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Apple To Refresh Mac mini, MacBook Pro, iMac Lineups Later This Year, Report Says (macrumors.com)
According to a note shared by reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is planning to refresh a number of its computing product lineups later this year. Via MacRumors: iPhone: There are three iPhones in the works, two OLED models in 5.8 and 6.5-inch sizes and one LED model that will be available in a 6.1-inch size.
iPad: Apple is working on two new 11 and 12.9-inch models that are equipped with a full-screen design and no Home button, with Apple to replace Touch ID with Face ID.
Mac mini: Processor upgrades expected.
MacBook Pro: Processor upgrades expected.
MacBook: Processor upgrades expected.
New Low-Priced Notebook: Kuo believes Apple is designing a new low-priced notebook. He originally said that this would be in the MacBook Air family, but now has changed his mind. Previous rumors have suggested this machine could be a 12-inch MacBook.
iMac: Significant display performance upgrade alongside a processor upgrade.
Apple Watch: Two new models in sizes that include 1.57 inches (39.9mm) and 1.78 inches (45.2mm) with an enhanced heart rate detection feature.
iPad: Apple is working on two new 11 and 12.9-inch models that are equipped with a full-screen design and no Home button, with Apple to replace Touch ID with Face ID.
Mac mini: Processor upgrades expected.
MacBook Pro: Processor upgrades expected.
MacBook: Processor upgrades expected.
New Low-Priced Notebook: Kuo believes Apple is designing a new low-priced notebook. He originally said that this would be in the MacBook Air family, but now has changed his mind. Previous rumors have suggested this machine could be a 12-inch MacBook.
iMac: Significant display performance upgrade alongside a processor upgrade.
Apple Watch: Two new models in sizes that include 1.57 inches (39.9mm) and 1.78 inches (45.2mm) with an enhanced heart rate detection feature.
... " That oughta shut them up! "
AC comments get piped to
That must be a magical revolutionary experience
This is an amazing euphemism for "guy who gets his information from contacts who work in Apple's factories."
If only Apple also upgraded iTunes to a decent music player that does not skip randomly in the middle of a track to the next song..
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
That's amazing how a man could design systems in a way that even after he died 7 years ago they're now still sold almost as they were 7 years ago.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
So basically they are putting in newer processors into most of their Mac line but doing little else. Nice but not exactly mind blowing to understate things greatly. The Mac Pro is conspicuously absent from the list. As seems usual lately the Mac seems to be getting ignored and most of the design effort is going into the iPhone.
I'll take "Random deflections by Apple haters" for $500, Alex
We all know what hardware we want, but until Apple listens to its user base the best Mac is a Hackintosh.
How to know this is fake: it says there will be a Mac Mini refresh.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
Jeopardy hasn't had $500 clues in over a decade.
In other news, Apple also plans on removing peripheral and charging ports. Once the battery is finished, you toss the device and buy a new one!
and all the dongles for that new connector. /s
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It's going to be fun watching Louis Rossmann predict how spectacularly these machines will self destruct. Apple's internal build quality has been plummeting at the same rate as their serviceability.
>> a 12-inch MacBook
Congratulations, you invented the Notebook.
>> MacBook and MacBook Pro: Nothing but minor processor upgrades expected, and that only because we can't buy the old ones anymore. At least we didn't take away more USB slots - yet.
As expected.
Please, please spin off your MacBooks to a company that knows what's doing! (Signed: 79% of your users.)
Hmm 6.5" and 6.1" and 5.8" are the new sizes. So the new iPhones are as large or larger than the current iPhone X?
For reference, Apple's current phone screen sizes (diagonal):
5.8" iPhone X
5.5" iPhone 8 Plus
4.7" iPhone 8
4.0" iPhone SE
Or you could just install Tomahawk and then never worry about fucking iTunes again.
I'll take "Things I don't need to know" for $1000, Alex
Stop playing iTunes on your laptop while driving a Yugo.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
So what happens when a droid with an enhanced heart rate is detected?
Looks as if Apple has completely abandoned whatever remained of its desktop line.
