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Apple Announces New iMacs With Better Screens And Modern Processors; Refreshes MacBook Lineup (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the new-shiny-computers dept.

Apple today announced updates to its iMac line and MacBook lineups at WWDC, giving its all-in-one desktop, and laptop series more powerful specifications and the latest Intel chips. From a report: Apple is bringing Intel's 7th generation Kaby Lake processors to the new iMac, along with what Apple calls "the best Mac display ever," offering 500 nits of brightness, or 43 percent brighter than the previous generation. The 21.5-inch model now can be configured up to 32GB of RAM, while the 27-inch goes up to 64GB, twice what had previously been offered. The new iMacs also are getting two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, making it Apple's first desktop computer to embrace the port standard. Graphics cards are getting a spec boost in the updated iMacs, too. The entry level 21.5-inch model will have an Intel Iris Plus 640 GPU, while the 4K 21.5-inch models will get Radeon Pro 555 and 560 graphics cards. Meanwhile, the 27-inch 5K model will have a choice of Radeon Pro 570, 575, and 580 graphics cards, topping out at 8GB of VRAM. The 21.5-inch iMac will start at $1099 and the 4K 21.5-inch model at $1299. As expected, Apple also refreshed the MacBook lineup. From a report: Today Apple provided a minor but wide-ranging refresh to its modern MacBooks and MacBook Pros, adding new processors from Intel and making a handful of other tweaks. The new processors are from Intel's "Kaby Lake" family, and some of them have been available for the better part of a year. Compared to the outgoing Skylake architecture, Kaby Lake introduces a gently tweaked version of Intel's 14nm manufacturing process, provides small boosts to CPU clock speeds, and supports native acceleration for decoding and encoding some kinds of 4K video streams.

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. MacBook still stuck at 16GB by GabeGhearing · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was hoping they'd add a 32GB option to the highest end MacBook... That's gotta come in the next year or so. It seems that there aren't suppliers for 32GB LPDDR3 setups(LPDDR3 being super-low-power RAM) and Intel CPUs won't support LPDDR4 until the next generation(Cannonlake). LPDDR4 uses a lot less power and supports much higher densities than LPDDR3.

    Intel was supposed to have Cannonlake out last year...

    1. Re:MacBook still stuck at 16GB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Redirect your whines to Intel who STILL haven't updated their portable chipsets to support LPDDR4. Apple is the consumer here, not the supplier. As for those who would be fine with energy eating 32 Gb RAM, you don't have a portable PC, you have a transportable one.

  2. Re: 18-core processor... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not quite. They are (like all the previous enthusiast chip, which used to be branded i7) based on the Xeon E5 / E7 die. The desktop chips, meanwhile, share a die with the E3 Xeons.

    They have several things missing: ECC support, muliprocessor support, probably something related to the data bus. But, they are selected carefully to he capable of very high clock speeds, and are unlocked to allow full overclocking: Xeons have nothing like that. Last year's 6950 was a 10 core that was a lot faster than the equivalent 10 core Xeon, for instance.