At WWDC, Apple announced Kabe Lake iMacs. The 27 inch 5k Retina Display machine looks like a nice fit for my requirements.
- 4K or 5K display
- Current instruction set
- Current video hardware and OpenCL support for current and coming Apple software.
- USB 3.1/Thunderbolt 3 I/O interfaces
The new machines ship before the High Sierra OS so I’ll hold out until High Sierra is released.
Why wait?
High Sierra is the first OS to use the new APFS file system. APFS is a new large scale copy on write file system similar to ZFS in its goals.
- Support large disks
- Support logical volumes spanning physical volumes
- Support solid state and traditional disks
- Support non-uniform access (SSD caches a traditional disk)
- Support encryption
- Support versioning and backups
- Support error correction and recovery?
Not sure about this last one as Apple does not make it easy to put multiple physical volumes into a machine or to create storage arrays from them.
Apple has developed High Sierra to migrate from HFS+ to APFS in place but I’d like to leave behind all of the legacy stuff from 2002 to today. It took quite a while to de-cruft the OS 9 and Rosetta stuff when Apple left PowerPC behind. I intend to start the new machine clean and create a new backup dataset for it on the storage array.
This also lets the bank account recover from building the storage array.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 