AMD releases ‘Radeon Pro 500’ Series graphics for iMac

Radeon Pro 500 series graphics harness up to 5.5 TFLOPS of performance, unleashing the creativity of artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, visualizers and engineers, and aspiring creative types across high-resolution canvases in the most popular creative applications, powering through the most demanding games, and bringing fantastic worlds to life in VR. There are no new ports or features, although pricing is changing a bit – the starting price for the 13-inch non-touch bar model is now $1,299.

At any rate, plan ahead – the new Mac Pro design isn’t expected until 2018 or perhaps 2019, while the iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December of this year. Apple is working on a major MacBook Pro redesign for next year or even in 2019 though, and a massive leak from supposed Foxconn employees may have revealed the first known details.

Outside of graphics, Apple is also refreshing the screen on the iMac, making it 43% brighter than the previous generation. This shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise given Apple’s other recent products, but nevertheless it means users are stuck with however much RAM they purchase from Apple.

Apple is calling it the most powerful Mac it’s ever made, and you’ll need to pay for the privilege of using it – prices start at $4,999, with no release date yet announced.

The iMac Pro comes out with the same design as the 27 inched iMac. Talking about the graphics cards that will be powering the upcoming iMac Pros we have the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 and Vega 56 GPUs. Now there are Kaby Lake processors from Intel, better AMD Radeon Pro graphics, faster solid state storage but oddly enough, you still can’t go higher than 16GB of system memory. SSD storage options are now up to 50% faster.

One minor yet significant update is also the signature Apple keyboard which now comes with a number pad (!) for the Excel junkies. The Radeon Pro 500 Series graphics deliver the “optimal combination of high performance and cool + quiet operation” says AMD.

New 2017 iMac Pro accessories come in space gray. New iMacs will be upgradeable to 64GB of RAM on 27-inch configurations and 32GB RAM on the 21.5-inch models. Apple has also updated MacBook and MacBook Pro with faster processors, added faster SSDs to MacBook and introduced a new US$1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro. There were also additional Thunderbolt 3 ports and a processor improvement: The newest iMacs will run Kaby Lake. However, you can now attach two 5K displays, rather than two 4096×2160 panels on the old iMac.

“The 21.5” model starts at €1,349, while the 4K version starts at €1,749.