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

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18 replies

Oct 24, 2018 11:37 PM in response to TomWheel

TomWheel wrote:

...

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

Tom, did you already update to Mojave? And did this fix the problem?

I face the same problems with a QNAP TVS-1282T3 which I connect via TB3 to the iMac Pro.

dialabrain

Level 10

138,249 points

Aug 11, 2018 1:14 PM in response to carefulowner

I have no problem with mouse speed. It's as fast as any computer I've owned or used.

Helbig

Level 1

4 points

Sep 26, 2018 6:27 AM in response to dialabrain

Hello again,

Thank You for Your answer.

I'm not a native speaker, in the german translation they write "NAS when attached by SMB" not "many" and not "all" and You can also see that the post dates from August 14th this year.

What i want to express: when the first update of Mac OS High Sierra arrived for my brand new imac pro, i had the first issue, that means that i could not start after installing. When i called apple support they could help me. At the second time apple support asked me to make a clean install but when it came to choose the file system and there was APFS i was asked to wait because he had to ask his supervisor, he was not familiar with that. Unfortunately line broke, and so i made reinstall as i was told at the first time.

When making a clean reinstall i had the issue with that time machine backup, and again it was surprising. First of all when i called one week ago, there was a clear statement that time machine backup is not possible with a NAS and got the answer it is not possible under no circumstances, which is wrong. Secondly: i had the NAS mounted on my desktop and i was asked to double tap on it. Nothing happened and i was told: You see, you made a false backup and all Your data since 2002 are lost now. I'm not an IT professional, but it seems reasonable for me that a file or a composite file of more than 4 TB will not open in a few seconds, and that was it. When i returned to my desktop i had the time machine backup on my hand and could make a restore. I used time machine restore two weeks before with my itunes library and had no problem, either.

I had very good help from apple support when i had issues with my macs, iphones, ipads and so on but my experience with support on an imacpro is terrible. Can You imagine what it means when someone tells You all Your data within last 16 years are gone because ***** Yes, You can.

And so on, another issue. I'm wondering about disk space consumption on the SSD so i made a file system check and there were a lot of errors i could not understand, again apple support told me it's an error which will be fixed with an upgrade, but that does not happen. At the end i had 1TB of disk space occupied but only 250 GB in my personal folder. After clean install last week i now have 1,65 TB free disk space out of two, that means only 350 GB occupied, which equals to my laptop. And there were no lost fragments of time machine backup, as it was the case at the first time i had an issue with disk space.

And i can tell You a lot more ...

[Edited by Host]

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Have early issues with iMac Pro been overcome?