Wow.
(ie, does at run WOW too?)
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…sell more new systems.
I’m not confusing the two; I’m saying that Apple offers sufficiently limited options at purchase(and updates them relatively infrequently) that even people who would prefer to just buy the box and forget about it are inclined to chafe at the inability to make upgrades; because what they want simply isn’t an available configuration.
For non-pro use cases, Apple’s “one size fits most; and our tailors are more competent than average” offer works fairly well. Gamers whine; but everyone else is fairly well covered; and you don’t risk buying some nigh-unusable thing engineered mostly to have the lowest sticker price at Best Buy.
For ‘pro’ cases, one size doesn’t fit most, Apple doesn’t offer that many sizes; and you can no longer take matters into your own hands even if you are willing to do aftermarket upgrades.
As you noted, the cheese grater pros ranged from “basically all CPU, GPU there because there’s nothing to connect a serial terminal to” to “stuffed to the gills with GPUs that Apple never actually offered for sale”.
The new model? Hope you like GPU compute; because all options are GPU heavy; hope you don’t like it too much; because all the GPU options are basically five years old.
On the laptop side, you see similar complaints about RAM: even people who don’t mind buying all the RAM at time of purchase are getting a little restive about the fact that the nicest MacBook Pro you can currently buy tops out at the same 16gb as the ‘early 2011’ pro. The penny pinchers don’t like that it’s soldered down; but there’s nothing about “you can’t even buy more RAM than you could six years ago; but check out the dedicated emoji touchscreen!” that is calculated to make Apples more price-insensitive customers happy.
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While I don’t disagree with most of your post (most users don’t care about upgradability, but pro users do), I’m not sure where you’re getting this from - the iMac Pro is using a platform only announced in January.
As for expandability, it appears that’s the plan for the actual “Mac Pro” update still to come:
In addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest-end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display.
I’m lucky, I could upgrade the RAM in my 27" iMac, and that still seems to be the case for the newer models as well.
Yep:
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Yes - I bought it at huge discount because of only 6 MB RAM. ;D Mea culpa 6 GB RAM.
It does work, but I really need more for PS.
Thanks - that is very helpful. 
As far as I can see the discussion has been about the overall cost of the iMac Pro announced this week, and the wants of consumers of this line of apple products and the pros and cons therein.
Enjoy your Surface Studio. Grats on being totally off topic.
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I started the process of hacking a dual processor card into one when life got in the way. I still have it but I don’t think at this point finishing the hack is worth the work for such an out of date processor and I don’t have the original processor anymore, so I’m going to end up either trying to stick a Mini or MacBook motherboard in there or raspberry pi-ing it. But I’m keeping the case forever.
Most welcome.
If I may, two other things that I use so often that I forget them:
- Extreme ease of typing accents and special characters without remembering alt+numberpad combos
- Being able to print to PDF without any third party stuff and being able to annotate PDFs without third party stuff. W10 may finally have this, but OSX/MacOS (as its now called) has had it forever.
Also if I may point out the tight OS & hardware integration does in fact help with the feeling of responsiveness of the OS. My previous portable was a slower i5 with 4GB RAM and even when I had some very large photoshop processing going on or doing some CPU intensive work in Logic (digital audio workstation software) alt+tabbing over to another application and doing “regular stuff”, the GUI was still smooth even the CPU was pegged at 100%.
This isnt to evangelize, if you are satisfied with the tools you use then I’m not going to be one to tell you do do something else.
the whole point of the touchbar is that it’s not dedicated. Perhaps you’ve just limited yourself to using the kind of soufflé like applications that demand emoji.
However, I was disappointed that apple hasn’t figured out how to incorporate the touchbar into an external keyboard. Perhaps the shear expense, and the problems associated incorporating the “secure enclave” functionality in a meaningful way doomed the project.
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I was expecting to see the touchbar pop up all over the place during this keynote and was surprised it wasn’t in the external keyboards, especially on a pro level desktop ideal for video and audio editing. Also surprised not to see any mention at all about the Mac Mini, which hasn’t been updated in over two years.
From what I remember, technically, this is possible on windows, if you aren’t a programmer. It involves using the International Keyboard, which tended to fuck up source code.
Touchbar may well be addressed in developer sessions but its not really keynote worthy now as its already “yesterdays news”. Mac Mini update certainly wouldnt sound good next to the stuff that was announced this time. It may get a quiet boost sometime later?
So in short, once again Windows punishes you for having the gall to write outside of ASCII?
Very true, they often announce ‘boring’ stuff the week after a big keynote. But I know plenty of developers who use Mac Minis as cheap testing grounds and are desperate for new versions.
They are actually good for small multimedia servers and for the kiddos!!
Don’t take my word for it. Although I have Windows 10 on my iMac, I only use it for a few applications, and haven’t learned all the tricks.
Automation of tasks / UI scripting. Apple even has two different systems, that both are really handy!
Along similar lines: Quartz Composer - Wikipedia Windows doesn’t have stuff like this that’s oriented to non-programmers or those with not much programming ability.
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faster porn and email…for 1%ers. 
exactly, once you shove a bbc (big black computer) into your work space you’ll be the envy of all your shallow peers.
yeah, no joke. i’ve worked on sun workstations, silicone graphics boxes, next boxes, etc. that all cost much more when converting to today’s dollars. in the early 90’s my sgi workstation was around $14k with the maxed out configuration and ram, which if i remember correctly was 256mb. they started at $5k then. computers today are cheap compared to the past once you cost adjust.
Really i’m just glad to see apple pushing out a higher end piece of hardware again. it is a positive sign after so much coasting and some disheartening missteps.
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Re the G4 Cube:
IIRC, it had no fan but was built with a space for a fan, so all you had to do was install it, no hacks necessary. One assumes that if it had sold less poorly, they would have added a fan at some point as faster, hotter CPUs became available.
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Well, to be fair, one of its big selling points at the time was its futuristic silent fanless form; it had space that a fan could fit into, but that space was its ‘chimney’ heat sink. Third party fans weren’t a perfect fit, but did the job of keeping it cool when a faster CPU was swapped in. So yes, technically it had space, but it went against the whole original concept of the thing – I doubt ol’ Steve would’ve been too happy with the idea had they kept the Cube form factor.
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