Apple Releases macOS Sierra 10.12.5 for 2017 iMacs and Touch Bar Update for 2017 MacBook Pro

The iMac Pro was pretty neat but the price is in sane.

It seems strange that anyone needing Xeon 8+ cores and 128GB of RAM would want the $5000+ computer to have the monitor built-in and no internal modular components.

Those who need and can afford it will likely be turned off by the form factor and mandatory purchase of a new monitor (ie. Mac Pro buyers), and everyone else will have a hard time justifying the cost.

It's clearly meant for the real professional class that wants a luxury Apple product and MacOS. This is definitely not meant to be a mainstream consumer mac as much as consumers would love the bragging rights. These people are not as price conscious as most of us and even at $5k+ that's nothing compared to the amount of income they will make with such a machine. When the iMac Pro is no longer good enough, they'll simply buy the new model or whatever powerful mac Apple has on sale by then.

A friend of mine would love this design as he travels a lot and wants a faster computer for video editing. He was turned off by the Mac Pro because everything is separate.

You're missing my point.

I agree that normal consumers will not be the buyers for the iMac Pro at all.

I don't think that most professionals who need Xeon 18-cores and 128 GB of ECC RAM want to buy an all-in-one.

Those buyers are more likely to want a separate box so that they:
a) Don't have to buy a very expensive new monitor (with only 1 size option) every time the update (likely won't need it at all)
b) Don't risk having downtime by a monitor failure
c) Don't have to worry about thermal limitations
d) Can replace failed / upgrade parts as needed, expansion, etc.

Hence the Mac Pro. These days, it's pretty common to have Xeon-tier computers used to crunch'n'serve data remotely, so the 5k monitor is even more of a waste. These constraints must rule out a large proportion of would-be buyers, I would think.

You have a point. I guess it depends on what specific field they are working in. I'm sure they're going to offer a tower solution at some point but they need something to shut up all the critics now and this was the fastest way to do it. At the same time it's possible that we won't see a tower and Apple will continue down this path. The lessons they learned with the profitability of the iPhone and iPad where nothing is upgradeable or consumer accessible definitely lead them down this road. The original Retina MBP was a sign of things to come. They did the same thing with the Mac mini and with the touchbar MBP they took it all the way. Even independent component level techs will have lots of trouble repairing the new MBPs if they will be able to at all. Hell ido it completely destroyed the touchbar pled screen taking the machine apart. The battery is glued in with a cement like epoxy?

Bottom line: This model works and is more profitable than ever since customers are forced to configure whatever they're buying properly right from the start. They omit just enough from the base models to force this.

Still until the iMac Pros are released we can't really pass judgement on them. For the price they're probably rock solid reliable and they are noticeable thicker than the regular iMacs. With the 4 TB3 ports high end external monitors can be used in the case of any built in display failure while they're repaired. I would guess most buying one would have at least a 2-3 monitor setup anyway. The weak link will again be the GPU which is limited to 11 TFLOPS. This is really powerful for today but GPUs are seeing exponential gains much like what we saw with CPUs over the past two decades culminating with the core i7s where gains from one gen to the next started to really slow down.

I think the game changer from WWDC will be native eGPU support. This really puts me at ease after buying the 2016 15". The machine is nearly perfect except for the GPU. This will provide the versatility to use enclosures with AMD cards for those areas where they excel and Nvidia for CUDA now that Nvidia is releasing mac drivers. Supposedly they will be mainstream next year and this for me was the most exciting announcement from the entire keynote.

It seems strange that anyone needing Xeon 8+ cores and 128GB of RAM would want the $5000+ computer to have the monitor built-in and no internal modular components.

Those who need and can afford it will likely be turned off by the form factor and mandatory purchase of a new monitor (ie. Mac Pro buyers), and everyone else will have a hard time justifying the cost.

It's clearly meant for the real professional class that wants a luxury Apple product and MacOS. This is definitely not meant to be a mainstream consumer mac as much as consumers would love the bragging rights. These people are not as price conscious as most of us and even at $5k+ that's nothing compared to the amount of income they will make with such a machine. When the iMac Pro is no longer good enough, they'll simply buy the new model or whatever powerful mac Apple has on sale by then.

The iMac Pro was pretty neat but the price is in sane.