Apple has brought in some minor but significant upgrades to both its iMac and Macbook Pro lineup. This marks just two of the many announcements live from the company’s annual WWDC event, held at San Jose, California this time round.
Apple started off by announcing that the iMac now has a much brighter display, 43 percent brighter than the previous generation iMac to be exact, at 500 nits. Two thunderbolt USB Type-C ports have also made their way to the new iMac’s I/O, as USB C technology begins to pick up the pace in the industry. Other than those, the iMac will look the same externally as Apple did not alter any part of the desktop’s overall design.
Underneath the hood, the iMac series now feature Intel’s Kaby Lake processors. The 21.5-inch and the 27-inch iMac’s are now configurable up to whopping 32GB and 64GB onboard RAM respectively. Apple has also made a good switch up with its desktops’ graphics as well. The base model iMac now sports an Intel Iris Plus 640 GPU, while the other models (both 4K and 5K) will feature GPU’s from the AMD Radeon 500 series to make way for VR tech which is now supported on macOS High Sierra with Metal 2.
Apple has also adjusted the price point of the 4K 21.5-inch iMac, which now begins at a slightly more affordable $1,299 (RM5,538.29). The base 21.5-inch model starts at $1,099 (RM4,685.59) and the 5K 27-inch model starts at $1,799 (RM7,670.04).
That’s not all. Apple packed a surprise for pro-sumers in the industry with a new iMac Pro. What makes the iMac Pro stand out from the standard iMac lineup is its “badass” space gray design, as mentioned by Apple.
The iMac Pro is spec-ed to the max, meant for professionals as it will come with a minimum of an 8-core Xeon processor, configurable up to a colossal 18-core Xeon chip. It can also be configured to have up to 4TB of SSD storage, plus incredible graphics performance via the brand new AMD Radeon Vega GPU, with up to a staggering 16GB of VRAM. By the looks of it, the iMac Pro is likely to be the replacement for Apple’s aging Mac Pro. Other minor mentions include a 1080p FaceTime camera and a UHS-II SDXC memory card slot.
Apple claims to have priced the iMac Pro relatively more affordable than the competition with similar specs. The powerful and gorgeous iMac Pro will begin at a price of $4,999 (RM21,313.24). It will start shipping this coming December