Apple’s goal with professional hardware has always been to inspire creatives and developers to produce new things. That’s not an altruistic objective; the more creative things get made on Macs, the more other creatives and developers are drawn to the platform, and the more Macs are sold. To that end, the iMac Pro is available to order today, so we spoke with Apple and several third-party developers who were introduced to us by Apple. We learned more about the iMac Pro and how people expect to use it to improve performance or add new features to their applications.

Externally, the new iMac Pro is indistinguishable from the existing iMac, apart from its darker color. But inside, it is a much more powerful machine, with CPU options up to 18 cores and up to 128GB of RAM.

It’s still not upgradeable in any significant way, apart from external GPUs. And of course, it starts at $5,000. Still, Apple has made a compelling case for the device by allowing the use cases to speak for themselves. We’ll go over the specifics about the machine and then explore some of the use cases we saw.