It's a bit odd, but it's the first step toward fixing Apple's pro desktops.

No one was allowed to touch the single iMac Pro that Apple had in its hands-on area following the WWDC keynote today. Big and dark and imposing, the computer is the first step toward making good on Apple's promises to recommit to its desktop users. It's not a new Mac Pro (a computer that's still coming, I've been assured), but it is a more concrete commitment to high-end desktops than the (nice, but straightforward) standard iMac refresh we got Tuesday.

Apple has made some cool tweaks to the iMac to earn it that "pro" moniker, specs aside. The cooling system and the vents have been entirely redesigned. A regular iMac has a single fan plus one vent in back, above the power cord and below where the stand meets the body of the computer. The Pro has two fans inside plus what appears to be a pair of long horizontal vents across the bottom, visible in the photos above. It also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports to the normal USB 3.0 ports, plus a 10 gigabit Ethernet port. The neat black keyboard, mouse, and trackpad (sadly unavailable for purchase separately) are a nice touch, too.

A powerful computer, frozen in amber

But intriguing as it is, the iMac Pro is also an odd machine, one that's unlike pretty much any other computer that exists. It's an ultra high-end workstation that includes anywhere from eight to 18 CPU cores (which almost certainly means that it's using Intel's new X299 platform and its accompanying Skylake-X processors) and a GPU based on an architecture that is expected to be as big a leap forward for AMD as Pascal was for Nvidia. At the same time, it comes in the form of an all-in-one PC, and one that doesn't appear to have any user-accessible parts to boot (the RAM hatch present on regular 27-inch iMacs isn't apparent here, and Apple's spec sheet doesn't mention user-accessible memory).

The end result is a Mac with high-end parts that is nevertheless hermetically sealed, a potentially awkward combination that helped to trip up the 2013 Mac Pro. That system aged poorly in part because components improve at different rates. Desktop CPUs don't improve all that much from year to year these days, but GPUs have gotten quite a bit better in the last four years. True to their name, all-in-ones need to be replaced all at once; it's hard enough to throw out a $1,400 or $2,000 system for want of a better GPU or more memory, and that gets even more difficult when your computer starts at $5,000.

Powerful as the iMac Pro appears to be (and that's assuming the cooling apparatus is good enough to keep it from having major throttling problems), its useful life will probably be shorter than the PC tower Apple compared it to onstage just because you can't swap things out or replace them as they break or become outdated. It's the same basic compromise that we saw in the Mac Pro all over again.

But there are signs that Apple has learned from its mistakes and is determined not to repeat them. With the Mac Pro, Apple designed itself into a corner—none of the sides of its triangle-shaped motherboard could be allowed to get dramatically hotter than the other two sides, so the enclosure was never going to be usable for anything other than a single CPU paired with two mid-end GPUs. That was a model of computing that never really took off, and Apple was left with a hard-to-update design that was impossible to retool.

The iMac Pro enclosure is more conventional—it can handle one of today's fastest, hottest CPUs plus one of today's fastest, hottest GPUs. That has always been the typical approach to building a high-end computer; Intel, AMD, and Nvidia (allergic as Apple seems to be to Nvidia these days) are all going to keep making really powerful individual chips for the foreseeable future, so Apple ought to be able to update the iMac Pro on a regular cadence if it wants. And an iMac Pro that gets updated regularly can at least partially deflect concerns about its hardware getting stale. Even if you need to replace the whole thing more frequently, it's a little more justifiable if you actually have a faster version of the same computer you can upgrade to.

Fixing the public perception problem

Finally, let's talk about the way the iMac Pro was announced. It's odd for Apple to talk about stuff before it's done—the small, private meeting in April where Apple told the press about its intention to refocus on desktops was pretty much unprecedented. The announce-in-June-launch-in-December strategy was also used for the 2013 Mac Pro, so it's not unheard of even if it is unusual.

For the iMac Pro, the "sneak peek" strategy ultimately seems like the right way to go. Apple's main problem when it comes to pro desktops at this point is public perception—complaints about how Apple was handling its pro desktops began in the lead-up to the 2013 Mac Pro's launch, grew louder as that machine sat on Apple's shelves for three years, and reached a fever pitch after the 2016 MacBook Pros were launched with nary a desktop in sight.

Pro desktop users represent just a fraction of a fraction of Apple's business, but they're nevertheless vitally important. They do much of the development that attracts people to Apple's platforms and keeps them there, and they're some of the company's biggest evangelists.

The April meeting got things started by telling those customers that Apple was at least aware of their complaints and working to fix them. Announcing the iMac Pro in June in front of an audience of many of those users buys Apple some time and earns it at least a couple of positive conversations on the Accidental Tech Podcast; actually releasing it in December satisfies some of the pent-up demand for a pro-level system and bridges the gap between now and whenever the new Mac Pro is announced (and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a similar gap between the announcement and release there, either).

I have questions about how successful and popular the iMac Pro will ultimately be, and I personally am turned off by the prospect of a super-expensive system that I can never upgrade. The iMac Pro also further complicates the pro/consumer product grid that Apple used to simplify the Mac lineup after Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late '90s (a grid which is already hopelessly muddled by iPad Pros and old MacBook Airs and Pros and multitudinous system configuration options). But I do think it's a smart way to address some of the people the 2013 Mac Pro was aimed at—people who want a powerful-yet-compact desktop, expandability and upgradeability be damned—while encouraging others that a new Mac Pro will be worth the wait.