Have early issues with iMac Pro been overcome?

Question

Level 1

113 points

Have early issues with iMac Pro been overcome?

For several months now I've been pondering whether to upgrade from my 2013 iMac to the new iMac Pro. I do a fair amount of pro-grade photography on my machine and so could benefit from the increased screen resolution and the wider colour gamut. But some negative issues I read about early on put me off the upgrade, and I decided to leave it a while in the hope that the issues would eventually be addressed by Apple and put right.

So, on returning to the matter last week, I went along to my local Apple Store and collared a couple of the Mac techies there to answer a number of questions I'd prepared. Apart from answering the more mundane of them, I unfortunately got very non-commital answers to the more nitty-gritty ones. So, I thought I'd now ask instead in this forum. Maybe some of you who already own an iMac Pro will be able to help? Here goes:

1. Early on in the life of the iMac Pro there were reports, I seem to recall, of overheating issues with the machine. Has this now been addressed and fixed? Was the overheating occurring only on the higher cored models, or did it happen also with the base model?

2. I heard too of issues concerning noisy fans. Was this genuinely a problem and, if so, has Apple now put it right?As someone who is easily annoyed by extraneous noises such as come from internal cooling fans, this is quite important to me. Bear in mind that the previous range of iMac employed only one cooling fan inside, whereas the iMac Pro uses two now, making for potentially twice the level of noise. My current iMac is all but completely silent.

3. Any new current iMac Pro will come with High Sierra on it and the file system will, I'm told by the Apple Store techies, be APFS. I now own a number of Samsung T3 and T5 portable SSDs, so will there be any problems in formatting those to APFS, once I'm in possession of the new machine? I recall that, quite aside from the iMac Pro, there have been (apparently) some issues with certain brands of external SSDs failing to properly format to APFS, if at all, and consequently some users having to format their external drives to the more usual HFS+ instead.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Aug 11, 2018 8:14 AM

Reply

Answer 1

TomWheel

Level 2

426 points

Aug 11, 2018 12:27 PM in response to carefulowner

I have owned a 10-core iMac Pro with 128 GB of ram, 2TB of SSD internal storage and the Vega Pro 64 (16 GB video card) since they were released in mid-December of last year. I agree with the previous posters regarding the fact that I have never had any problems with my machine running hot or with loud fan noise. I use my iMac Pro for heavy duty 4K (and higher resolution) video editing. I have seen my CPU's run at 98--100% for extended periods without any sign of overheating or any increase in the fan noise which remained essentially imperceptible. My iMac Pro has been simply superb for the purpose, video editing, for which I purchased it.

I have (and continue to have) one serious and annoying problem. I have a Promise Technology Pegasus3 R6 raid 5 array attached via Thunderbolt 3 which performs superbly. However,, since the update to 10.13.4 and through 10.13.6 I cannot put my iMac Pro to sleep without it constantly reawakening and spinning up the raid array, which, after a few seconds goes back to sleep and spins up again, and this repeats over and over. I discovered (as have others who have reported this problem on the iMac Pro Forum) that this problem with external thunderbolt raids attached to the iMac Pro and introduced by Apple with the 10.13.4 update can only be resolved by disconnecting the wired ethernet cable and using wireless connectivity. The problem is then resolved. I have reported this issue on the Apple Developer web site and they acknowledge the problem but refuse to fix it until the next major OS revision (Mojave)) is released in September. This has been the situation for at least three months and for Apple to create and leave this situation for their current flagship computer is incomprehensible to me.

Tom

Reply

Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Aug 11, 2018 10:51 AM in response to carefulowner

FWIW, I ordered my 8-core iMac Pro the day they were released last December and all I can say is…

1. Mine has never run warm much less hot and I'm not aware of any inherent issue. Of course any computer under a can run warm to hot under a heavy load.

2. My fans have never kicked in so not sure how loud they may be. Of course if the computer gets hot, better to have a noise than melt components.

