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Apple to Unveil New iPads, Retina iMacs, and OS X Yosemite on October 16
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We haz the Mac mini Server (Mid 2011) with an OWC 6GB (x2=Striped RAID Set) SSD and 16GB RAM ... so a Mac mini "refresh" would be nice. We'd take the goods out of the 2011 and move 'em over to the 2014/2015.
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No way does a new Mini have any SATA bays. We'll get both NAND and RAM soldered directly to the logic board to force users to buy overpriced storage at the original time of purchase. Actually I suspect the wait is not only on Intel but on NAND prices falling sufficiently to preserve the Mini's margins.
I'm most interested in two details:
1. Does Apple go quad-core across the lineup?
2. Iris Pro?
If yes to both, then they cannibalize iMac sales unless there is a new way to differentiate the iMac. Could it be Retina? With Apple's buying power they could maintain margins while giving users a deal on a Retina desktop system they couldn't get by buying a Mini and an equivalent quality 5K display separately - at least for a few years until 5K IPS displays are a commodity item.
Another alternative is to axe the Mini and fill the low end desktop range with cheap iMacs. Seems unlikely as it would only harm the iMac's reputation to flood the market with gimped $700 versions.
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Wow sucks to be in the UK then. I have access to hundreds of HD channels here in NY and would jump at the chance to have 4K programming.
The 3D fad is dead as expected. 3D only works optimally when the screen you are viewing takes up at least 90° of your viewing area like at the theatre. Most people watch television at home with a viewing angle less than 45°.
you still won't be able to connect TB SSDs you bring in from a shoot to your precious cheese grinder, no matter how upradable your gpu might be.
Have fun with your USB2 /firewire 800 transfer speeds
I've had USB 3.0 on my Hexa-Core Mac Pro for years, dude! It's got these innovative new slots inside that let the user insert special cards to expand the machine's native capabilities.
Maybe Apple will add this amazing new technology to the nMP in some future upgrade... 
There are two features that I was pretty "meh" about when Apple announced them as big deals that took me about 5 minutes of using to really love: Time Machine and TouchID.
I never locked my previous phones because it was way too annoying (although I will say that Apple's basic passcode was much faster than anything I had used in the Android world). TouchID makes it really convenient and the other nice thing is that I can give my wife access easily without having to give out my password.
Time Machine and TouchID are both really cool in that they were ways to get NORMAL users to backup and use some basic security. I find that for all the whining about Apple, they do a really good job at making things accessiblea point lost on the people who whine about tech features that 95% of the universe doesn't care about.
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I've had USB 3.0 on my Hexa-Core Mac Pro for years, dude! It's got these innovative new slots inside that let the user insert special cards to expand the machine's native capabilities.
They have, it's called Thunderbolt. It's effectively external PCIe and it allows you to connect all kinds of things to a desktop or laptop.
if the iPad gets any two of these things then I'll probbably buy one.
Touch ID
A8X
2GB of Ram
4K Retina display
8 megapixel camera
Touch ID
A8X
2GB of Ram
4K Retina display
8 megapixel camera
You're right on soldered RAM across the line buy I doubt Apple will solder the SSD too, while there are a possibility the next Mac *mini* to be ssd only Apple will use its propertary pcie ssd (hard to clone yet).
Notwithstanding the impact of the arrival of 5K display I doubt this resolution to come to the Mac (except the Mac Pro using 3rd party monitor), my reasoning it's Apple didn't go to 3K on the iPhone 6+, despite most flagship android devices offering 3k, instead they go conservative and offered HD and still retina display, the same it's for the iMac 27 there is no need to go to 5K now, the hardware to support 5k (double pixels as 4K)demsnfs an extensive thermal redesign on the iMac, add the this the cost of an optimal 5K capable iMac could rise quickly 3000$, then now quality 4K panels are now available at the same cost the las year 3K panel, plus Haswell i7-4771 combined with nVidia GTX 980m plenty capable to deal with 4K still fit the TDP of the current iMac, so actually Apple could launch an 4K optimal iMac with the same cost as the current models, and this 4k iMac still could be named retina iMac and still be capable to handle another external 4K display.