Then again, after they pushed out a trash can, how low could they go?
For those who want to do real work, they'll have to keep looking elsewhere.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Are they coming back or what?
The modular Mac Pro is coming out next year.
Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. They haven't given a shit about this product for a long time and it's hard to believe they are going to start now. Their last attempt (the trash can) was DOA and stupid to boot. Plus if they treat it like the rest of the Mac lineup it will basically be sold with minimal changes for years to come with little prospect of meaningful improvement. They also keep talking about "Pro" users but seem to have no idea what those actually are or what they do. Apple's idea of a "Pro" user seems to be something relating to a heavy user of Photoshop but they don't seem very clear about it and their design reflects that confusion.
If I'm going to buy a Mac I want to see Apple start taking the Mac seriously again. Right now their attention is clearly focused on the iPhone. I like Macs but they literally don't sell anything at the moment that I'm interested in buying. It's not about the money (for me) it's about the design and the lack of clarity on who they are designing their Macintosh product line for.
I don't care so much about minimal CPU improvements. What would be much more important in a time of video editing, large music and book collections etc that we finally have mac books with 1TB drives! We have freeking memory cards with 512 Gig. What is the holdup?
mac pro is 2019 but they need to have an preview. or maybe an Imac pro with an lower starting price.
all apple systems are to thin and apple cuts them down due to thermals.
That way, I don't have to purchase display, mouse and backup drive adapters to fit the four Type-C USB ports they offered on their last MacBook Pro. I can just forget about peripherals all together or just pay a few grand for Apple's wireless peripherals.
Someone mod funny +10000000000000000.
Have you ever considered a life of comedy?
Lets not forget the no home button iPads! So exciting! Just what we all were clamoring for!
Ever since the iPhone X I held off on getting an iPad Pro update specifically to get FaceID and the same gesture support for operations on an iPad. It's a vastly better way to go than the home button.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's why I work in IT. Your broken Dell cup holder will be ready next week.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
How the fuck is this motherfucking shitmoth back to posting ten times a day??
If only Apple also upgraded iTunes to a decent music player that does not skip randomly in the middle of a track to the next song
You actually use iTunes? I haven't fired that up in probably 3 years. Frankly Apple has bigger fish to fry than that obsolete piece of garbage. For example:
1) The Mac Mini and Mac Pro haven't seen a meaningful update in years and basically get ignored
2) The Mac Pro design is stupid and needs to be fixed ASAP
3) Apple still can't get seamless integration between their operating systems and devices for files and data
4) Apple still doesn't have a decent application for proper note taking with the Apple Pencil
5) It's time for the lightning connector to die in a fire and be replaced with USB-C
6) Apple needs more than a single USB-C port on certain of their laptops
7) Dongle hell
8) Apple Pay still not accepted enough places
9) Apple Pencil is a total afterthought with basically no useful software support unless you are a digital artist focused on the iPad (useless on a Mac)
10) Apple treats cases for their phones as an afterthought rather than an important part of the device despite nearly every customer buying one
11) iPhones can have a power cord or a wired headset attached but not both at the same time.
12) Apple Maps still lags behind Google's offerings
13) Apple is ignoring equipment for serious artists (why don't they buy Wacom?)
14) It's still unclear what Apple's next Big Thing will be. To grow the company they can't coast on the iPhone forever.
The list goes on and on. Apple does a lot of things right but they could be doing so much more/better.
More buggy shit from apple.
Is "Processor upgrades expected" apple-speak for soldered in processors or processors that are merely 2 generations old?
Honestly - what is is there to do?
Isn't it kind of Apple's job to figure that out? I can think of quite a few things they could do with the Mac or iPad that they aren't doing right off the top of my head (posted elsewhere in this thread). If they can't think of something new and interesting then they are doomed.
Computers really became "good enough" a good while back. Heck even my 2011 vintage Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM is still chugging along just fine.
They become good enough for stuff like word processing a while back. There are plenty of use cases for which current generations of hardware are still are no where near good enough. It's all about the use case and I don't buy the argument that there are no interesting problems left for desktop and laptop devices to address.