3. I only run one external SSD and it's formatted as HFS+ since it's only for Time Machine.

Also, I don't know of any changes made to iMac Pros since their release.

Reply

Answer 3

Helbig

Level 1

4 points

Sep 26, 2018 1:50 AM in response to carefulowner

I bought my iMac Pro at the end of 2017. I always have two macs in use, a desktop version with a big screen, most of all for photo editing (with different cameras up to medium format size) and a laptop when i need to be mobile. So during the last decades i had several Pro machines as well as several laptops. I'm sorry to say, but this imac pro will drive me back to windows systems. I'm completely disssatisfied with this machine.

Since i bought this machine i had a lot of issues. First of all i had to reinstall the system 3 times this year: it regularly happened that after an upgrade of Mac OS High Sierra the system didn't start any longer, so i had to reboot in repair mode and do a reinstall. I bought the machine with a 2TB SSD, because i have about 4 TB of photos i use an external hard drive for storing photos. But it happened several times that the hard disk was full, once it was because time machine decided to make backups on his own and not on my NAS but there were other issues as well. So i decided to make a full, clean new install and now the iMac Pro didn't recognize my time machine backup. Apple support told me that time machine is not intended to be used with a NAS, so there's no chance to get my data back (which was not true, fortunately i managed to get back my data). Now magic mouse always loses connection. And so on and so on, there's a lot more. All this is very time consuming to fix, it remembers me to the old days with windows XP or Win 98 where you had to make clean installs every year to get systems working. I have a lot of experience with different mac's since 2002 and didn't change my way of working with this machines. I spent nearly 7000 Euros and a lot of working hours and that's not the way i want to get for this. And Apple support is really bad with this pro machine, e.g. time machine is intended to be used on a NAS as documented on support pages of their own, support was totally wrong and there's no way to complain, because they don't ask for feedback any longer.

Reply

Answer 4

carefulowner Author

Level 1

113 points

Aug 11, 2018 11:12 AM in response to dialabrain

Thanks for your response, dialabrain. Judging from your own experience then, the rumours I heard early on have not applied to all iMac Pros, and therefore it all looks quite encouraging.

On the matter of formatting external discs, did you not feel it more logical to re-format yours to APFS? Of course, you can format any external disc to any file system, provided it's a compatible one, but for consistency (and possibly efficiency) I would have formatted the external disc to APFS, had I been in your shoes. (Maybe you just didn't want to erase all existing saves on the TM disc?). Currently, I use three - one dedicated to Time Machine, another for mass backup of picture files, and a third used for experimental booting of new versions of macOS as they come along.

Reply

Answer 5

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Aug 11, 2018 11:18 AM in response to carefulowner

Well, first of all Time Machine does not work with APFS drives at this time. Secondly, there is no compelling reason to format external drives to APFS that I can see. I do have one external drive formatted as APFS connected to a 5k iMac running Mojave but I haven't noticed any apparent difference between it and the HFS+ drives. Maybe there's a difference but not one I perceive.

Reply

Answer 6

carefulowner Author

Level 1

113 points

Aug 11, 2018 11:44 AM in response to dialabrain

Well, first of all Time Machine does not work with APFS drives at this time.

By that, I presume you mean in the general case, not just on your setup? If that's currently the case with all setups then I guess that that must be the external drive issue to which I alluded (Issue 3). Okay, I'd be quite happy to leave my existing TM disc and other external ones as HFS+ (macOS extended journaled).

Reply

Answer 7

carefulowner Author

Level 1

113 points

Aug 11, 2018 1:17 PM in response to TomWheel

Well, your first paragraph is reassuring, Tom. As for your Raid array problem, I think I can remember a particular posting of yours about it not so long ago in these forums. I agree that such a bug ought to be fixed promptly by Apple, but it rather looks like you'll have to wait till Mojave is officially released.

