So, about the cost. This Mac Pro is for editing 8k raw video. Which is Hollywood stuff, shot on cameras that cost 10s of thousands of dollars, on top of 100s of thousands of dollars of lenses and budgets 10s to 100s of millions.
I don't work in Hollywood, but I work heavily in production engineering for television productions that work on A LOT of 8K RAW video and multicam where time is critical, we have days to edit where hollywood has months and multicam is pretty damn taxing vs how a lot of movies operate.
Our budgets are a fraction of a hollywood production though.
The base model Mac Pro isn't going to be doing much at all. The higher end model with a lot of upgrades is going to be the sweet spot. You really need to push up to a 12-16 core, with 64-128gb RAM, 11+gb GPUs and then add the afterburner card (cause Apple won't play nice with Nvidia) if you want to be doing anything with 8K RAW on a high resolution display.
Yes, the Mac Pro is essentially an infinitely upgradable machine. That's awesome. But third party support is questionable and without Nvidia that leaves a lot of speculation as to what the afterburner card will truly be able to do.
I'd kill for that motherboard in a smaller CPU buildout. In a high budget post-facility environment, it may be an ideal candidate. Currently there isn't a Mac in our reach that doesn't overheat or choke on big media projects (we refuse to look at the iMac Pro seriously).
We've been holding off buying new gear for several years. Most of the editors I work with would prefer to stay on macOS, but the base model should have been $3500 8-Core with a lot more GPU horses. Apple delivered a $6000 box without anything to back it up. At a minimum we'd have to upgrade to a bigger GPU and add the afterburner cards and a little RAM, probably pushing us close to $10k mark.
AMD Ryzen 3000 and Threadripper builds are going to be increasingly more common for normal budget media work. The Intel i9 is our current sweet spot for budget to power ratio.
If I was in an unlimited budget post-facility, yeah, I'd get one cause it looks pretty damn cool and I love macOS. But I don't expect it to solve a lot of real world problems if upgrades are bottlenecked to proprietary offerings from Apple. We're going to have to wait and see if they can keep up with the rest of the industry.
Do you have your production software for Windows/Linux or is it only for MacOS? If you do, then you can very likely get the same specs for much lower cost from Taiwan based ODM builders like AIC, Gigabyte etc. They have these server-class motherboards in datacenter class mechanical/thermal chassis. After that, you can ask them to slap on whatever Intel CPU with how much ever RAM and how much ever PCI-E cards (GPUs, NVMe SSDs, custom ASIC accelerators, 50Gbps NIC etc) you want.
The place I work decided that the iMac Pro was a no buy (much like a couple of models of Mac mini) because so little of it can be serviced locally and the RAM is not upgradable.
We have actually started buying Intel NUCs for our student labs instead of Macs. Adobe and Office work on both.
Serviceability of an iMac in a short deadline environment that is running close to 24/7 with sustained graphic and 8K renders / conversions. It's just not the right tool for the job. If I worked on single track edit with long deadline client work, like at an agency, I think it would be fine for most basic media stuff.
I'm fairly positive the iMac Pro would melt though. Even if it didn't melt at first, the load it lived under would greatly reduce the lifespan of the machine.
eGPU isn't an option. Nvidia if you're working with RAW becomes pretty critical and the support for that was greatly reduced with Mojave. RTX cards have been a gamechanger for most of the work we do.
You will not be editing raw 8K video using the tiny 8 core CPU and 256GB storage space of the base model which the parent was referring to ($6000). Its true that for Hollywood projects, the price of this might not be a huge deal, even with the baller fully speced out model. Heck in my own industry (pharma) we're paying thousands and thousands of dollars for software that doesn't do much except have the magical 21CFR compliant sticker that regulators look for.
I wouldn’t put much emphasis on the storage. Most places that are doing video editing at this level are using all flash based SAN networking over 10/100GB Ethernet/fibre.
