couple extra thousand. They finance it/pay cash for it out of business funds and write it off at the end of the year. They don't lose sleep over it. They just buy it and do their work. When the machine no longer functions they rinse and repeat.
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That's me...

Thomas Smet said:
In my experience it is the "non pros" that care more about bang for buck. The Pros just buy what they need and don't think twice about an extra $2,400 for RAM. It may sting for some people but at the end of the day it is just money and one project that requires that level of horse power really pays for it so whats the big deal.
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I think there are a lot of smart pros and businessman that care about cost efficiency. Actually, I'd say most of the best do... even if they ultimately choose to splurge.

Though my point was more that I'd personally pay more for the PC ;)

Just saying, in 2017, arguing that Mac is the luxury option and PC is the bang for buck budget option is simply a false dichotomy and a non-starter. I think the iMac Pro looks great and if you get one, I think it is a sexy beast of a machine and a beautiful piece of design! Ain't no shame in that.
 
It's fun to argue the "I can build a PC for half that price" but I don't want a PC. The fact that I have to use one at work is enough for me to know I don't want one at home. Add that you cant use FCPX on a PC makes the decission easy.

I'm in need of a new Mac but I can't get the price of the iMac Pro to a place I feel good about. It's really impressive but out of my range. I'm 99% sure a 2017 i7 iMac with 580 GPU is what i'm getting before the end of the year.
 
Erik Naso said:
It's fun to argue the "I can build a PC for half that price" but I don't want a PC. The fact that I have to use one at work is enough for me to know I don't want one at home. Add that you cant use FCPX on a PC makes the decission easy.

I'm in need of a new Mac but I can't get the price of the iMac Pro to a place I feel good about. It's really impressive but out of my range. I'm 99% sure a 2017 i7 iMac with 580 GPU is what i'm getting before the end of the year.
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A few months ago when I started having boot up problems with my 7 year old iMac I decided to buy a 2017 i7 4.2GHz 580 GPU iMac with a 512GB SSD. I also bought an additional 32GB of RAM from OWC. No regrets. The machine runs like a dream. I upgraded to FCPX 10.4 and Compressor last night. It took about 10 minutes to do the upgrade. Regarding my 7 year old i7 iMac. I brought it to my local Apple store when it would not boot up. Apple ran their hardware and software diagnostics on the machine and determined the boot up problem was due to corrupted files. The hardware looked okay. They were able to recover my documents and photos folders and re-installed the Apple OS. When I brought the iMac back home I reinstalled FCPX and Compressor and a couple of other apps from the Apple store. What did this cost me? Nothing except for a couple of hours at the Apple store and a couple of hours to reinstall the apps. I keep my video files on external G-Tech drives. Apple support is the best and worth the premium price for you pay for Apple products. On another thread guys are bragging they can assemble a faster Windows editing machine for much less than iMacs cost. When you factor in the time they spend researching and ordering the components, assembling the parts, finding and downloading drivers that work, I'm sure the "hourly cost" of the home built Windows machine is equal to or higher than an iMac. By the way, I really "built" my first computer. It was a Heathkit and I had to solder all of the components on the motherboard.
 
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I'm typing this on my 2012 27" iMac as it renders an output in FCP X 10.3.4. iMacs are great, but buying my wife a new laptop the other night at the Apple store, I looked at the bottom of the line 2017 5K Retina for $1,800.00 That will suffice for me. I don't need to edit 8K RED or four streams of 4K 60p. The iMac Pro looks amazing but is definitely for the higher end business. Maybe if I was a full time editor? But for me, next year, a regular 2018 27" iMac will work great.
 
puredrifting said:
I'm typing this on my 2012 27" iMac as it renders an output in FCP X 10.3.4. iMacs are great, but buying my wife a new laptop the other night at the Apple store, I looked at the bottom of the line 2017 5K Retina for $1,800.00 That will suffice for me. I don't need to edit 8K RED or four streams of 4K 60p. The iMac Pro looks amazing but is definitely for the higher end business. Maybe if I was a full time editor? But for me, next year, a regular 2018 27" iMac will work great.
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Shoot, up until a few years ago I was editing on a Mac Mini just fine. Most of my work still comes to me in 1080p Prores HQ format, which even the lowest specced mini can handle perfectly well. I will say Windows 10 is the first version of Windows that doesn't make me want to punch the screen.
 
Look the iMac Pro isn't for everybody. It is priced like a Mac Pro and not everybody needs a machine like that. There are a lot of people that earn a ton of money a year editing projects every day on a regular iMac or even MBP.