Software will always need bug fixes, but hardware just doesn't need to be constantly updated.
Hardware doesn't need to be updated if you aren't doing anything new. But Apple cannot survive long term if they aren't doing anything new. The iPhone has been a decade long hit precisely because it does something new that people actually can use and that required new hardware. Not like you were going to lug around a Mac Mini to use as a phone.
at some point you can't get parts that old anymore. Their suppliers would move on. Apples big, but not that big. They make money on high margin, not high volume.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't believe that 14nm regardless of the number of "+s" behind it will have anything close to adequate cooling in a thin "ultrabook" type device. That will be the big challenge for high performance thin laptops.
Given what they did to the MacBook Pro the last time they “improved” the design, I’d rather they stick with processor upgrades.
I'd rather they try something and fail rather than do nothing at all.
Ever since the iPhone X I held off on getting an iPad Pro update specifically to get FaceID and the same gesture support for operations on an iPad. It's a vastly better way to go than the home button.
Disagree at least for some use cases. There are many ome applications where FaceID is preferable (most really) but definitely there are some where TouchID works better. Sometimes I want to be able to open my device without staring directly at it with it square to my face and TouchID is generally better for that. I also prefer TouchID when using ApplePay. Ideally (form factor permitting) I'd prefer to have access to both on the same device though I understand the challenges of doing this.
I got tired of waiting for a new model, so a few weeks ago I replaced the 2008 Mini that I used as a media server with a 2012 model that I stacked to the rafters with RAM and disk space. Figures this news would come out now.
And what exactly are they all doing? Not working on product design - that's for certain.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
Why doesn't Apple seize this opportunity to migrate from the x64 to their A series - A10, A11,...?
I expect this to happen eventually but as an end user there is no obvious benefit to me for the most part unless they do a lot of software development along with it. That's all behind the scenes plumbing for most use cases. It potentially benefits Apple which is fine but I don't really care about that as a customer. What I care about is what additional capabilities it gives me or how it helps my work flow. If it helps them make a seamless user experience where devices work well together then bring it on.
Not a laptop that happens to be plugged into a wall. A desktop that uses all 110v coming out of the wall and uses interoperable parts and has room for many, many hard drives and PCI cards?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
If Ives had balls he'd hammer the covers into some kind of reverse golf ball texture to increase surface area. It would look slick and provide better grip too. But Apple is thought to be worth so much money by the algos the board is afraid to screw it up so they sit halfway on their thumbs. Insanely great dies at the hand of modest, safe, mediocrity.
Capcha: broker
I believe the base model of the iMac pro is only bout $4999.....??
I mean, its pretty much an entry level workstation....and if you get the educational discount, which is very easy to get....you get a few $100 off that price.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
HP workstations start at
$1.8K for systems with 1 cpu systems
$2.5K for systems with 2 cpu sockets
You do not get a screen but you also not locked into the screen on imac pro.
Now apple can have an lower starting point with an cheaper cpu / less ram / smaller SSD. Or an mac pro.
A mac pro can start at say $2.5K-$3K or if apple wants to be greedy maybe $3.5K-$4K say imac pro - screen.
Whoa. You mean Apple is updating their products. No company ever does this.
Seriously, can Slashdot please stop front paging every rumour about Products possibly getting updated. It's not news
I'm personally disappointed that Apple is dropping the SE. For me it's the perfect size, and the screen has a bevel so that I don't trigger unintended touches just trying to pick it up. There's the standard headphone jack so I can listen to music with decent headphones I already own, even while it's charging. It's also fairly reasonably priced, runs ARKit, and is supported by the latest iOS releases. Damn fine phone.
I didnt realize that when you release a new model that hardware upgrades are a given? Oh, wait apple lives in their own bubble, I forgot.
lin-sux use has declined dramatically as osx takes its rightful place as the premier platform for serious power users, decelopers and fans of unix. this refresh will only work to accelerate the mass dumping of lin-sux due to its terrible software like gnome and SystemD and the kernel itself full of huge bugs, security issues etc.
For those laptops.
Did they learn nothing?
And for pity's sake keep the miniplug jack!
