That's always remained a fundamental issue. I'm even willing to pay a premium it's just that I'll be forced to buy a new machine down the line.

I'm not sure it's any different *in practice* on the PC side.
Yes, you can throw a couple of bigger DIMMs in your box, and/or incrementally upgrade the CPU or GPU. But as soon as a few years have passed, you'll need a new socket for that new CPU. Maybe you want faster RAM, support for a newer wifi standard, faster ethernet, USB 3 or C ports... any of that necessitates a new motherboard. And you'd better replace that PSU every few years, or it might up and take your shiny new components with it.
Last few times I've upgraded, about all I've been able to keep is the case and the peripherals. And even those are starting to look long in the teeth...

The machine sounds awesome, until you a) see the price... starting at 5000$... with hardware specs that are not even close to what you get with 5000$ invested into PC DIY gear... b) you realize again, this machine will most probably be damn hard to upgrade. And c) you start to ask how hot the components will run in an AiO chassis.

I hope I am wrong on my second and third complaint and Apple for once has NOT made their machine so thin it boggles the mind, instead concentrated on thermals and upgradeability and made the machine thick enough and the hardware exchangeable. Given its a Pro labelled machine, and none of the components in it probably come in a laptop friendly formfactor, nor are easy to cool within a laptop chassis, I guess this will be a monstrous thick iMac (which certainly will put some weird people off... whats it with this craze for ever thinner machines, especially for AiO you NEVER even put into a backpack, is beyond me).

That still leaves the price. The only thing this machine has going for it is looks (and given it will not be a superthin iMac, it might not appeal to the usual remaining Apple crowd amongst the graphics artists), build quality (which arguably you can also have elsewhere nowadays, still Apple usually does not skimp on that), and MacOS.

With only the last one being an Apple exclusive...

Ehhhh... I guess its a weird mixture between two extremes that might ONLY find a moderate fanbase because Apple is dragging their feet with the Mac Pro. Which, given its not another waste bucket of doom, is the only sane options for Apple Fans needing Pro grade power. Because a full sized tower guarantees good thermals, and upgradeability, whereas this AiO needs a lot of engineering marvels to give even a fraction of that.

On the other hand, if you neither need the upgradeability nor the powerful components running at max output (instead of constant throtteling, which still might happen in an AiO even with the fattest panel ever, see dells Workstation AiO), and are too smug on the design of their workstation to accept a tower standing next to their desks, why pay so much and still make compromises on the design aspect when a normal iMac most probably will also do?

I feel, like the dell AiO workstation, this is a weird hybrid that in the end will not satisfy anyone really.

Apple claims that a similar specced machine on the market without a 5k display would cost about $7000. Is this true? And I guess, since @[member='Hodgman'], mentioned it, are those specs really that out of this world, in most people's opinions?

Well, if you buy the pro grade hardware you usually do pay a premium.

But: A similar specced machine costing more than this = bullshit! I have to ever see the Apple computer which is cheaper than a similar specced DIY Workstation. Even a lot of pro grade pre-builts are cheaper than Apples Pro grade Macs, and none of the builders that outfit machines with Xeons, Quadros and Firepros ever sells them cheaply. To be fair, many of those also have better support as part of the deal (don't know about Apple here).

I am sure you CAN find a shady workstation outfitter that charges even more outrageous prices than Apple... which might is what Apple meant with their words here. Still, in general I call bullshit on that.

with the caveat that we don't really know much about the VEGA GPUs... if these are Pro grade cards with optimized drivers that work with pro grade apps, AND the Vega performance is up there with the GTX 1080 Ti, such a Quadro alone costs 5000$... that could be what Apple means. Because as of now, Firepros from AMD hardly are used anymore in the Workstation space, and with the outrageous prices of Quadros, AMD might undercut them considerably with their newer Pro GPUs. Comparing a 2000$ Pro Grade Vega to a 5000$ Quadro might make the 5000$ to 7000$ comparison more believable.

And then there is the question: do you NEED Xeons, ECC RAM and Pro grade GPUs in a world where ECC RAM has dubious advantages outside of the server space, and Pro grade GPUs only really give you advantages in a select few pro applications (while others, like ZBrush, clearly do not take advantage of it) and more VRAM?

In a world where, thanks to renewed competition, Intel HAS to release an 18 core i9 instead of selling it at many times the price as a Xeon? Where you can get a Ryzen Threadripper with 16 cores for outrageously low prices of under 1000$? Where high end gaming GPUs often run circles around pro grade GPUs costing 6x as much?

I mean, if you can afford a 10'000$ machine, actually NEED the speedup in CAD applications the Pro Grade GPUs bring, all the VRAM you can get, and the maximum amount of cores money can buy, there is no way around Xeons and Quadros / Firepros.

