Apple announced at WWDC that it will release an iMac Pro later this year, but only revealed the starting price, saying the most affordable one will be $4,999.
The company promised to offer more information about the settings that will push the price higher later this year, and promised to equip the iMac Pro with the best possible hardware on the market.
ZDNet estimated how much the best iMac Pro will cost, and the result is incredible.
First of all, the processor. Although no information was given about the CPU that Apple will use, the company is likely to use an 8-core Intel chip for the entry-level model, with a price tag of $419 per chip. The most expensive iMac Pro model is likely to come with an 18-core Xeon processor and an estimated price of the processor at $2,282, not including Apple's overpricing.
Cupertino typically adds another 75% to the regular price of components, so the processor alone could cost no less than $4,000.
As for RAM, if the base model came with 32GB of RAM, the final price on the expensive model could reach $2,700 if it comes with 128GB of RAM.
Storage now: A teardown by iFixIt found that Apple used a Samsung M.2 flash SSD in the MacBook Pro. Boosting the capacity to 4TB and adding in Cupertino's pricing brings the price tag to a whopping $3,600.
Last but not least, there's the graphics card, which is expected to be the Radeon Pro Vega. While that card isn't available yet, a comparison to NVIDIA's GTX Titan X, coupled with Apple's overpricing, puts the final cost at around $2,000.
This means that a high-spec iMac Pro could cost no more than $17,299.
The iMac Pro will be a direct rival to Microsoft's Surface Studio, an all-in-one PC that was announced in the fall of last year and also comes with a fairly high price tag.
But the Surface Studio is still much more affordable than the maxed out iMac Pro. The top-of-the-line configuration of Microsoft's all-in-one costs $4,199 and comes with an Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of Rapid Hybrid Drive storage, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M graphics card with 4GB.