About the mini, Apple needs to kill it and replace with another much smaller system (based on Broadwell-M) and another beefier *mini Mac Pro* based either on Haswell-E or Haswell-E and having optional discrete gpu options (nVidia, AMD).
I've no comments on the iPad, whatever Apple launches will sell good and surely I'll be in row purchasing an iPad Air or iPad plus.
The *one more thing* maybe an Apple NAS appliance loaded with a custom osx server running on ARM a7 or a8 chips and loaded with 2 or more spinners, since the timecapsule it's the less successful device from Apple since user requiring home or soho NAS discarded it to solutions from Synology WD etc.
If they did a redesign now with the 9 series chipset (and used haswell-refresh), they wouldnt need to redesign again for broadwell as it'll just be a drop in replacement.
I'm really hoping something in their lineup (preferrably laptops) use nvidia's maxwell.. for the sake of the battery life and performance.
I felt the same way about the first MacBook Air, except in the place of "bend" I would put "screen breaks off".
Maybe
a.) Some recent TN monitors have been receiving remarkably good reviews. b.) Apple may tell itself that studio users would be better served with Mac Pros,
a.) Some recent TN monitors have been receiving remarkably good reviews. b.) Apple may tell itself that studio users would be better served with Mac Pros,
If people truly watch their TV with a 45 degree angle, 4K should be just as useless as 3D unless the TV is 100+ inch... Most people watch their TV, way further than its even good enough to properly resolve a 1080 TV, I routinely see 10-12 feet away for a 50 incher.
Many 4K TV being sold these days have Abysmal quality compared to Plasmas the same size. They lose badly to mid range LED TV's too. You can get semi-decent 4K at the top end, but you'll pay very dearly for it.
Putting that all together, buying a 4K TV for the average person right now is pure folly even if uncompressed content existed.
The A7 is currently still the single core champion, so not sure why you rag so much about performance? The A8 at the same clock speed as the Iphone and without changing the screen would introduce a massive gain in battery time and still boost performance significantly : 6 hours!! Wonder if they'll do that or push the performance of the GPU, up the CPU clock and up the screen size and eat the improved performance that way?
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Again, the A7 has the highest single core perf by far, it crushes the Ipad 3 performance. Not quite sure were your getting at there. I can understand not being satisfied with 1G of memory, but most apps don't even fully use A7's performance and you think it is not satisfactory? Makes no sense.
If they boost the clock to 2GHZ, you lose the improvement in efficiency and thus battery life. At 2GHZ, you'd probably have a significantly worse battery life for the A8 than the A7, even if that would mean a 50% performance improvement (making twice as fast any other core!) and certainly throttling eventually. So, I don't think they will go for 2GHZ, even if they could technically do it; not enough upside. They may boost the clock, but they'll try to keep battery life the same or slightly better.
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Yes there should have been a 4K plasma. Goddamn I don't care about it consumes a bit more power. The quality of cheapest plasma is already gorgeous compared to low and mid tier LED panels. That's a shame. When I go beyond 1080p, everything is crappy LED display and I don't like LED display. Especially the so called motion blur reduction "feature". Plasma for life! At least until they find a way to produce a cheap and reliable 4K OLED panels. Then I'll jump in.
I hope they won't use AMD GPUs in new Macs. AMD has nothing to come up with against Nvidia. In terms of performance and power efficiency, Nvidia all the way.
I would love to see the true multitasking on iPad.
They should also start putting GTX models of GPUs into Macs, GT series are just ridiculous and really not enough for MBPr, to drive such a high resolution.
I would love to see the true multitasking on iPad.