Sill old gear in a fancy over priced wrapper
was to get that new CPU for how many months now?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Anything with the cpu welded to the screen is not a "pro" article. It is still just style over substance.
A real pro machine can be upgraded independently of its screen.
And by defaults, not having to customize our orders! The current default hardwares specifications are too small and low for their prices!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well, aside from note taking, listed above, what would you think you would use a digital stylus for if not for artistic apps, Procreate (drawing/painting), and Affinity Photo (photo and painting), and coming out now Affinity Designer.
Don't dismiss note taking. That is a HUGE killer app if done right. Literally every student could use it and probably most professionals too. Do you ever draw equations or sketches? Do you have a paper calendar? Do you ever hand write lists or notes? Meeting minutes? Typing is great but for some things there is no replacement for a pencil/stylus. Annotating documents is something I literally do every day on paper but there is no reason I couldn't do a lot of it digitally except that the applications for it SUCK. (seriously, they are absolutely awful and I've tried) I take notes in meetings and have to sketch schematics all the time. But Apple makes some cutsie little art apps that have a user base of about 3 people instead of trying to figure out how to get an iPad to be the primary tool of every student on the planet. Engineers should be carrying an iPad (or Android equivalent) to every meeting if Apple (or someone else) would just write the damn software to make it a useful tool for doing that.
Another problem with a stylus is that software developers tend to get confused and start treating it like a mouse instead of what it really is which is a drawing instrument. Notes are just a form of drawing and should be treated as such. When you treat a stylus functionally like a mouse you end up with a device that doesn't work well as a mouse or as a drawing instrument. A mouse is generally poor for drawing and a stylus is terrible for navigation. There is a reason artists use pencils and pens when learning to draw - it's a good tool for that. There is a reason we teach children to write (a form of drawing) with a pencil - it's a good tool for that.
I mean on a real computer, I use my wacom tablet and pen for these type things....so, I'm not sure what else a pen/stylus/tablet type functionality would be use for...?
That's because nobody has written the software needed to take full advantage of them. Wacom makes some great devices but without the software to use it for something more than digital art work and photoshop it's really underutilized. Engineering documentation and paperwork could actually benefit greatly from integration with a Wacom tablet and pen if done right.
For #8, it's important for Americans to remember that they're not the only country in the world, and a great deal of why Apple Pay isn't accepted everywhere is because American payment infrastructure is woefully outdated and still apparently relies on signatures on pieces of paper in a great many instances.
The signature requirement is not a requirement anymore. And plenty of merchants have the technology but cannot be bothered to activate it or got to the trouble. Even some that do aren't actually aware that it works. I was in a Little Caeser's recently and they actually do accept ApplePay but there was no signage and none of the staff were aware it worked. Hell I see retailers all the time that don't even have their chip reader activated and still require the magnetic strip swipe.
Apple Pay is accepted anywhere that tap-to-pay works, so that means here in Canada that a huge and growing number of merchants accept it.
Sadly not true. There are quite a few major companies that are not willing to work with ApplePay even though there is no technological barrier to doing it. Walmart, lots of gas stations, Home Depot, Costco, Lowes, Target, and countless others don't take ApplePay. Maybe one out of 4 merchants I interact with actually can do ApplePay, and very few sit down restaurants. And they wonder why I do most of my shopping online now... (top tip for retailers: if you want me to visit your store I suggest taking the form of payment I prefer and making it easy to do business with you)
Apple Pay isn't really specifically some sort of tech magic that needs Apple specific merchant hardware to work, it just needs run-of-the-mill tap-to-pay terminals.
I'm afraid they need hardware that many of them haven't installed and even some that have just aren't willing to cooperate with Apple for various reasons.
The Mac Minis we had at my last job were painful to use, being the only computers in the building that had hard drives as their primary disks. And they were all recent models!
I've been wanting to replace the 2007 Mac Mini I use in my entertainment system for years, but I'm not doing it until Apple offers an SSD option. No, I don't want a "Fusion" drive! And now they're upgrading... the CPU? WTF, Apple?