The thing about the Apple Pro apps is they tend to not need a massive amount of horse power. I can do some amazing stuff with 4k video on a 2015 MBP and I still edit HD like a hot knife through butter on a 2011 MBP and 2012 iMac. FCPX is highly optimized to perform well on non bleeding edge machines. FCPX is also better at utilizing RAM than Adobe applications are. Adobe is a resource hog. That isn't really a secret. Really good feature packed applications but Adobe isn't about to win any awards when it comes to optimized and efficient software development.

If one is using the Apple Pro Apps they can get exceptional results on a MBP and iMac. If one plays games and uses non Apple applications then yes a custom built PC will be faster for less cost. For the Apple Pro Apps users the iMac Pro gives another option for even more performance. It isn't a must. We don't have to have it. It just helps those who love working on Apple with Apple Pro apps get stuff done faster. That is worth it to some of us.

I myself will likely skip the iMac Pro for the same exact reason I skipped the Mac Pro. I don't really need it. Yeah I could render faster and throw more crap into a timeline to play back but honestly I love the proxy workflow in FCPX which I am able to get 9 4k streams playing in realtime through a Blackmagic I/O device downscaled to a HDTV. I'm not sure why anybody ever needs more than that. All this is done on a 2012 iMac by the way. Thats a five year old machine that is a pleasure to work with and pretty much does anything I throw at it with a proxy workflow. I'm sure a 2017 iMac would allow me to move away from that proxy workflow and would likely be more than enough for the Apple Pro apps.

Now when I do 3D animation projects I really do miss having the better resources on a PC but I don't do as much of that right now with my current position. I sometimes play Diablo 3 on my Mac and I know without a doubt I could get better results with a PC for half the cost but that isn't my primary use case for my productivity machine.

CUDA users are pretty much SOL on Macs these days but the prospect of using eGPU has me excited to bridge that gap. Yes it costs more but who cares? I don't penny pinch that much to really worry about it.
 
filmguy123 said:
Lol, that pretty much says it. I'd love to see this on their product box as a quote.
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I was sentenced to a Windows laptop in my last corporate job from 2010 to 2013. Never again, I still truly hate Windows with every fiber of my being. I worked from home and on the road and even then, the company's corporate IT guys took four HOURS to remotely configure my Windows laptop to wirelessly print with a modern, Epson printer, something that took :10 on any Mac. Idiotic. Gahh. It's like Windows exists solely to keep corporate IT departments and virus software companies in business. No thanks. I am a Mac user for life and if Apple goes under (which there is a chance of under the flailing 'leadership' of Tim Cook), I will switch to Linux or rubbing two sticks together over ever going back to Windoze. I'm becoming less and less of a fan of Mac as they devolve into another Microsoft, but I've tried over the decades to give Microsoft and Windows a chance and every time, I regret it. The OS just doesn't operate in a logical, intuitive and humanistic manner, it's designed for robots.
 
I want to work with my 4K 10 bit footage with no hiccups, and no dropped frames. I want to speed up render times. It looks like these new machines will let me do that, so i'm in.
 
puredrifting said:
I was sentenced to a Windows laptop in my last corporate job from 2010 to 2013. Never again, I still truly hate Windows with every fiber of my being. I worked from home and on the road and even then, the company's corporate IT guys took four HOURS to remotely configure my Windows laptop to wirelessly print with a modern, Epson printer, something that took :10 on any Mac. Idiotic. Gahh. It's like Windows exists solely to keep corporate IT departments and virus software companies in business. No thanks. I am a Mac user for life and if Apple goes under (which there is a chance of under the flailing 'leadership' of Tim Cook), I will switch to Linux or rubbing two sticks together over ever going back to Windoze. I'm becoming less and less of a fan of Mac as they devolve into another Microsoft, but I've tried over the decades to give Microsoft and Windows a chance and every time, I regret it. The OS just doesn't operate in a logical, intuitive and humanistic manner, it's designed for robots.
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I feel you! IMO Macbook Pro has no comparison. OS X really shines here on mobile. I haven't had such bad luck with Windows on desktop for years though. Windows 7, and Windows 10 have both been very good. Especially 10.

I don't think Tim Cook is bad, and I still really like Apple. I do agree it's devolving into another Microsoft though. Their product line has become bloated and convulted. It's the exact shift Steve Jobs talked about waaayyy back when - when a company stops being lead by product people, and starts being lead by marketing people. I know people are tired of the "What would Steve do" rhetoric, but I swear, if he came back for a year he'd flip at how many models they have in stores right now, and how they are still selling low-end products now years old to give "options". It stands against his MO which is a quality experience, minimal options.

