Linked: “The Mac Pro Lives”

via Daring Fireball: Great piece but this part ultimately is what I wanted to reference and shed light on which is a quote from Craig Federighi:

That is a pretty incredible evolution that we’ve seen over the last decade. The original iMac, you never would’ve thought as remotely touching pro uses. And now you look at today’s 5K iMac, top configs, it’s incredibly powerful, and a huge fraction of what would’ve traditionally — whether it’s audio editing, video editing, graphics, arts and so forth — that would’ve previously absolutely required the Mac Pros of old, are being well-addressed by iMac. But there’s still even further we can take iMac as a high performance, pro system, and we think that form factor can address even more of the pro market. 

My first iMac, a 233Mhz G3 w/ a 12” CRT Display and 64 megabytes of RAM along with a very weak graphics card is how I learned Photoshop. It was a terrible machine. Waiting 30 seconds to apply a blur to a 4 megapixel photo. Later, I worked exclusively on a 1Ghz Dual-G4 PowerMac and in OS X with Multiple CPU support, it crushed the iMac by a factor of 10. Over the years, I owned many PowerMac & PowerBook products and didn’t go back to the iMac until the redesign in 2012 when a Core i7 was available with the Fusion Drive. It was the first time there was a Mac Desktop that I could afford and was faster than my MacBook Pro.

Back in the day, if you wanted an Apple machine faster than the MBP, you had to go Mac Pro and spend 3-8 thousand dollars. Suddenly, a $2500 iMac was superior to the MacBook Pro with a larger screen and it was actually affordable (not compared to most PCs but to Mac users it was). 

Today, I have a Quad-Core 4Ghz Core i7 iMac with a 5K display, 32GBs of RAM and 4GBs of VRAM and Final Cut Pro editing 4K video or Adobe Lightroom (R.I.P. Aperture) editing my Canon 5D Mark III RAW files is again, much faster than today’s top of the line MacBook Pro and it’s actually pretty close in speed to the Mac Pro Apple sells for twice the $$$$.

In short, this comment really resonated with me. I don’t consider myself a pro but a few hours a day, I do professional work as a hobby (not making any money) and during those times, the iMac is my computer of choice not because it’s better than the Mac Pro but it’s half the cost and about 90% as fast which is remarkable to me but I’ll take it. 

I’m not in the market for Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro but I might be for an iMac Pro if I can afford it. $3,000 for a more powerful GPU and 6 or even 8 cores with more than 32GB of RAM and I may have to pull the trigger on that. Good thing I’m not in the market for a new iMac for at least 12-18 months.

PS: I transcode / encode a ton of 4K video now and one area that is falling short is the lack of support for Apple’s GPUs by independent software makers. Transcoding a 4K video in MKV container takes a ton of time at an average of 25FPS in Handbrake. A 1080P MKV to MP4 (h.264) averages 50-75 fps. The GPU just sits there un-used while the CPU does all of the work. Doing a similar operation on the PC is much faster just by booting my iMac into Windows. I don’t know who is to blame here but I have an ultra-fast high VRAM GPU in the iMac that sits unused except for in Final Cut Pro or Lightroom.