Apple iMacs are getting a worthwhile refresh with brighter screens and bumped specifications across the board including faster processors and graphics. Both the 21.5‑inch iMac and the 27‑inch 5K model are getting Intel Kaby Lake 7th-gen CPUs that bring support for HEVC video encoding, one of the highlight features of the upcoming High Sierra macOS update.
The all-in-ones can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM, Fusion drives are now standard (hybrid HDD/SSD solution) and faster SSDs are offered with up to 2TB capacity. Two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports have been added to the back of the machines.
The 21.5‑inch iMac is getting faster Iris Plus 640 integrated graphics via the Kaby Lake upgrade, with a new option for discrete Radeon Pro 500 series graphics. Meanwhile, the 27-inch iMac gets upgraded to Radeon Pro 570/575/580 graphics, which are being touted as ideal for VR content creation. macOS Sierra is getting support for Valve VR and Unreal Engine's VR Editor. A neat Star Wars VR demo was shown running on the iMac at 60+ fps.
Availability on the new iMacs is immediate, at $1,099, $1,299 and $1,799 for the 21.5-inch model, 4K 21.5-inch, and 27‑inch 5K base models, respectively.
During the WWDC announcement it was briefly mentioned that MacBooks were also getting updated to Kaby Lake processors. This includes the 12" MacBook, and 13" and 15" MacBook Pros.
The upgrade should come with a marginal increase in performance and battery life, however Apple didn't care to elaborate acknowledging the change is a small one, not to mention they didn't address other complaints about the latest MacBook Pros not getting enough RAM expansion or their lack of ports. The only other change mentioned is a reduction in price for the base 13" MacBook Pro with no Touch Bar which is down to $1,299.
Apple also unveiled a new iMac Pro model coming this December, which undoubtedly was the most exciting hardware announcement made today. Using the same all-in-one design, Apple called it the "most powerful Mac" they've ever built.
Set to take over the void left by the Mac Pro (trash can workstation), the iMac Pro will come in Apple's space gray, run a 5K display, and thanks to a reworked cooling solution, it will be able to house 8-core, 10-core and up to 18-core Xeon processors on the most expensive configurations. Discrete graphics are powered by AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega with up to 16GB of VRAM, offering 11 and 22 TeraFLOPS of single and half precision performance, the later which is often used for machine learning.
Other top-end configuration specs include up to 128GB of ECC memory, up to 4TB SSD, four Thunderbolt ports, 10GbE networking. The base configuration is set for release this December starting at $5,000 (for specs that Apple claims would cost around $7,000 if you were to buy a similar workstation PC at present time).
https://www.techspot.com/news/69579-apple-mac-hardware-update-imac-goes-vr-macbooks.html
