Apple iMac Pro 27" Retina 5K - Late 2017

Hands On: The iMac Pro opens a lot of doors for creative professionals working on the Mac, and if that was indeed Apple’s primary mission here, consider it accomplished—as long as other third-party developers follow the lead demonstrated by the ones we've met with so far.

Waiting in the wings, of course, is Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro and companion Pro display. No one knows what they’ll look like or how much power Apple will cram into the workstation computer, but it should be as much as you can find on an iMac Pro. For many designers and developers, though, the iMac Pro all-in-one may be all the power they need. Unless they want an upgradeable system: then they may want to wait for the Mac Pro.

Should you want the iMac Pro? Yes, of course. It's the most powerful Mac available today by a very wide margin. Should you buy the iMac Pro? More than with other computers, that's not a question I can answer for you. It's the most expensive Mac available today by a very wide margin, and for most people, just getting the "best Mac" isn't worth the extra money unless you have work that is currently, significantly hampered by the speed of your computer.

As I write this, Apple hasn’t released full pricing for the iMac Pro line other than noting that a base 8-core model with 32GB memory, 1TB SSD, and a Vega Pro 56 graphics chipset will start at $4999. The nearest comparable shipping 27” iMac I configured was $3699 but with a greatly inferior CPU and graphics chipset, four fewer cores, and other disadvantages across the board.

This is a wonderful machine that will satisfy all users out there – with the exception of the 0.1% of users who work in the 8K RAW RED world for example and want to transcode at 1:1 or faster with purpose-built machines. If you’re shooting 4K or pretty much any still camera available today, this Mac is unlikely to let you down. I know it’s tackled everything I’ve thrown at it and it’s the first machine that can keep up with me in an still edit of thousands of images or hundreds of minutes of video footage.