Google is by far the most exciting company to me right now. Well, Google and Tesla. I picked up the iPhone X and I'm extremely pleased, however, I could see myself switching to a Google Pixel down the road. IMO Apple used to always lead at software. In recent years their software has become less and less leading and impressive as they have favored hardware. Problem is, the hardware and design race is slowing down...
 
filmguy123 said:
Thomas, here's a good article on the pros of the iMac Pro for many users, and the modern non-need for upgradeability. I think this speaks to your perspective well.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/15/opinion-a-non-upgradable-imac-pro-not-as-crazy-as-it-seems/

Cheers!
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I agree with this take on it. With Moore's law and the way that the writers of all of our most used software work, they are always leveraging the latest and greatest CUDA, open CL GL, as much RAM as is possible to cram into a machine and the most processors with the most cores. Realistically, power users should probably upgrade and sell their machines every two years. If you buy a mid-line IMac Pro for $8k, use it for two years, you could probably sell it for what, $4k or so? Maybe even more. $4k, divided by two years is $2k per year or $166.00 per month? Big whoop, that's nothing to a pro user. The days of keeping a tower running for five years, if you are on the bleeding edge (who else would buy a $13k iMac Pro?) are done, you can't keep up. If you replace the graphics card, your processors are out of date. RAM gets maxed out and you need more. Just buy a new computer if you are working pro and presumably making $100.00 an hour or more for editing. For the rest of us who are pro users but not power pro users, we will be perfectly happy with a medium line MBP or a bottom of the line iMac for under $2k and the investment is a fraction of what the iMac Pro or the new Mac Pro will be. If you are an AE user or editing 8K, your computing and software needs are more expensive than most of us. Don't forget, many of us have to go out and buy $10k + cameras, storage, lighting, audio, etc. all of the time, an editing computer is just a small part of the overall expenses for even a small production company. Very different than full time editors and motion graphcs people.
 
For sure - totally resonate with that perspective too!

For me, I'm self admittedly a bit of tech head but I have been amazed at how my system has held up. I got a 6-core extreme Intel CPU, 64gb RAM, sound dampened beautiful black aluminium full tower case, liquid cool, quiet fans, etc. In 2012. The thing is still blazing fast. Been overclocked to 4.2ghz for 5 years strong now. Upgraded GPU a few times, dropped in more/bigger SSDs as needed, dropped in an expansion USB 3.0 card. I can add dual or even triple/quad SLI gpu's if needed, and when I need more from the CPU, I just swap out the motherboard/cpu/ram system now for a vastly discounted upgrade if needed without tossing all my good components. It took me a day to build (and I'm a nerd, but that was a FUN saturday - like Christmas) and about $2700 iirc.

And then waste all my savings on Zeiss Milvus lenses :grin:

But there's other things that doesn't interest me that I'm lazy as all get out on. Change my own oil for $10? Yeah right. Etc. Different strokes, different folks.
 
filmguy123 said:
For sure - totally resonate with that perspective too!

For me, I'm self admittedly a bit of tech head but I have been amazed at how my system has held up. I got a 6-core extreme Intel CPU, 64gb RAM, sound dampened beautiful black aluminium full tower case, liquid cool, quiet fans, etc. In 2012. The thing is still blazing fast. Been overclocked to 4.2ghz for 5 years strong now. Upgraded GPU a few times, dropped in more/bigger SSDs as needed, dropped in an expansion USB 3.0 card. I can add dual or even triple/quad SLI gpu's if needed, and when I need more from the CPU, I just swap out the motherboard/cpu/ram system now for a vastly discounted upgrade if needed without tossing all my good components. It took me a day to build (and I'm a nerd, but that was a FUN saturday - like Christmas) and about $2700 iirc.

And then waste all my savings on Zeiss Milvus lenses :grin:

But there's other things that doesn't interest me that I'm lazy as all get out on. Change my own oil for $10? Yeah right. Etc. Different strokes, different folks.
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Sorry! I accidentaly downvoted on a phone! It cannot be taken back :( i agree with your post
 
Wow the apple Pc online wars still live. Years on and the classic line I can build one better and cheaper gets thrown out. A subtle dig that basically says you're a sucker for paying that price, as if we're all sheeple morons. The more things change the more they stay the same. Its funny. Ranks close, being open minded is thrown in the trash. A bounty of speed and performance gets offered and theres always someone going to throw shade because of price as if the value of everything should be set at walmart prices.
 
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