- The iMac Pro is beautiful. Really. The space grey and black around the screen are both discrete and stylish. I absolutely despise bright colors on my computers and this machine ticked all boxes for me.
- Insanely quiet. A month ago I was working at about 4:00 AM and everything around was absolutely quiet. Then I heard a slight humming noise and I thought this might be the time I actually hear the iMac Pro. But no, it turned out to be my external HDD. To this day, after owning the iMac Pro for ~4.5 months, I haven't heard its fans, not even once.
- It's of course powerful. Haven't seen it glitch or lag once. And the rare cases I did it was definitely a software issue (like the Mac AppStore mysteriously refusing input for some odd 5 seconds sometimes). Anything that can actually use the hardware works fast. I am little worried about the SSD promised performance though; it says it should support 3.3GB/s writing speed but the very best PostgreSQL `pg_restore` performance was 1.6GB/s; I am guessing it's the quad-memory channel that might be the bottleneck, as several reviewers in the past claimed. Overall, everything just works fast.
- The iMac Pro's power highlights how flawed are so many software packages. They simply can't make use of the 10 cores I have, or that much RAM, or the insanely fast SSD. We finally arrived at a point when hardware is more than capable but software is stuck in the past. Having the iMac Pro really did drive this point home for me.
- macOS however leaves something to be desired in terms of stability. One of my external HDDs practically ruins the sleep of the iMac Pro and I often found it shut down in the morning. And one dual-rack box where I keep two old SSDs in RAID 6 configuration is always disconnected after I wake up the computer. It's weird. One time I even had to do safe mode reboot. But hey, this might be hardware vendors not fully complying to specs. Wouldn't be the first time.
---
Overall, I am extremely satisfied with the iMac Pro. But I do wonder if I should be buying a Linux workstation with the 64-core Threadripper in 1-2 years; practically only very specialised software packages can make use of such monstrous hardware.
We the programmers have to start using multicore-friendly technologies like Elixir or Rust's rayon library. We can't slack any longer. Powerful machines which will sit idle because of our crappy technologies and programming languages are coming.