Colors are vibrant, blacks are deep, and the amount of screen real estate available makes it very difficult to go back to regular monitors. It features 14.7 million pixels - an insane resolution of 5120-by-2880 pixels - packed onto a 27-in.
That screen is the best display on the market built into an all-in-one unit. That makes the iMac good enough for many entry- and mid-tier Mac Pro customers, especially if you consider the iMac's real strength: the stunning 5K Retina display.
That easily puts its consumer-grade performance in the "good enough for professional work" class. But the iMac's hardware supports OpenCL - as all shipping Macs now do - and, the iMac even beats out some of the low-end Mac Pros in specific benchmarks. The Mac Pro and the iMac can both run Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, and you'd expect better performance from the pricier Mac Pro.
Applications need to be written to take advantage of those capabilities it doesn't happen automatically. Appleīut there's a really important caveat. This is exactly what the Mac Pro is built for. In concert with OpenCL and other supported APIs, applications can lean on the more powerful GPUs for general processing. While the Xeon-based CPUs on the Mac Pro are indeed powerful, the real benefits are from its dual-GPUs, whose normally idle cores can be utilized for processing by the operating system and supported apps.
Even if you upgrade the processor to an Intel Core i7 (which, if you're going to buy this iMac, I would recommend), the Mac Pro will still beat the iMac if the software you're running supports the Pro's architecture advantage.Īnd that's the kicker. But let's not exaggerate: if you have software that utilizes every available bit of power of a 12-core Mac Pro, the performance of this iMac isn't going to sway you. It easily handled everything I could throw at it in the six weeks I spent with it, including editing HD video in Final Cut Pro. The iMac I reviewed featured a quad-core 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 chip, 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, a 1TB Fusion Drive and an AMD Radeon R9 M290X. The iMac with Retina 5K isn't exactly a slouch. (But, did I mention you can bring six of them?)
Although the Mac Pro starts at $2999, the review unit, as configured, cost $6,799 - and you still have to bring your own monitor. But, as I said, this performance doesn't come cheap. It was the fastest Mac I have ever used and it breezed through a project render I conduct on my review units using software that isn't even optimized to take advantage of the Mac Pro's features. The Mac Pro setup I reviewed packed an 8-core Xeon E5 processor clocked at 3.0GHz, 32GB of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory, a 512GB SSD and two AMD FirePro D700 graphics cards. Appleīesides supporting up to 36 connected Thunderbolt devices - 36! - the Mac Pro also supports up to three 4K displays or six Thunderbolt displays. It was designed and built around powerful, user-replaceable parts, with a system architecture that emphasizes performance without bottlenecks, including PCI Express gen 3 for 40GBps bandwidth and for expandability, four USB 3 ports and six Thunderbolt 2 ports using three separate bus controllers. The Mac Pro is specifically aimed at those who need workstation-class performance, and aren't afraid of workstation-class prices. At this level, potential customers - businesses and universities included - are expecting a high-performance machine, which is exactly the territory of the Mac Pro.
Neither the Mac Pro or the 5K Retina display iMac was designed with your average customer in mind starting at $2999 and $2499, respectively, the price alone dictates that these computers are beyond the budget for most buyers. Susie OchsĪpple's new 5K Retina iMac running Final Cut Pro. With the arrival of the Mac Pro last year, and the introduction of the iMac with 5K Retina display in October, what once was an obvious decision is now muddied with tradeoffs. Nowadays, the line between consumer and professional hardware is blurrier than ever. The deliberate compartmentalization of prices and features clearly dictated which laptop or deskop machine was right, with minimal overlap between the categories.īut as Apple expanded its line-up, and as technology became faster and more efficient, overlap became unavoidable. There used to be a time when the gap between Apple products made choosing the right computer obvious and easy.