The Apple iMac Pro will come to India, but at a price of Rs 4,15,000, who’s going to buy it?

Professionals who need to a Mac have, for the last few years, been forced to work under the **limitations of Apple’s crippled and namesake ‘pro’ ecosystem**. [caption id=“attachment_4260383” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The 2017 iMac pro. Image: Apple[/caption] A professional who needs a Mac generally needs a powerful and versatile Mac, one that’s not constrained by either thermal limitations or connectivity. Since the launch of the trash can Mac Pro in 2013, Apple die-hards have had nothing but pseudo-pro devices to work with. What’s a video editor who uses Final Cut Pro to do with an iPad Pro, an underpowered MacBook Pro or even a quad-core iMac? What about the game developer who needs high-end GPUs to work with VR? What about that graphics designer or researcher who needs oodles of horsepower to render that 3D scene? What about that developer who needs multiple VMs to check his code? These professionals haven’t had a viable, professional Mac for three years. All that changed yesterday when Apple finally released the 2017 iMac Pro. The new iMac Pro offers almost exactly what most pros need. Up to 18 cores for all the possible processing power you could ask for, up to 128 GB of RAM, up to 4 TB of super-fast SSD storage, a choice of two powerful graphics cards, 10 Gbps Ethernet. four Thunderbolt 3-rated USB-C ports and a 27-inch, 5K P3 display. Oh, and it’s available in space grey with accessories to match. For real pros, this is salvation. That’s the only good news, though. At $4,999, the iMac Pro isn’t cheap, but it’s definitely worth the money when compared to similarly specced Windows offerings. Also, a fully specced out variant can set you back by over $13,300. The bad news for us, however, is that pricing for the base model iMac Pro will start at Rs 4,15,000. That’s a whopping Rs 95,000 over US pricing, a premium of 29 percent. For the price difference, you can pick up a 256 GB iPhone X and still have some change left over for an Apple Watch. The base model unit offers a Xeon-W processor clocked at 3.2 GHz, 32 GB of 2,666 MHz ECC RAM, 1 TB of storage and a Radeon Pro Vega 56 GPU with 8 GB of HBM2 memory. The in-built, 27-inch, 5K, P3 display is standard across the variants. Apple is yet to confirm a launch date for the product in India.