Report: Apple To Unveil New Macs At An October 27th Event In Cupertino (recode.net)

According to Recode's sources, Apple's updated Macs will be unveiled at an event in Cupertino on October 27th. Recode reports: The move had been long expected, given that the company released MacOS Sierra last month but had yet to introduce any new computer models sporting the software. It also comes just in time for Apple to have the new products on sale for the full holiday season. Apple has gone a long time without making significant changes to any of its Mac models, with most experts encouraging customers to hold off all but essential new purchases until the lineup was updated. Tops among the rumors have been reports that Apple will introduce a new MacBook Pro sporting a row of customizable touchscreen keys. The Mac event is expected to take place at or near Apple's Cupertino campus rather than in San Francisco, where the company held many recent events, including the iPhone 7 announcement.

Comments

Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[sandbagger]

With PCI slots room for multiple video cards and several hard drive bays. You know, a proper workstation.

Re:Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[sandbagger]

I guess you don't do video.

Re:Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[kuzb]

In my experience their quest to make things sleeker means devices are inherently less upgradable, much harder to repair, and far more prone to failure. Ram is often soldered to the board, and in some systems (yes imac, i'm looking at you) you have to do retarded shit (like pull the glass out of the unit) just to replace a drive. Not to mention they go out of their way to use torx screws for everything just for the added /facepalm. Top to bottom, these things are engineered to be more frustrating than they need to be.

While 6 months is a bit of an exaggeration, what isn't is the fact that apple stuff is purposefully engineers their technology to be prone to failure. There are tons of cases of ventilation issues with macs because airflow doesn't seem as important to them as the look of the machine. They'd rather throttle your already anorexic CPU than provide you with appropriate cooling. I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff. Sure a regular boxy pc may not be as attractive, but it'll be a lot cheaper, perform better, be infinitely more upgradable, and can be modified to suit your personal demands. With Apple, you'll pay out the ass for whatever they give you - and fuck you if you don't like it.

Re:Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[amiga3D]

You know, just a little research tells me that Apple had over 25 billion dollars in revenue just from Macs in 2015. That's a nice chunk of change considering over 30 percent of that is profit. HP has to sell more than 7 windows machines to equal what one Mac brings to Apple. Why in hell do you think Apple would turn away from that? Particularly since they put so much work into making them work together so seamlessly.

Re: Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your beef with torx screws? They don't strip out like Phillips. They've been around for decades. Spend $10 and get a set of bits and call it a day.

You complain about hex bits from Ikea too?

Re:Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[Kjella]

I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff. Sure a regular boxy pc may not be as attractive, but it'll be a lot cheaper, perform better, be infinitely more upgradable, and can be modified to suit your personal demands.

Well you can take it out as same performance for less money or more performance for same money, I think for most it has "enough" though so it's really attractiveness vs price. As for upgrading most people are quite happy with laptops (stats from Norway age 16-65 says 30% use desktops, 80% laptops), I don't think they even consider it the same way I've never considered replacing the engine or gearbox on my car. It's not like any part will be outdated in two years anymore and if my needs radically change I'll sell it and buy a different car.

Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake it's not like CPUs are revolutionary improving. Graphics did a huge leap recently because they skipped the 20nm node but I'm pretty sure a GTX 1080 will be a pretty damn decent card five years from now. RAM, SSD/HDD, connectors like USB are quite stable too. It might not be the most economically efficient since I'd buy extra early for it to last, but I could certainly build a PC today I could weld shut and not open for 5-10 years barring hardware failure and not really miss anything. Which means it's again price aka money and so is service/replacement costs.

Basically if you have the money there aren't really that many other downsides. Much like despite what /. says the average consumer doesn't mind a non-replaceable battery.

Re:Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[ShanghaiBill]

I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff.

Here's the reason: People buy Apple computers because they run Mac OS X.

Re: Including a Mac Pro tower, right?

[Yvan256]

Correction: swapping RAM was pretty easy. The latest Mac minis have on-board RAM and cannot be upgraded, ever. So if you do any serious work with your computer, you absolutely have to pay for the overpriced RAM upgrade directly from Apple when you buy the computer. You can no longer offset the cost of the computer on a few years by doing upgrades by yourself.