It's clear that by now, the usual 3D artist does not need that any longer. Some CAD folks doing insane stuff maybe. A game artist? Give me a break. Sure, if money is no objection, get that 5000$+ machine... at that point thought, you are rather looking at a a 10'000$ machine, because what you get for 5000$ in pro grade hardware is actually fairly weak compared to a decent gaming PC.

If you have a limited budget, get an enthusiast (HEDT seems to be the newterm coined for that) grade platform, one of the new i9 from Intel which hopefully come down in price a lot, or even better a Ryzen Threadripper, get as much cheap and fast DDR4 RAM you can get and don't worry about the missing ECC, get the fastest gaming GPU money can buy and have a machine that most probably will run circles around the 5000$ pro grade workstation when it comes to raw power for about 2000-3000$... sure, a good screen might set you back another 1000$. Still a faster machine overall. Because a 16 or 18 core Xeon will most probably cost you 4000$ alone. So does a Pro grade GPU on par with the best gaming GPUs on the market. That 4000$ spent on a good HEDT/Enthusiast PC and a good Screen will compete with 10'000$ in pro grade hardware when it comes to raw power.

So really, a Mac Pro or this hybrid will never be good value. Because Pro grade hardware never is. Its not its reason d'etre. Pro grade hardware is there to let you squeeze out the last drop of performance from pro grade applications optimized for it, no matter the cost. If you are on a budget, don't bother, unless you have a very specific use case in mind (I am sure there are reasons some people buy small Quadro cards with 384 CUDA cores for prices that would net you a GTX 1070... I am not so sure I understand the reasons, but I am sure they are there :P)

Oh, and about the "out of this world" part.... does this machine come with motherboards capable of housing multiple CPUs? Multi GPU? Probably not... thus clearly inferior to even the waste bucket of doom Mac Pro already when it comes to top end configs.

Then there is the problem that nobody knows yet how powerful Vega will be... on the theoretical TFLOPS side it looks good compared to Nvidias Pascal, but then that architecture is already a year old and will soon be replaced with a newer generation. And given how underwhelming Pascal was for a double node shrink, how little was changed compared to Maxwell architecture wise (which WAS a good architecture for gaming GPUs), and how small the dies for Pascal where (hey, it was a new node, so no point in rocking the boat too much I guess), there is a LOT of knobs Nvidia can turn up to 11 to make Volta completly destroy Vega (and their own Pascal architecture in turn).

But Volta is still a year out, so lets ignore that for now. Expectations for real world performance of Vega (which for AMD GPUs in the last year usually was far worse than Nvidia, with a 5,5 TFLOPS RX480 just about on par with a 3,5 TFLOPS GTX970) vary from that thing being on par with the GTX 1080 Ti (which has similar TFLOPS, about 1 less than the pro grade Vega already anounced, so quite achievable even with the Vega archtecture still not catching up with Pascal in bringing its raw power on the road), to the best Vega chip only being about as powerful as a GTX 1070 (with the Vega demo on the Computex only fueling suspicions that AMD tries to keep quite about it because it might not be all that hot on performance)

Given that the GTX 1070 still is plenty fast, maybe not enough for AAA gaming at 4k or 5k, still more than enough for 3D applications and compute, and the top end Vega being said to have 16 GB of fast HBM VRAM, that still makes it plenty fast, especially if this REALLY is a Pro grade card with pro grade drivers the pro applications optimize for (which has to be seen. Is it a Firepro card?)

Really? I never realized that upgrades were on the rare side for PCs. I've never built one and I've been a Mac user for about 10 years now. Plus I've only recently seriously returned to CG/game dev, even as a hobbyist, so it's only recently that I've been giving this stuff serious thought.

I really like Apple. I like most of the non desktop hardware. The desktops have been sort of iffy for me though specifically for the reasons we've been discussing. I've used an iMac before, and they're nice, just not the best for graphics/game dev, but they get the job done, however. And these things are super expensive, so it's tough to really justify putting money into a machine this expensive.

Has Apple ever had upgradeable hardware? As I've recalled, I remember that my first Macbook Pro had an easy access RAM slot, so swapping out RAM was easy, even though I never did it.

I guess the main cost is that Xeon processor onboard, and that we are sort of divided on if Apple is telling the truth on similar specced hardware costing more than $5000. At the minimum, it really depends on what hardware one uses.

Interesting stuff for sure.

Well, as far as I remember the Mac Pros always had good upgradeability thanks to the full tower format, only limited by nonstandart internal compartmentalization with some designs, and Apples (in-)famous certification of hardware... which guarantees compatibility, but also limits options and ensures only slightly older hardware can officially be used. Not that the certification really mattered that much, all Mac Pros have been built with standart ATX components besides the Motherboard, so you should be fine putting ANY compatible CPU or GPU into the Sockets yourself, and RAM compatibility is not more of a pain than any PC really. Don't know about the warranty though. And of course you have to rely on non-official drivers for MacOS when putting a GTX 1080 Ti into your Mac Pro.