Given that you do video editing and presumably are always keen to have your screen as properly colour-calibrated as possible, how did you manage with a fairly widely reported bug in that area, where all independent calibration of the screen was lost and the screen automatically returned to default 50% brightness whenever the machine was shut down or powered down? I gather that many graphics specialists - designers and photographers especially - were pulling their hair out about it, loss of true colour calibration being so disasterous to their work. I heard, some months later, that Apple had apparently acknowledged the slipup and dealt with it as a matter of priority (meaning therefore that major bugs can often be quickly fixed if Apple really put their minds to it). Anyway, I certainly hope that what I later heard was indeed true and that now that particular problem no longer exists, as colour management is of supreme importance to me.

I mentioned at the start of this posting that I'd recently been to my local Apple Store and briefly played with an iMac Pro there, as well questioning the techies on certain aspects. One of the things I noticed about the iMac Pro's Bluetooth mouse was that it's still very slow as regards onscreen speed. And when I looked in the Mouse settings, the speed was already set to maximum! Now that's really disappointing. On my current ordinary iMac I found from the start that the Apple mouse was so slow (like dragging the pointer through treacle) that it affected my productivity. I ended up buying a non-Apple, wired mouse and used that, in the end. A decent speed range resulted and I was in mouse nirvana from thereon. I find it so unfathomable that Apple should constantly get such basic things wrong.

Reply

Answer 8

carefulowner Author

Level 1

113 points

Aug 11, 2018 1:24 PM in response to dialabrain

I'm afraid that's not my experience. I imagine that opinions on it will vary according to past experience and needs. The same can be said of fan noise, as although these things can actually be measured and quantified, at the personal level the perception is highly subjective.

Reply

Answer 9

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Aug 11, 2018 1:40 PM in response to carefulowner

I can move the mouse from one side of the screen to the other virtually instantly. There's nothing to "measure". Whatever was going on in the store, it's not normal for the mouse to be slow on an iMac Pro or any other Mac.

Reply

Answer 10

TomWheel

Level 2

426 points

Aug 11, 2018 1:45 PM in response to carefulowner

I have not found a need to calibrate the 5K screen of my iMac Pro nor have I had any issues with the brightness setting being retained. Color quality and fidelity “right out of the box” have never been anything but great when editing in either Final Cut Pro X or Premiere Pro. Recently I have been making large photographic prints with a recently purchased Epson SureColor P800 printer and my iMac Pro. Allowing the Epson to control color, and comparing the resulting prints to the image on my iMac Pro’s screen they are as close to identical as I have ever seen when comparing an emissive medium to a reflected medium. I was surprised and very pleased to see this especially since I was not expecting it and was prepared to go through calibrating the iMac Pro screen with equipment that I have.

The Apple mouse that came with my iMac Pro is very responsive and as fast as any mouse I have ever used. On very rare occasions I have had the mouse lose its Bluetooth connection, but I was able to reconnect with no problems.

Sitting next to my iMac Pro is a fully maxed out Late 2013 Mac Pro which I have used since I purchased it in December 2013. I have never had a single problem with this Mac Pro, but for computationally intensive tasks, especially those like 3D modeling and animation or Eyp video editing which use the graphics processor, the iMac Pro literally runs circles around the older Mac Pro. I have been very pleased with my iMac Pro.

Tom

Reply

Answer 11

carefulowner Author

Level 1

113 points

Aug 12, 2018 4:15 AM in response to TomWheel

On the matter of the mouse speed onscreen, I think I'll have to re-visit that Apple Store and have another play with the demo iMac Pro. One of the techies with whom I was having discussions was looking over my shoulder when I was exercising the mouse and looking at its setting in System Preferences, and despite the speed on the screen being frustratingly slow and me remarking on it and pointing to the fact that its setting was already on the fastest possible, the techie didn't blink an eyelid. He clearly thought that that was normal or good enough. But I'm afraid that if that is indeed normal then a lot of users/potential users must be disappointed. As I say, this is a subjective matter and what one user has become used to as 'fast' (and incidentally, not just with regard to mice used on Macs but also on machines on alternative platforms) may fall below the requirements of another. We will have to agree to finding different levels of satisfaction in our experiences with this.