Also, the presentation slide from 2014 said "SSD" as if all the minis now had that feature, but only the top model does. Totally misleading advertisting.

So yes, I'm looking forward to see if the Mac mini will finally be "updated" next week but I'm really not holding my breath. Like a lot of people, I may need to go with the hackintosh option.

Logged in to post, no AC

[felixrising]

About Fucking Time. Typed from my new Dell XPS 15.

Re:One rumour is the death of Magsafe.

[seoras]

That would not be good. I've tripped over my power cable far too many times and been grateful for having Magsafe.
I had hoped Apple would find a way of continuing MagSafe with USB-C even though they didn't with the MacBook.
Feels like a big step backwards.

I've come to dread these events...

[Ecuador]

I've tried using MacBooks, but they always had issues for me, so I go with (not necessarily new) Thinkpads for the road, but I mostly use my desktops anyway, and that's where I have a Mac Pro and a Mac Mini, which are pretty solid machines. Granted, the Mac Pro was too expensive, if my job did not pay for it I had calculated that I would have built it for less than half the price, but if you're not on a budget it is a good machine.
So, whenever there was new hardware introduced, specifically Mac Pro and Mac Mini I followed it, and if there was a good feature / speed increased introduced I would perhaps go for it (happened once with the Pro, twice with the Mini). But in 2013, it happened. They took their only "classic" workstation with multiple drive bays (I have 2 ssds and 3 hds right now), dual CPUs, PCI slots etc and "transformed" it into a cool looking yet useless to me cylinder.
Then with the Mac Mini, first they took away the option of getting any graphics other than Intel, then in 2014 they soldered the RAM and took away the option for a quad core!!!
So I dread the new announcements, perhaps a new Mac Mini single core. Or with an iPhone cpu... And a Mac Pro that is a cool black sphere... but you can't open it at all for stuff like adding RAM etc.

Re:I've come to dread these events...

[tlhIngan]

There's always the XPS 13 developer edition

Which is far from a completed product.

The first time we got it, suspend didn't work. You could suspend it, and resuming worked 50% of the time. The other 50% you had issues. A software update later fixed this.

Then there's boot time. Most PCs with 14.04 pretty much get you to the login prompt within seconds. It took a couple of minutes, despite it having a super fast SSD and a fast processor. Again, software update fixed this later.

The next time, the screen is high res. Linux and high res support is iffy, at best. It works, but if you plug in an external monitor, it too would be runing in high-res mode. It takes a bit of voodoo to get independent display scaling to work.

The next one was a software update. Which broke wifi, bluetooth and audio. Turns out Canonical turned on driver signing which broke all those drivers. Yeah, it's an easy fix (turn off secure boot), but still.

Yes, it's great, but damn are there serious usability issues.

We bought these things so we had reasonably powerful Linux certified laptops for developers to use so we internally didn't have to try the hit or miss process with regular Windows laptops.

In the end, we gave up and switched to Lenovo, whose machines seem to run Linux the best and have had fewer issues with breakage.

Software not Hardware

[Roger W Moore]

I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff.

I buy it because I need a Unix-based OS which just works. As a grad student and postdoc I used Linux for everything but as a faculty member I no longer have time to poke around getting it to work properly on the desktop plus I need access to commercial programs for various things (again partly as a result of not having the time to make OpenSource packages do what I need).

That being said the recent trend with Apple is just getting ridiculous. They are selling a MacPro that is 3 years old; their support for GPUs both in software and hardware is bad (and I nee this for some video editing) and they seem to be more interested in some bizarre design ideal than in making a machine that makes the user's like easier.

I'm going to wait for this event to see what they come up with but if the new laptops have replaced every port with a USB-C ports "because it looks cool", except for a lightning port instead of a headphone jack then I'm going to seriously consider dumping Apple and switching to some combination of Windows and Linux on a Dell. I'm not going to buy and then carry around 42 dongles to make everything work no matter how much I like their OS.