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Apple Announces New iMacs With Better Screens And Modern Processors; Refreshes MacBook Lineup (arstechnica.com)
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.
Really? I'm not denying that, but I am questioning it. Programming for some time now and I can't remember the last time I needed to crack open the case to change out an expansion card of all things. I know a couple of folks in the graphic arts department and likewise, most of their editing and asset management hasn't required a change of things that would typically go into a PCIe slot. So I am curious as to which fields require a constant refresh of what's in the PCIe slots?
Now if we are talking gaming, end user side, I can see that. So with a flexible enough definition we can call them professional? I'm a little out of the gaming loop so I don't want to grant a title to gaming that it doesn't have, but at the same time don't want to snub a legitimate group there. But gaming development, of which I don't do (sorry mostly deal with standard grade C++ and database programming) maybe then there's a need for it?
I'm just struggling to put a solid finger on who exactly needs a constant refresh of cards but at the same time doesn't need a refresh of CPU/RAM/etc at the same time. Is this a common thing in that industry? Not hating on your comment or anything but it now has my curiosity peaked.
Something in the range of a NVIDIA GTX 1060, which can be had for about 260 bucks?
I'm no Apple fanboy (I own nothing of theirs), but are you comparing gaming benchmarks? I assure you that the target market for these machines are users of applications that would perform vastly better on a Radeon Pro 580 than a GTX 1060.
I already committed to a Dell XPS 32GB for my next laptop though, I didn't have any faith on Apple being "courageous" enough to compromise on making a model that's slightly thicker than a previous model.
Apart from the iMac Pro (which I'm afraid to see the price of...), their 'improvements' are no less a joke now than they were last year.
They barely count as incremental, and nothing that is truly important. Their $4000 machine still only has 16GB RAM, a 4GB graphics card, and still no way of connecting to *anything* externally without buying an armload of attachments.
I miss the days when their "Pro" laptops actually were. Apple is probably the singularly best example of what happens when a company replaced an Engineer CEO with an MBA. Cook needs to be fired and replaced with someone that can provide actual leadership instead of just coming up with new ways to milk the dongle dollar.