Of course that somewhat changed with the waste bucket design.

Other than that, no, iMacs never have been GREAT at upgrades. People have argued that even PC users do not upgrade just as much as they claim, usually building a whole new machine as if the CPU goes, the whole mainboard has to be changed... and if you wait long enough, the RAM also has to go, and by that time you might also want to exchange the GPU for newer model.

I would answer to that even keeping a good PSU and Casing can save you 300-500$... and with Mac casings usually being pretty premium, and often (not always *cough*waste bucket*cough*) very good designs, you might want to keep your old case and just exchange the internals.

Now, that of course never is possible with an AiO.... which is why they are usually bad value, unless you have a very strict upgrade cycle. Now even the screen is fixed to the same upgrade cycle as the rest of the hardware. That is not going to please a lot of graphics designers that are used to their 2000$ eizo.

The Xeon indeed most probably is the most expensive part in the higher configs of this machine.... not in the 5000$ config though if they are using quad or hexa core xeons. Their prices usually are not much higher than the HEDT i9 (i7 till now... silly Intel, an i9 branding would have made sense from the start).... so expect them to cost <1000$.

That VEGA GPU, if it really is a Firepro model with pro grade drivers, most probably will eat up at least 2000$. Pro grade GPUs that are not weedy little 500 core models cost a hefty premium. Top end Quadros usually go for 6000$... AMD never got this insane with their Firepro prices, but then they never had a matching Firepro since at least 4 years.

Expect that 5k screen to also cost a hefty premium. Apple screens usually are good.... not 2000$ Eizo good, but it seems even SOME graphic designers and photographers do even use them for work (with other loudly complaining about these screens... well, Apple could make some bucks releasing an iMac with an Eizo calibrated and Branded screen for sure). And 5k is currently at the cutting edge of available resolutions, AND like 2k screens not a resolution mass produced for TVs anyway (which is why 2k screens never got cheap as fast as 4k screens now)... these displays will increase the price of the screen.

I think in the end, Apple COULD have a point that a similarly specced PC currently available COULD cost 2000$ more (if said machine had the same Xeon CPU, but had to swap the GPU for a Nvidia Quadro as Vega Firepros most probably are not available for other system builders right now).

The question is if that comparison even makes sense when a similarly specced machine clearly has not access to the same components at the moment, and neither machine will be a good deal to begin with because Pro hardware never is.

Trying to sell still overpriced pro hardware on the merit of its comparatively low price is a bad joke, if you ask me. But then, as said, I am not one of the few professionals who have the very specific use case that can only be served with pro grade hardware, so what do I know....

Backlight in the monitor goes? Graphics card dies...

The bonus of paying top dollar for premium parts is that they just don't die very often. And Apple always replaces them when they do - if you are dropping $5k, shell out the extra for the 3 year warranty.

That kind of misses the point of the disadvantage of an all-in-one lack of modularity. I've only ever had two monitors die on me so far after decades of computer use. The old 14" CRT I had with my first computer popped and wouldn't turn on anymore after a decade or so of use, and then a Dell LCD screen (Which took a tumble when someone tripped and knocked into it.)

In both cases it was easy enough to swap things out with other hardware on hand or otherwise ignore the loss and continue using the rest of the computer without any real negative impact. Having Apple be happy to fix a dead backlight or cracked screen (Something I've seen in several iMacs over the years) is all well and good, but it still means the entire computer goes out the door and can't be used.

I would still prefer if Apple was offering a hardware lineup that meant that I could pull an old monitor out of the closet, or just continue on with one less screen for a few days, while they fixed the problem.

Why shell out top dollar for a system that is inflexible and hard to work around individual issues when you could shell out top dollar for parts in a modular system that have the same low odds of failure?

You describe every Windows laptop and Android tablet ever made too. Doesn't seem to stop people buying millions of those. And it isn't like the all in one form factor is an Apple only thing. Quite a few Windows machines do the same thing as an iMac. Besides iMacs do support external monitors, hard drives and other peripherals. Unless the motherboard goes out it isn't like a failed component on an iMac reduces it to doorstop status until it can be fixed by Apple.

We have a Mac mini at work that has been on non stop for the past four years and still seems to be as snappy as when it was new. We regularly update it too, currently runs Sierra so that it can use Xcode 8 for builds. Failure rate on our Windows hardware has been far, far greater.

I've become partial to Apple because a Macbook has been my primary work computer for many years now. But $5k for a base workstation is a bit on the extreme side.