This week on The CultCast: Shakeup at Apple! In a surprising turn of events, Jony Ive takes back the reigns of the Apple design team. We discuss what this means for Apple. Plus: The new iMac Pro is out, and the reviews are coming in. We’ll tell you what’s new about this beastly machine with a monster price tag. And we wrap with what Apple got right 2017, and what the company needs to do better in 2018! It’s been a wild year.

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Episode

CultCast #314 – Shakeup! Jony Ive takes back the design team
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This week’s stories

Jony Ive is once again leading Apple’s design team

• Jony Ive is reportedly returning to hands-on design duties at Apple, two years after being promoted to the role of chief design officer.
• According to an Apple spokesperson, “With the completion of Apple Park, Apple’s design leaders and teams are again reporting directly to Jony Ive, who remains focused purely on design.”
• Why Ive would be returning to his old role isn’t immediately clear — nor what this means for Alan Dye and Richard Howarth, the pair that split Ive’s duties. Ironically, at the time that Ive was given his new job in 2015, some pundits suggested it meant he was on his way out of Apple, and this was a way of carrying out the transition. Now that he is “demoted” to his old position, no doubt many people will take it as signaling much the same thing.

Apple’s insane earning power

Apple’s ridiculously powerful iMac Pro is coming this week

• By the time you hear this, the iMac Pro will be ready for to come n git
• Comes wtih an
• 8, 10, or 18 core Intel Xeon Chip
• 32, 64, or 128 GB of DDR4
• A new thermal design means the iMac Pro runs 80 percent cooler than a regular iMac
• Four Thunderbolt 3 ports for powering two 5K displays or four 4K displays at once, a 10-gigabit Ethernet port, four USB-A 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. That makes it Apple’s most port-friendly Mac in years.
• Hermetically sealed. Not upgradeable in any way, not even RAM.

iMac Pro impresses in first hands-on reviews

• A few lucky tech reviewers have already gotten their hands on the slick new iMac Pro with
  • 10-core 3GHZ Intel Xeon chip
  • 128GB DDR4 RAM
  • AMD Vega Pro with 64GB of RAM
• Black Magic Speed Disk test: 3000 MB/s read/write SSD speeds….
• Photographer Vincent Laforet got to incorporate the iMac Pro into his workflow for a few days and says
• “I’ve seldom seen a jump this dramatic before on any new generation of Macs – 20%-30% speed increases are the norm … NOT 200%-300% increases.
• Marques Brownlee has been using the machine for a week and did a quick overview video of it. His reaction was more tempered but you could tell he was impressed with it’s FCP performance, especially since he films raw 8K and previews his cuts with color grading applied.
• Makes the argument that for the price it’s a good value since you’re getting cutting-edge components that purchased separately would cost about the same price of the machine.

How Apple got it right 2017, and what they need to do better in 2018 (discussion)