Here in Europe we have bank passes with NFC. Much handier than using a phone.
Also less secure and it's yet another thing to carry. I'm rarely not carrying my phone anyway so I'd rather not bulk out my wallet with unnecessary cards - and most of them should be unnecessary if we were doing things right. Probably 90% of the things in my wallet could easily be done via my phone with no loss in effectiveness and probably better security.
Apple is on record about the new Mac Pro, which means there's about a 99.99% of it happening.
Oh it'll probably drop but the question is what then? Are they going to ignore it for the next 5-7 years like before or are they really going to make serious improvements to it on a regular basis? Given Apple's history with this product I'm pretty gun shy about it until they show some evidence they've changed their ways and actually take it seriously.
A hypothetical "A12" or whatever would probably cost a lot less to Apple, allowing them to reduce the cost of their Macs by a few hundred dollars or so.
I very much doubt there would be that much margin savings in an Apple designed chip. A Mac Mini only sells for a few hundred dollars so there clearly isn't that much margin in the CPU to be had. They still would have to have it manufactured and it's not clear that Intel's markups would be hugely higher than whatever fab Apple uses (presumably TSMC) especially since the volumes for Intel chips would be higher. Apple isn't really vertically integrating since they don't control the manufacturing and that is where the cost savings lie and I don't think Apple wants to actually do the manufacturing.
And even if there were savings I'm pretty dubious Apple would plan to pass them along to you and me unless they had to for competitive reasons.
It would also, I assume, require less power than Intel's CPU giving you either a laptop that runs for more hours, or a smaller laptop that requires a smaller battery (again costing less for both you and Apple).
Less power maybe but would they get the same performance? Performance is something that the X86 does rather well in spite of whatever other problems it has. Not to say it couldn't be matched but there isn't much evidence of that happening yet.
If there is some kind of Rosetta 2.0 in place that can run most x86 applications at more or less the same speed (at least from the user's point of view) then it would be stupid for Apple to not switch to their own ARM CPUs.
Pretty much by definition any sort of emulation will result in a performance hit. The real question is whether it is substantial. It wouldn't be Apple's first (or even second) rodeo with a chipset change but this sort of thing is always fraught.
What inane, but shiny and courageous, gizmos will they include?
Also, what parts have they designed to fail? The screens? The keyboards? The batteries? All of the above?
Jobs would shit himself if he were alive today to see the absolute crap that Cupertino is pumping out.
Apple should change it's slogan to: Meh, it's an Apple [shrugging shoulders emoji]*
*It would be really nice if we could post more than just text on this site.
Freedom?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
This functionality you dream of will not work unless users know it will be available on every device they have and for every document.
Yeah you are right that its a tough problem. But if anyone is in a position to make it happen it is Apple since they control their entire product stack. I think they could get 99% of the way there with Apple cooperating with Microsoft, Google, and a few other firms. If the most important apps and platforms have the capability and it's made available to others as some sort of an open framework then I think it could happen. Apple is ideally positioned to make this happen. Google might be able to do it too but it would be harder and more likely to fragment.
It wouldn't necessarily need to be integrated into every application immediately. It would be enough to begin with to have a REALLY good note taking and sketch app based on an open set of software and standards that everyone else could build into their products going forward. I would buy an iPad Pro tomorrow if you could assure me that it had a super well designed note taking application. How to best integrate this into annotating documents and existing applications would take some time anyway so no point in trying to eat the elephant all at once. Instead concentrate on making it an open framework that is easy to tie into.
Someone like myself would want it to be cross-platform as well--or else it is not ubiquitous.
I would prefer cross platform as well and frankly I think it would be hard to pull off if it wasn't. Apple would pretty much have to cooperate with at least Microsoft and that puts it on at least two of the three main platforms. If they can get Google on board as well then I think they could definitely make it happen.
The key to the whole thing is just having the software written with a mind towards what people actually would do with it. Right now they start with some technology and see what they can make with it rather than starting with user needs and figuring out of to make technology support that.
Remember that Apple promised a modular system.
I have obtained an exclusive overview of Apple's new desktop approach :
http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/sidecar.html