I would definitely look at a Mac Pro for software development (every minute counts) and if you're in that group there is simply no need for more storage or decent graphics.
That's silly to be honest. I am a developer myself and I can tell you Mac Pro or iMac Pro is a waste of money in every way imaginable.
Look up barefeats benchmarks. Unless you have very specialised needs (like video editing) there is visible penalty when you increase the number of your cores. For every day usage 6-8 cores is what you should be aiming at, and preferably with highest clock speed possible.
The more cores you have, the lower clocks get and the harder it is to sync cache between them. If your software cannot really use that much parallelisation it will be slower, not faster.
For 99,99% devs spending cash on iMac Pro over iMac with i9 is waste of money and probably degraded performance. Mac Pro is even worse as you need to buy external monitor too.
My compile times being shorter by seconds isn't important. Having lots of cores and memory is. There are many types of software to develop and mine is best developed and tested on a bevy of VMs or containers.
That said, I could still avoid the Apple tax with a Precision or something from System76. My my employer tends toward Apple on the desktop and Dell in the datacenter, but $dayjob will more likely refresh with a MBP than one of these behemoths.
I build my own whitebox systems at home mostly, and AMD's been good to me on price/performance. I have a few Macs. Wouldn't mind a Talos II from Raptor Engineering or one of these newest Mac Pro machines if I could justify the cost.
There are edge cases for sure, never said there aren't any. If you need to run several VMs, each with a few cores and few gigs of memory, and all of those under heavy load at the same time, then apple "Pro" machine might be just what you need.
What you say is true, but apple has generally been better at selecting processors from intel that aren't just re-bagged low clock xeons. It wouldn't surprise me if this thing is 5Ghz turbo on a couple cores. There was that 28core 5ghz beast intel was talking about (definitely not 300W though) and a few rumored W3175X, follow on.
All of the Xeons in Mac Pro say 4.4Ghz turbo from what I saw at apple.com.
So the 2019 iMac i9 @ 5Ghz on 4 cores will beat the crap out of them for software development purposes, and from the benchmarks so far it seems there is very little (or none at all) throttling on new iMacs.
I disagree. Having more cores is becoming more and more relevant to software engineers these days. The power wall is forcing application scaling to happen through core count, so a lot of the software development in the world is focused on that. Having a beefy multicore machine is becoming more and more relevant to devs.
"100%" CPU utilization means very little with modern Intel CPUs and TurboBoost. Intel CPUs have the headroom to clock much faster than base clocks but often can't sustain due to thermal constraints.
Using a desktop processor with more thermal headroom (with adequate cooling) would presumably be much better bang for your buck than increasing core counts in an already thermally-challenged laptop.
meh, i'm just starting to fool around with music editing and my 250 GB laptop is out of storage. Also, it's a three year old laptop and that's what it came with. They could have kept the stainless steel and given me a bigger drive.
Who exactly is the intended user for this ultra-expensive, non-portable, box if it's too lame for hobbyists?
This is just apple sticking a vacuum into their customers pockets, applying the same over-pricing policy that is now standard on their phones.
I would definitely look at a Mac Pro for software development (every minute counts) and if you're in that group there is simply no need for more storage or decent graphics.