Only very partially. First of all, you have to buy it with the screen included. Which is a great screen (using a normal 5k iMac myself) but also limited at 27". As mentioned by others, you cannot connect your laptop to the screen, so I had to get (and store) another screen just for the laptop.

My iMac has a good processor but the graphics card is severely lacking. Not sure how far the one of the iMac Pro goes in comparison to a good mid-range desktop card. In general, I consider the Xeons of not a great value for many usages, especially now with all the new AMD processors.

But the biggest catch is, that most parts of the machine are not updateable. To add to the insult, the machines are glued together, so that you cannot easily reach the parts which are. With the iMac Pro you are limited to Apple-provided SSD storage for example. So certainly the iMac Pro is a nice machine, but not really a replacement for a plain desktop.

It’s a desktop computer. You can add external drives. You can also add external GPUs.

You certainly cannot add an external GPU to my TB2 iMac, and also adding external disks has been a very mixed experience for me. At minimum it is ironic, that Apple designs an ultra-sleek machine only to have you connect a lot of hardware externally to. My iMac still has a full 3.5" HD bay inside, unfortunately, not accessible. It would be an entirely different machine, if you could access the interior and find there like 2 2.5" bays or even some NVMe slots.

We weren’t talking about a new iMac and there hasn’t been any widespread performance issues with using external drives on them.

Also, aren’t you “valuing form over function” by complaining about it ruining the “ultra sleek” aesthetic of the computer? Isn’t that a complaint lobbed at Apple?

I'd actually argue the "non-Pro" iMac fills that space for a lot of people. An 8-core i9 with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM is $3600 (or ~$3200 if you buy it with the stock 8GB of RAM and upgrade it yourself, as that's one of the few Macs you can still easily do that with!), and that's a pretty serious computer. For a web developer and writer like me, it's arguably already overkill.

I think there's still a desire for a "midrange" headless Mac between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro, but that's been something people have wanted for many years -- it's pretty clear Apple doesn't think there's enough of an addressable market there to make it worthwhile. (I also think people underestimate how much power you can actually stuff into the current Mac mini as long as your work doesn't require a serious GPU.)

> An 8-core i9 with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM is $3600

Whaaaat.

That's nowhere close to a reasonable price! Playing around on PCPartPicker [0], I can get a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, 1TB SSD, 64GB of RAM (expandable to 128GB later) and a RTX 2070 Super all for less than $2k. Sure, the monitor is worth something - but 50 percent?

0: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/92GygJ

The same panel in standalone 5k monitor form from LG is $1300, and even the non-name-brand versions are still $1k+. There's still a bit of apple markup, but it's in the same ballpark when you include the monitor.

The monitor, yes, but also the case, the keyboard and mouse, the OS, and the luxury of you not having to build and image the machine. Depending on how you value your time that could be a huge savings.

There are many reasons to prefer the Mac. But in this comparison, you also have to consider that it probably not only has the better CPU (the iMac is overdue for an update with a more current CPU) and the better Graphics card, but the advantage that you can change grapics card and SSD easily any time you feel like doing so.

I do think that the upper range iMac is one of the best value Macs, but it still suffers from being glued together.

Just FYI, that LG panel has never sold in a sub-$1000 display. Dell used to have it for ~ $1500.

I am using a late 2015 5k iMac, as this was the only alternative back then. And if needed, I probably would get another high end non-Pro iMac. I would be much more excited about the iMac, if Apple had not glued the machine and I could access and exchange the HD in it. Also a big problem with all iMacs is, you are stuck with the graphics card you bought it with - and there was not really much choice back then.

Yeah, I'd like to see the iMac -- and the Mac mini, for that matter -- move back to at least somewhat more user-upgradeable. I'm willing to mostly forgive the Everything Glued Down aspect of the laptops (although even there they take that unnecessarily far), but there's not much reason both the RAM and the HD/SSD couldn't be more readily swappable on all the models, at the least. It'd be nice to have the GPU on a daughter card, too, even if it's something weirdly proprietary.

And at that point you're shopping it side by side with a $3799 refurbished iMac Pro

iMac and iMac Pro are at the right price points to fill that space, but I don't think they fill it for everyone. I would love to have a mid-powered desktop computer at home, but also be able to have my choice of monitor setup - dual 4k monitors, or an ultrawide. And I would love to be able to work from home occasionally and plug my laptop into that same monitor at home. Having the ram or video card or hard drive be upgradeable is another nice to have.

The iMac Pro doesn't allow any of those things. There used to be a target display mode which was awesome and solved at least one of those problems, but Apple removed it for technical reasons, and now even though newer display port protocols now exists with enough bandwidth to drive the 5k display from my macbook pro, Apple has made no mention of bringing it back.

Hypothetically Speaking, would an updated Mac Pro Trash Can fit your needs.

I have been wondering why they dont just keep making the Trash Can Mac Pro and call it Mac. Sort of like a Cut down version of Mac Pro and reusing as many component as possible, except swapping the Xeon Processor for an normal Intel Core X or i10.

I mean they invested the whole production lineup for Mac Pro Trash Can, might as well continue doing it.