They should also start putting GTX models of GPUs into Macs, GT series are just ridiculous and really not enough for MBPr, to drive such a high resolution.
What bugs are you referring to?
I ask because I downloaded the GM Candidate and made the bold/risky decision to use it as my main OS and overwrite Mavericks.
It's been incredibly stable in my day to day use and I haven't yet noticed any bugs, I'm really liking it.
This.
However I predict this:
iPad Air = 1.5 GB Ram with A8 CPU
iPad Pro = 2 GB Ram with A8X CPU
I'm not concerned at all with the basic GUI of the home screen. That is about as important as the desktop background in OSX. I don't sit and stare at my iPad's home screen all day, I use apps on my iPad. Apps just need to be easy to find and launch and the design of iOS in this regard is pretty timeless. It is efficient and allows sufficient organization customization to provide easy access to all the apps. The stars are of course the Apps, and the job of the launcher GUI is to provide quick and easy acces to them. The GUI's the apps present to you on the different iDevices are the real measure. This is the domain of the developer, and Apple has provided more than sufficient tools on the different devices to developers in this regard. The groundwork Apple has laid down here is really good.
If Xcode, Preview, TextEdit and iCloud Drive were released as Apps for iOS, you'd pretty much be 99% there as far as a "full fledged" OS goes. The curation of the App store is really the limiting factor, as far as "freedom" goes, because you get the "walled garden" that just isn't present on OSX.
Especially with the new features of iOS 8, the list of things you can't do on an iPad (or iPhone for that matter) that you can on a Mac or PC is continously getting smaller, but those items still on the list are still important enough to not allow them to replace their larger cousins for the average consumer. It's why we still have a Mac mini coupled to external storage as the central hub of our household. We're still a long way from being able to use these devices without having a central photo/media/document library somewhere else.
Biggest problem in this regard is permanence. I don't buy iTunes media because it specifically states that you don't own your purchases, you purchase the right to access the media and it can be removed from the store without notice or recourse, and you don't have the right to transfer any of your purchases to anyone else, say another AppleID. So all our music, movies, TV shows, etc are still purchased brick and mortar and then we either create or download digital copies. This same principle applies to software apps as well especially on iOS. An app goes off the App Store in iOS, and it disappears from your previous purchases and that is a right Apple reserves.
This is the main difference between iOS and OSX. OSX has the Mac App Store, but users still have other sources available to them for software, unlike iOS devices (if we exclude jailbreaking), and you also still have the downloaded installer locally if you kept it.
But back to your quote - the main thing is user experience. As long as it is best in class, it doesn't matter what the actual specs are. I honestly don't see what increasing the resolution of the iPads would do for the user experience - Apple would probably up it enough to use the 3x rendering that the 6+ is using as the new standard, but the point count would probably still be 1024x768 making the usable space the same as before, and would it really be that much better an experience than now? I would much rather they made the displays the same resolution, but improved every other aspect of them. 100% accurate color gamut, even better viewing angles, higher power efficiency, bringing the screen even closer to the touch surface, etc. Make them industry leaders in everything except pixel count. Take cues from what they did with the 6+ screen, which is supposed to be exceptionally awesome.
I don't agree regarding quality. The Air may be light and svelt but that doesn't mean it's not built well. It does take getting used to the lightness when coming from an earlier generation iPad but it'sa well made device, IMO.
Touch ID does seem like a nice thing to have even though I don't know how much I'd use it.
Totally agree on the storage thing. It's time to up the ante. 32 GB ought to be standard and there is no reason they couldn't offer a 256 model. Or, just go 32/64/128 and have three models. That covers enough users.
Not really sure what's so hard about the migration thing now. IMO it's fairly easy to transfer data and apps from one device to another. Never had a problem with this myself.
Apple is still doing mostly good things even without Steve around. They've had some slip ups and whoopsies here and there but nothing drastic. When compared to what else is out there, their stuff works a lot better overall than most of the other choices. I do live my windows phone though.