As regards screen calibration for colour, it might transpire that the iMac Pro comes out of the factory with a 50% brightness setting that's very close to the accepted norm for photographic colour work. I use 'accepted norm' advisedly; what most photography people aim for is a screen brightness level of 200cd/m2, but personal requirements can range from 100cd/m2 right up to 300cd/m2, depending on the level of lighting in the room in which you're viewing the image. Speaking generally, even if, out of the factory the brightness level was spot-on for requirement, you'd still be left with gamma and colour temperature to deal with, and even though the gamma value is usually a given, the colour temperature most certainly isn't. Some people work with 5000K for photographic work, others work with 6500K.

With Macs, it's all too easy to lose any initial brightness setting you may have had via calibration, particularly because an overriding brightness button has existed on the keyboard (a real pet hate of mine). Of course, it makes sense to retain the factory profile, as well as any additional profiles made since first usage, in Displays in System Preferences. Some of these may have been user-created for driving an external display, with screen characteristics quite different to, in this case, the iMac Pro's. You can at least then get back to where you were if any of those main three settings get changed. But with some users there's always the temptation that a better job can be done by just eye and guesswork, rather than using any calibration hardware/software. Yes, sometimes they can be lucky. But as often as not the printing of the image will be the thing that tells in the end, over a wide range of samples. This is not something that I personally leave to chance, as the inks and papers I use are very expensive and wastage is not part of my vocabulary.

All of that said, though, and I think I might be repeating myself here, I heard rumours some while ago that Apple had conceded there was a genuine problem in loss of calibration data and reversion to 50% brightness whenever the Pro was switched off and that they came up with a fix for it quite quickly. I'm therefore assuming that the issue simply doesn't exist any longer, following a macOS update that presumably ensued.

Reply

Answer 12

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Sep 26, 2018 3:40 AM in response to Helbig

Sorry for your problems but I bought my iMac Pro at the end of December as well and haven't had one problem with it. As far as Time Machine, Apple has said for years the only NAS drives it supports were the Time Capsules. It has nothing to do with the iMac Pro. Users often seem to want to blame something other than a lack of knowledge. I have been using Macs for 33 years, currently own six, and am very happy with my iMac Pro. Hopefully things will work out for you.

Reply

Answer 13

Helbig

Level 1

4 points

Sep 26, 2018 4:30 AM in response to dialabrain

Hello,

Thank You very much for Your Answer,

I'm sorry but it's not true, e.g. please refer to: Backup disks you can use with Time Machine - Apple Support

It's explicitly written: all NAS when attached over SMB and that's what i did and which worked at the end in my case.

I'm happy to assist You with Your knowledge and don't want to blame You.

On the other hand: carefulowner asked for experience with the new imacpro and i wrote about my very bad experience. I think it's not helpful at all and it's not polite (or netiquette) to be insulting, You just know my name , You don't know my profession, my knowledge and so on. So please be careful with judgements about others in the future.

I don't know if You are a professional working for apple, but I'm very astonished to get such a quick and insulting answer.

Reply

Answer 14

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Sep 26, 2018 5:48 AM in response to Helbig

It's explicitly written: all NAS when attached over SMB and that's what i did and which worked at the end in my case.

FWIW, that's not what it says. the word "All" is not used, the word "Many" is.

Many third-party NAS devices support Time Machine over SMB. For details, check the documentation for your NAS device.

And for what it's worth, there have been more than one manufacturer that claimed they are compatible when they weren't.

I have no idea why you felt "insulted". That was never my intention. And no, I don't work for Apple.

Reply

Answer 15

dialabrain

Level 10

138,237 points

Sep 26, 2018 6:35 AM in response to Helbig

You're welcome. FWIW, not all support people are created equal. Just like any other support agents for other companies, Apple support people can make mistakes.

The issue with file storage readings is fairly notorious and are often wrong.

As I said before I'm sorry for your problems and I hope you have a good day.

Reply

Have early issues with iMac Pro been overcome?

Similar questions