As for the CPU, I agree. However I’m not 100% sure on how much can be offloaded to the GPU these days, 5-ish years ago when I was working with video editors a lot, it wasn’t much that could be offloaded.
- Neither the Mac Mini nor 2019 Mac Pro are user-serviceable; you have to take your Mac to an Apple-approved repair center if you want to upgrade your RAM (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#one and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208377). I guess it's nice to have DIMMs when the computer is out of warranty, but I'd like to preserve my warranty and not have to pay Apple's prices for RAM upgrades plus labor costs.
- The storage is soldered onto the motherboard in the Mac Mini, which precludes upgrading or replacing storage.
- The storage for the iMac Pro is a special proprietary design, precluding the use of industry-standard M.2 NVMe flash drives. (Granted, the 2013 Mac Pro doesn't use industry standard M.2 NVMe drives, either, although I've read that it's possible to use some standard NVMe drives in the 2013 Mac Pro with the help of an adapter.)
- The iMac Pro at $4999 is still much more expensive than the previous generation base Mac Pro, which was $2999.
- The iMac Pro is an all-in-one design. I prefer desktop computers that are not housed inside a monitor; what happens if the monitor fails?
For most consumer PCs, I have no problem with most things being soldered on like RAM, CPU, etc...but soldering on the storage is unforgiveable. And it has nothing to do with being able to upgrade it, but rather it's about the problems this introduces (and the options it limits) when it comes to data recovery when your machine inevitably @#$@#s up.
Indeed. I was able to recover 10 years of photos and data from my brother-in-law's non-booting 2009 iMac earlier this year after he extricated the disk from behind the flat panel. He bought a new disk and I transferred the data onto it. His family now has a functioning computer again and all of their photos back, as if nothing ever happened.
The data recovery difficulties you refer to have nothing to do with soldering anything. It's a consequence of being secure by default. Pulling an encrypted drive from a machine with a dead motherboard shouldn't give you access to the data on that drive.
Apple has been providing a totally painless backup solution for a very long time, and there's no excuse for not using it.
If the monitor fails you put it under the desk and connect another monitor to it, pretty much what you would do with a desktop anyway... The storage for the iMacPro is freaking fast, what do you need standard stuff for? You can connect to external storage via TB3, you know ...
I think your issues really just exist in your head. Which is fine, because it is YOUR head after all, but these issues are not relevant outside of your head.
Sorry for the rant in advance, just getting fed up reading all these comments that make no sense whatsoever. It pretty much all boils down to people not wanting to pay for quality.
The Mac Mini got a nice refresh, but it is still limited in CPU, has no real GPU, doesn't have much drive space. So to turn it into a nice deskop machine, you have to get an external GPU enclosure and an external drive bay. At which point the whole desk is covered by computer parts stringed together. Makes any beige box look elegant in comparison. I really wonder when someone makes a box which has slots for a graphics card, drives and a mac mini...
The iMac Pro is quite nice. But extremely expensive, the computer is tied and limited to the 27" screen (which I consider on the small side), you are tied to the graphics card ordered (not sure how the top choice compares to a full desktop card), CPUs are Xeons, so quite expensive for what they do, RAM and SSD are not accessible, not even the cooling fans can be cleaned (and eventually cooling fans have to be cleaned). Once again limited to external drives.
The standard iMac now offers an i9 CPU which seems to be a sweet spot, but you don't get the same graphics cards as the iMac Pro, but at least accessible RAM. For all iMacs of current design, its a $300 bill to get anything done on the inside, due to the glued nature. A non-glued iMac would become instantly more attractive. But all have in common that you are limited to the builtin screen which you have to dispose of, once you don't use the contained computer any more.
And what is a very practical limitation: they don't have any screen inputs. I would like to connect my (work) MacBook Pro to my iMac screen, but that is not possible. Sometimes I even used via VNC screen sharing out of desparation, but that sucks.
